Angela Merkel Admits Failures On Defense Policy

Angela Merkel : The former chancellor of Germany is advocating for a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Ukraine via negotiation.

Angela Merkel Admits Failures On Defense Policy

BERLIN — Angela Merkel, who once served as chancellor of Germany, voiced her disapproval of the defense strategy pursued by her country’s current administration and called for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict in Ukraine.

In an interview with the German weekly Die Zeit that was published on Wednesday, Merkel said that discussions will “one day” bring an end to the conflict in Ukraine. The former chancellor did not want to go into the specifics of the circumstances under which she would support a peace accord, but she did say that she would not support a “dictatorial peace.”

Merkel also said that despite NATO obligations, Berlin had not been able to spend the desired 2 percent of GDP on the military forces. This was something that brought frequent and scathing criticism from the former President of the United States, Donald Trump. Merkel said that despite increases in the military budget, “we have not done enough to do enough for deterrence.”

She admitted that Germany “should have reacted more quickly to Russia’s aggressiveness,” and she added that although her conservative CDU/CSU bloc was the only group that had the NATO target in their government program, she herself “did not make a fiery speech for it every day.” This was despite the fact that her bloc was the only one that had the NATO target in their government program.

In spite of the fact that the criticism had been going on for months, Merkel did not want to disassociate herself from other measures. For instance, she defended the decision to move forward with the Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipeline known as Nord Stream 2, which her successor as chancellor, Olaf Scholz, ultimately decided to halt days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February. She also defended the decision to proceed with the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline.

Merkel said that Ukraine has also shown a strong desire to continue serving as a transit nation for Russian gas. She went on to say that the situation with Russia would have been “dangerously worsened” if the choice had been made to not go forward with the pipeline in conjunction with the Minsk peace deal.

She went on to say that Germany’s dependency on Russia for its energy needs to be developed as a result of decreased gas exports from the Netherlands and the United Kingdom as well as decreased output in Norway. “The decision would have needed to be made to buy more expensive [liquefied natural gas] from Qatar or Saudi Arabia,” Merkel added, referring to the fact that the United States was only accessible later as an export country.

According to Merkel, moving in that path would have had a major negative impact on Berlin’s ability to compete.

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