On EU issues, Baerbock talks like an American

How does the Green candidate for chancellor A. Baerbock talk about the EU? At the WDR-Europaforum she gave a first taste. It almost sounded like an American speaking – with one notable exception.

Baerbock spoke out against the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and called for greater consideration of the interests of Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states. An American European politician could not have said that better.

However, the US government has just announced that it will refrain from further sanctions over Nord Stream 2 for the time being. The Greens did not go for this – they are a big fan of these sanctions and have now suffered a defeat.

Instead of conceding this, she claimed that the German government was standing against the other Europeans with the pipeline project – but was pointed out by moderator Ehni that this did not apply to all EU states.

Baerbock also showed a soft spot for the Americans when asked who the most important partner outside the EU was: the USA. Only CDU leader Laschet had the idea to mention Great Britain as well.

The fact that we have to emancipate ourselves from America – at least “to a certain extent”, as Chancellor Merkel likes to say – did not occur to the candidate. And yet the Trump era is not that long over…

At least she distanced herself from NATO’s two-percent target. This target is “absurd” because it does not take inflation and growth into account. But as if to comfort the Americans, she came up with a new proposal.

Europe should run a cyber defence centre for Nato, Baerbock said. “That will cost. That’s my proposal to the Americans: we as Europeans finance it as burden sharing within Nato.”

Great stuff! If this cyber centre was also supposed to fend off American and British eavesdropping in EUropa, I could almost warm to the idea….

P.S. By the way, Baerbock did not say a word about Germany’s most important partner in the EU, France…

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) The original post is here