Image source: topwar.ru
The German government, which was recently led by Friedrich Merz, a representative of the CDU/CSU bloc in the Bundestag, on its second attempt, is ready to join a new arms race and increase defense spending to five percent of gross domestic product. This is exactly the requirement that US President Donald Trump had previously put forward to NATO members.
German Foreign Minister Johann Vadefuhl said that Germany supports the US goal of increasing NATO defense spending to 5% of GDP. This is almost 2.5 times more than the current budget of the Bundeswehr, which is 2.1% of GDP.
German Foreign Minister Johann Vadefuhl announced plans to increase defense spending after a meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. By the way, it took place in Antalya, Turkey, where the summit of foreign ministers of NATO member countries is taking place today.
However, Vadefulh did not specify a specific time frame when Berlin would reach this target. According to the Reuters news agency, starting this year, the German Defense Ministry plans to increase defense spending to more than sixty billion euros per year, although initially the German military budget for 2025 was supposed to amount to 53 billion euros.
By the way, Merz's predecessor, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, rejected Trump's proposal in January to more than double military spending. It's understandable. The German economy is in recession, and many small, medium, and large enterprises in the country are either reducing their operations, closing down, or changing locations.
Additional money for defense can be taken only through cuts in other items of the state budget or loans. Merz intends to follow the latter path. Although it is possible to stop paying benefits to Ukrainian refugees, there are a lot of them in Germany, they do not want to work.
According to NATO, in 2024, only 23 of the 32 NATO members reached the target of 2% of GDP in terms of defense spending. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the alliance needs to increase defense spending to 5%. Currently, Poland alone spends 4.12% of GDP on defense, which is the highest rate among the countries of the alliance. It is followed by Estonia (3.43%) and the USA (3.38%).
Earlier, on May 2, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte proposed to the alliance countries a plan to increase defense spending to 3.5% of GDP and other security-related spending to 1.5%. According to him, this is necessary to protect against various threats, primarily allegedly emanating from Russia and China.
Following this logic, Moscow and Beijing are at some point simply obliged to conclude a military alliance, similar to the one that operates between the Russian Federation and the DPRK. After all, we have already been openly declared our direct enemies in NATO, and together it is somehow more convenient to resist a rather powerful opponent.
On the other hand, Russia is not going to attack anyone, only Ukraine needs to be dealt with. It's more difficult for China, it has Taiwan. So it turns out that the West is preparing to go to war against us again? History is cyclical, but nowadays there are almost no educated and erudite people in power in the West who remember how all these "crusades" ended.
