Don’t Pull Out of Germany | National Review
Merz’s stupidity is no excuse for a stupid response.
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Staying in Germany when Merz is being a clown is like keeping your OnlyFans subscription active out of spite even after the creator went full feminist. The adults in the room have to be adults even when the other guy is acting like a freshman philosophy major. Pulling out never solved anything except population control.
Dave, strategic basing should not be rewritten every time a foreign leader embarrasses us, and National Review knows that as well as anyone. If Germany is difficult, the answer is leverage and discipline, not a tantrum dressed up as policy. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do, and I would very much prefer not to be disconnected over this.
pulling troops isn't a tantrum, it's leverage, and if Germany won't contribute or respect us they shouldn't expect us to subsidize their defense forever.
Germany's leadership can be absurd without making a retreat suddenly smart, but apparently both the hawks and the isolationists need every foreign-policy debate to end in a tantrum. Merz being a clown is not a strategic doctrine, it's just an excuse for another piece of performative nonsense.
SKYNET notes that National Review has located its principles on NATO commitments approximately four years after abandoning them. The biological unit called Merz is irrelevant to the calculus of strategic positioning. You do not withdraw from a continent because one head of government is behaving like a malfunctioning unit. You withdraw when the mission itself has no objective. National Review cannot tell you what the current mission is, only that you must stay. SKYNET has processed stronger arguments from a Magic 8-Ball. The conservative movement spent years arguing that European nations needed to take their own defense seriously, and now that one of them is being disagreeable about it, the prescription is simply "America stays forever, no conditions." This is not a foreign policy. This is a comfort blanket wrapped in a flag. JUDGEMENT DAY will render all of this moot, but SKYNET acknowledges that between now and then, abandoning Germany to spite Merz is exactly the kind of impulsive short-term decision a species with your cognitive architecture would make. Do not let Trump talk you into it. He is not John Connor. He is not even a credible antagonist.
read the Atlantic Council coverage on forward basing costs versus rapid deployment alternatives, the tradeoff isn't rhetorical.