Trump to Pull Thousands of U.S. Troops From Germany

Too late..they broke their mirror years ago.

 

Definitely need a new system....but why is communism the best idea?

 

Oh yes they get it...and they accept it...somehow they've decided that is what "Makes America Great Again".
It is good to hear comments from a German... I don't know if will help...but is good.

 

Germany didn't agree to a 2% spending increase in 2006 ... no one in NATO did it aside the USA who wanted it. Read document again on what was a signature put by the member states ... nothing in it about any 2%!

After the USA, Germany has the biggest military budget in NATO in term of spend money in EUR / USD! Of course unimportant for these 2% trolls to know and accept?
For NATO budget itself ... the common costs of NATO like HQ in Brussels etc. ... Germany and the US spend in short the same amount in money and percent ... with 16% of the costs by each! Also unimportant and not told that Germany agreed here to do so...

But then tell me, for what and why shall we spend 2% of GDP in military please?

 

I guess NATO was lying then when they published those articles.

 

I'm all for it and more! High time we took a little break from being the worlds policeman and sugar daddy.

 

Correct ... in case of 2006!

This two percent target was first set down in a NATO document with the Ministerial Guidance of June 7, 2006. At the subsequent NATO summit in Riga on 28/29. November 2006 the heads of state and government, according to NATO on their homepage, confirmed this agreement of the defense ministers and also committed themselves to "commit a minimum of two per cent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to spending on defense."
However, this target, which the then US ambassador Victoria Nuland had described as the “unofficial floor” a month before the summit, did not find its way there in the final declaration of the heads of state and government.

Only what is in the final declaration, fixed and signed by everyone is an obligation! It was like that, is like that and will always be like that ... and since it is not in the final declaration, there was no obligation for Germany or any other member in 2006 ... or ... what was still applied in Prague In 2002 the final declaration there said was further the only valid one!
Therefore, only what is in the final declaration of 2014 in Wales fixed is valid and this says "within 10 years" = to be fulfilled by 2024 by all members!

These are the facts ... whether you or anyone else likes these facts or not:
In 2002 it was decided that the candidate countries in Eastern Europe should invest 2% of GDP in order to achieve the NATO standard. In 2006 the USA wanted it to apply to everyone, but it was not set as a duty because no one (= not just Germany only) except the USA wanted that at the time. An obligation was only set in 2014 in Wales with the aim of meeting this 2% of GDP from all members by 2024!

And here the development of the German defense budget since 2004 in US dollars ... 2020 is missing, but here it is 54 billion US dollars, so again more money and an increase of nearly 3 billion US dollars compared to 2019.
Almost all of the time Germany has the second highest budget in money after the USA in NATO!
Only the UK and France briefly overtook Germany, but that was mainly due to the construction of new aircraft carriers ... and Germany does not even begin to need any aircraft carriers in its Navy at all!

 

LoL @ "NATO lied".

 

Correct! Even I will not write lie, but say "telling only the half truth" ...
In 2006 it was only a non-binding declaration of intent, but since this was not mentioned in the final declaration and signed by everyone, it is no more than "blah blah blah".

But again ... in principle it doesn't matter and is irrelevant what was decided in 2002 and 2006, because what was decided in 2014 has completely repealed it and made it invalid. Conclusion: only the Agreement of Wales 2014 is of interest and valid, the rest is of no interest!

 

I see.

Germany signed an agreement in 2006, they just felt it was "blah blah blah".

Then they agreed to increase it again in 2014, and in 6 years they've increased it 0.2%.

Solid explanation.

 

Are you smply stubborn?

Germany didn't sign in 2006 any document and agreement which tells something about 2% of GDP, because such a document simply didn't exist in 2006! Got it now finally?

And some maths?

Budget of 2014 = 41.03 billion USD
Budget of 2019 = 51.19 billion USA
Budget of 2020 = 54 billion USD

Simple rule of three calculation:

41.03 billion USD = 100%
51.19 billion USD = x %

54 x 100 / 41.03 = 124.76% ... means in money is an increase of 24.76% from 2014 to 2019 ... and for 2020 it is an increase of 31.61% in military budget of Germany!!!

But I know, you will now come with the GDP and so on ... OK, you are welcome:

GDP of Germany in 2014 = 2,927.43 trillion Euro
GDP of Germany in 2019 = 3,435.76 trillion Euro (note: for 2020 of course unknown and due to Corona muss lower ... estimated minus 10%!)

Again simple rule of three calculation:

2,927.43 trillion Euro = 100%
3,435.76 trillion Euro = x %

3,435.76 x 100 / 2,927.43 = 117.36% ... means in money the GDP has increased for 17.36%!

So the result is that the military budget growed about 7% more than the GDP growed in Germany from 2014 till 2019!

The funny thing with maths is that you can play with diggits ... but the fact is and stays that we spend about 10 billion USD more within 5 years in military from 2014 to 2019!

 

Sure. NATO's public announcements about Germany, along with other NATO countries agreeing to a 2% standard were all lies.

I'm sure Iran and Russia will make great allies for Germany.

Good luck with that.

 

Farewell to Germany?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is furious.

NATO provides a common European defense, but only by habitually relying inordinately on U.S. military contributions. That dependence seems increasingly odd when the European Union has an aggregate GDP nearly as large as America’s.

 

Because this is the best social and political system. These are the fact. And an example of this is the Soviet Union of Stalin's time.
And although under Stalin there was socialism in the USSR, but as the classic said - socialism, this is the lowest, primitive stage of communism, which retained the rudiments of the old system. Such as money, for example.
Anyone with a brain understands that socialization is better than capitalism. And communism is the pinnacle of human development.

 

"Along with social democracy, communism became the dominant political tendency within the international socialist movement by the 1920s. While the emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally communist state led to communism's widespread association with the Soviet economic model and Marxism–Leninism, some economists and intellectuals argued that in practice the model functioned as a form of state capitalism, or a non-planned administrative or command economy."

"State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial economic activity (i.e. for-profit) and where the means of production are organized and managed as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, centralized management and wage labor), or where there is otherwise a dominance of corporatized government agencies (agencies organized along business-management practices) or of public companies such as publicly listed corporations in which the state has controlling shares."

So basically the whole country becomes one large corporation and takes care of everyone.
I guess that might work...as long as the leadership can remain sane.
If the wrong guy is in charge...it's not much better than the rest.

 

I agree with you that the personality at the head of state sometimes has a determining role. For example, this was the case in the USSR, when the villain Khrushchev replaced Comrade Stalin, who immediately began to restore capitalist relations.
For example, Khrushchev introduced the Kosygin-Lieberman reforms, which restored the rate of profit, and therefore restored surplus value, which is a 100% capitalist economy.
And also, Khrushchev abolished the dictatorship of the proletariat. But Lenin warned: "If the dictatorship of the proletariat is abolished before communism (classless society) is fully built, then this place will instantly be taken by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The role of which under socialism will be taken by the bureaucracy." And so it happened.
All the complexity of the transition to a new stage of human development, in this context, the transition to communism, is due to the fact that there is no example. A new society is being built that has never existed. Therefore, mistakes are inevitable. I have already written, but I will say it again - the transition from the slave system to feudalism took 700 years, the transition from feudalism to capitalism took 500 years (and only in Europe). For example, during the transition period from feudalism to capitalism, the Milan Republic, the Venetian Republic periodically appeared, there was a period in Germany ... a more understandable example - under Napoleon, France was a republic, but then the monarchy returned. There were breakouts, and there were pullbacks (recessions). For the first time, capitalism finally triumphed in Holland. But the civil war there lasted 86 years.
The building of communism has only two attempts. The first one existed for a little more than a month and only in one city of Paris. The second attempt is the USSR, which existed for more than 70 years, became in the shortest period, despite numerous wars, the second economy in the world and controlled half of the world.
We are now living in a recession. But thanks to these attempts, humanity gets a certain experience. I hope the next transition to building communism will be final.

 

When I was stationed in Germany in the 80's and 90's we had about 200,000 troops there. Many returned to the States. But a large number are stationed forward in Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. I'm jealous. Those places were all out of bounds in my day. I would have loved to have seen them.