And maybe an expansion of my previous comment although one moving somewhat off the topic of Germany it is by belief that as a consequence of Brexit, Central and Eastern Europe have been hurt quite badly in a strategic sense losing the UK as by far the largest "Atlanticist" member state of EU. Now countries like Estonia are "stuck" dealing with not just the traditional continental European power like France and Germany but also a more prominent role in the governance of the by countries like Ireland, Belgium, and the Netherlands who have more skeptical view towards Atlanticism without the UK around anymore.
Admittedly it’s only a quibble, but Adam Garfinkle is off base when he attributes a decline in American economic performance to the “massive under-investments in science, infrastructure and education.”
He may have a point about infrastructure but under-investment in this area can be explained, at least in part, by the classic competition between guns and butter. Americans pay for all the guns, freeing up the Germans to enjoy the butter. The price of one F-35 provides a handsome down payment for a brand-spanking new airport terminal in Frankfort. A squadron of F-35s would pay to weatherize the energy infrastructure of a place like Texas. Instead we’re spending money modernizing Ramstein
In his zeal to deny that the Germans are free-riders, Adam Garfinkle goes a bit too far.
Then there’s his assertion that the United States is deficient in its investment in science. Deficient compared to whom? The United States invests far more in basic and applied scientific research than Germany. It also invests far more than Europe as a whole.
Compare, for example, the amount of funding provided by American taxpayers to NIH with funds provided to the Medical Research Council of Germany. To cut to the punchline-there is no comparison. The same is true outside of the field of biomedical research. The NSF, NASA and DARPA are far more generously supported than any
similar German organizations.
None of this even accounts for the huge investment in scientific research provided by Americans through an impressive list of NGOs and especially, private foundations. Support for science from these types of agencies is negligible in Germany-and that’s on a good way.
When the topic of American subsidization of the German lifestyle comes up, the discussion usually focuses on defense spending. Actually it goes way beyond that. Every German who needs a chemotherapy drug, a medicine for an autoimmune disease or a hip, knee or shoulder replacement can thank Americans for the fact that those therapies are available.
Whether these therapies are developed by American manufacturers as many are or European or Asian manufacturers, they exist only because it’s the high prices paid by American patients that make the enormous research expenditures needed to develop those therapies possible.
If Americans paid for these therapies what Germans do, we would still be reliant on leeches and cupping as the go to therapies.
As the old saying goes, with friends like these...
"A squadron of F-35s would pay to weatherize the energy infrastructure of a place like Texas" isn't the way to think about it. The way to think about it is, "What's the cost, to the United States, of *not* having Germany's defense be a small fraction of our defense budget." Anyone who wants to find out what it would look like if Germany rediscovered its enthusiasm for Machtpolitik--or what it would look like if the rest of Europe, including Russia, discovered to its horror that Germany had rediscovered its enthusiasm for Machtpolitik--hasn't properly calculated the economic benefits that have accrued from three-quarters of a century of European peace. Nor are the benefits to be measured in dollars alone. They're to be measured in wars not fought, lives not lost.
As for the question, "Deficient in investment compared to whom?" That's not the right question, either. We're deficient in an absolute sense. How do I know? From the conversations I've had on Twitter in the past three months with an endless array of Americans who lack the fundamentals of a science education and can't understand the basic concepts they need to function in the modern world. Such as, for example, "How vaccines work and why they're essential to public health." We're now looking at the prospect of having four brilliant, near-miraculous vaccines, but being unable to achieve herd immunity, all the same, because a significant number of Americans believe in various species of premodern magic and *cannot* recognize a sound scientific argument. It doesn't matter what other countries spend if a significant section of *our* public is rapidly hurtling back to the 16th century and the life expectancies associated with it.
As for the argument that the high prices Americans pay subsidizes drug research for Germans--no. High US drug prices aren't related to the cost of research. For at least the past decade, drug revenues have declined because blockbuster cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, depression and acid reflux drugs have become generic; to avoid reporting lower revenue and profits, pharma companies have been jacking up prices on drugs still under monopoly protection (Humira, Lyrica, Lantus, etc.) That's why the prices of these drugs are the highest in the world. The price increases largely fueled profits, not research spending. If anything, the US market is a source of global inefficiency (as explained here: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/are-other-countries-blame-high-us-drug-prices.)
I partially agree. There is one benefit to the current world order that is so profoundly beneficial to the United States that it dwarfs all others; it’s the fact that we control the world’s reserve currency. We get to decide how much of the stuff to print and the fact that the world has an insatiable demand for our greenbacks is so advantageous to our country that it can’t be overstated.
I get it; with that privilege comes responsibilities and obligations and defending ingrates like the Germans just comes with the territory. So be it.
With that said, while it’s true that Prussia and later Germany have been bombastically aggressive since the days of Bismark, that doesn’t mean that but for the defense subsidies that Germany receives from the United States, it’s bound to rediscover it “enthusiasm for Machtpolitik.”
Bismark famously said that if the British army was ever to invade Prussia, he would send out his constabulary to arrest it. In the 21st Century, Germany is so pathetically weak that if it ever became uppity, we could send Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife from Mayberry to subdue the country.
Then there’s the fact that Germany’s demographic implosion is so remarkable that if Germany was ever to rediscover its martial spirit, it would need to rely on its aged pensioners to threaten anyone.
Claire, it is simply inaccurate to claim that the development of new drugs is not facilitated by high drug prices in the United States. The average new medicine costs about $1 billion from inception to approval. There are multiple failures for every success. There have been revenue declines caused by patent expirations but there have been numerous new drugs that have taken the place of newly generic products. Many of these new products are biologics (made from living tissue) and they cost far more to develop than more typical small molecule drugs.
I could mention numerous examples but I’ll mention only two; Keytruda (Merck) and Opdivo (BMS). For some patients these are miracle medicines. Previously unresectable and incurable lung cancers are now forced into remission for years thanks to these drugs. Jimmy Carter’s melanoma, which had metastasized to his brain was cured by these drugs.
They cost billions to develop and they are both extremely expensive for American health insurance companies (and Medicare and Medicaid) to pay for. If BMS and Merck relied for their profit on the amount paid for these drugs by the Germans, they never would have been developed in the first place.
If Americans paid for their medicines what Germans (and the French) paid for theirs, the international pharmaceutical business would be a mere shadow of what it is. Even European pharmaceutical firms (AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Novartis, Novo-Nordisk, Hoffman La Roche) would be dramatically less innovative but for the prices paid by their American customers.
Those miraculous Covid vaccines you mentioned would never have been produced so rapidly without a worldwide pharmaceutical industry that’s as vibrant and innovative as it is. Believing that the vaccine developers could have pivoted as quickly and successfully as they did to develop Covid vaccines if they had to rely for profit on what Germans pay for their products, simply strains credulity. To be fair, it’s not just the Germans, it’s all Europeans.
On an unrelated note, it’s really great to see Adam Garfinkle here from time to time. No one is more interesting than he is and there’s not a pundit anywhere who writes more beautifully. Several years ago, Adam wrote a fantastic book on political writing. I look at it all the time, though sadly, I’m a poor student.
I'll concede that my comments about drug pricing and medical research were too simplistic. This would be a good subject for a longer essay: I'll put it in the hopper.
The US is modernizing Ramstein because the US wants to modernize Ramstein for its own purposes and quite frankly for your own purposes WigWam and people like E Hines too as I laid out in my own comments.
I am actually going to recommend this video by Adam Posen at the American Enterprise Institution to both the Cosmopolitan Globalist and Trumpist readership. The video of officially about Brexit but in reality, it is more about the US, British, and Germans relations among themselves and more broadly as Posen describes the moral values of Brexitism and Trumpism vs the moral values of Cosmopolitan Globalism.
My link jumps into the video part way at the point which Posen talks about Germany specifically and his own experiences dealing with Helmut Kohl but I would recommend watching the whole video afterwards.
I am glad you liked the Posen link. I brought it up in part as I think you could rephrase in part what he said along with David O'Sullivan about Germany and Brexit to US-German relations which is that Germans like the US, Germans consider the existence of the US-German alliance along with NATO to be in Germany's enlightened self-interest but Germany isn't going to roll over for this that or the other because members of Congress in Washington or DC think tanks want it to. I think the problem on the US side is too many Americans think it is there birth right as Americans to demand Germany roll over for this that or the other as Posen puts it. Hence I the high demand by readers here to talk about US German relations here at the Cosmopolitan Globalist.
I would also recommend even as someone who is no particularly a big fan of Margaret Thatcher to watch the Posen video above in combination with Claire's book about Thatcher or at very least watch Adam Posen along with one of Claire's old book talks such as below.
"If you ask these questions of an intelligent German, they are apt to be taken as an arrogant, ignorant, and probably deliberate affront. Why? Because the tenor of the US-German bilateral relationship in recent years has made it so. Ex-President Trump was and remains a zero-sum-fixated person who has never been able to wrap his “big brain” around mutually beneficial relationships at any level...."
And therewith Garfinkle exposes himself for the same arrogant, ignorant, and probably deliberately affronting commenter of which he accuses the questioner of being.
Confirmed by this overtly deliberate smear:
"I don’t assume that our questioner is a fan of Donald Trump or Richard Grenell. If he is a fan, then I have better things to do than try to explain reality to a willful nitwit."
After that, nothing of what Garfinkle has to say can have any seriousness, and I have better things to do than wade through his words, no matter how otherwise prettily he might arrange them.
To expound upon the current argument about US/German relations and to expand upon my own previous response I think there are two facts of life of the US/German relationship and NATO that are not properly understood both by the Trumpists and the Cosmopolitan Globalists.
1. My first point directed towards the Trumpists, is that the actual direct US costs in terms of money and manpower towards the US remaining a member of NATO in good standing or even the most prominent and powerful member of NATO are actually quite low in the context of the entire US military budget. The number of US troops in Germany and the rest of Europe along with the US contribution to the NATO command structure are way down compared to their numbers during the cold war and even during the cold war as, like today, US troops in Europe operated on a day-to-day basis in a very benign environment. Troops in Germany neither today or prior to 1989 are being shot on a daily basis like in Iraq or Afghanistan.
More importantly, the US forces in Europe provide a large logistics platform to project American military outside of the North Atlantic NATO Treaty area into places like Africa and the Middle East. This was apparent already during the second half of 1990 only months after the Wall fell when US forces stationed in Germany to block a Soviet invasion were retasked to Operation Desert Storm expelling Saddam from Kuwait cutting the deployment distance to the theater well over half of what it would have been in a direct deployment from the US(if that was even possible without refueling and rest stops between the US itself and Saudi Arabia in the Western European NATO members).
In fact, the biggest liability for the US in terms of NATO is really the contingent liability that there could be an actually Russian military invasion of NATO member state territory(other than the US itself) which isn't zero but is something that can be deterred.
2. The second point and this I think unlike the first is the blind spot of many Cosmopolitan Globalists more than that of Trumpists and Grenellists is that actual political support for NATO in the US at the political level is very shallow. Now from one perspective of looking at the glass half full, it doesn't go from being shallow to outright negative because as I pointed out in my first fact of life NATO membership is relatively cheap for the US and most politicians in Washington, DC that are least semi-mainstream know this. Even Trump and Grenell never called for outright NATO withdrawal although I suspect there will be at least one future Republican Primary candidate that will do so.
But anyways support for NATO I do believe IS very shallow and I think from the US perspective among Members of Congress and non-military political types the main plus of NATO for the US as they see it is not the logistics platform(like Ramstein AFB and Landstuhl Hospital) that the US military thinks highly of but the more political elements which have no basis in the NATO Treaty but I think could be understood as that the EU and the EU/NATO member states shall take no action politically or economically that expressly harms US interests outside of the NATO area(i.e. the Middle East, China, etc) or basically goes against the US political systems desires(and the security interests of the US are purely for the US to decide and for Europe to follow). I think former French Ambassador to the US Gerard Araud described this as Europe outsourcing its security to the US and in turn at a global level adopting US foreign policy as their own. If you watched ranking GOP member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee James Risch this morning it is obvious that while he claims to support NATO he really supports it on a transaction level is I just outlined.
So the risk as I see is that the Cosmopolitan Globalists are underestimating that Europe will do something from a geo-economic perspective with say China or Iran that really defies the wishes of the US political system and that while not perhaps immediately leading to NATO withdrawal might make it at least more mainstream(say 30 or 35 Senators calling for pulling out). Or more specifically people like Senator Risch whose support of NATO is very transactional, to begin with shifting towards an outright withdrawal position. And this could come from the other side with say Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and media figures like Rachel Maddow calling for NATO withdrawal over some type of economic deal between the EU and China.
Anyways I will have to talk further in the future about what I think are the implications of all this and what options Cosmopolitan Globalists might want to consider.
In response, I want to posit two of what I think are accurate statements that might explain in part the whole US/Germany/Rest of the EU and Eurozone relationship.
1. Prior to the Eurozone crisis having a single EU wide or at least Eurozone financial regulator I think would have significantly have mitigated at least the banking aspect of the crisis
2. In terms of global financial power and prestige the US institutionally in the form of the US Treasury Department and US Federal Reserve along with I think US politicians and officials of both parties, I think it is only fair to say the US benefited from lack a single EU financial regulator that would have been in charge of licensing and authorizing US banks operating in the EU and just more broadly competing with America prestige. US policies such as unilateral US sanctions say against Iran or North Korea in the late 2000s would have been far more tricky having to implement in the face of a single EU regulator more accountable say to more "Anti American" voices in the European Parliament in Brussels. In fact I would so far as to say if you accept my premise many of the Cosmopolitan Globalist writers who are deeply "Pro American and Atlanticist" might even agree that having a single EU bank regulator would have been a bad thing.
Now there is no evidence the US played any part in defeating or opposing a single EU bank supervisor and in particular, the creation of one inside the European Central Bank was very much contemplated in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and contemplated not just covering the Eurozone but the opt-out countries like the UK. However, the Treaty article that called for this type of regulation was somewhat vague and any actual implementation required the unanimous approval of all EU Member States so the whole issue was put off until after the Euro was introduced in 1999.
Furthermore back to the US perspective the Single Europe Act back from 1986 essentially gave US banks in London the power to operate across the entire EU but solely under the supervision of national UK regulators which as things in the UK typically work are very pro American and Atlanticist and were known to practice a "light touch" form of regulation. From a US perspective, I think you call this icing on the cake. What is clear is once the Euro was introduced EU Member States governments as a whole were very unenthusiastic to the idea of a single supervisor but the UK, in particular, was very opposed to this transfer of sovereignty to Brussels. In fact, many in the UK joked that the EU "already" had a single bank regulator that of the UK FSA in charge of the City of London. Was this view on the part of the UK taken in part to please the US? Probably not but it was a view that was widely supported in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American circles in the early 2000s(Remember this was around the time of the Iraq War)
Now, this probably would have to be a whole article on my part but suffice to say the EU did finally get a single EU bank regulator after the Eurozone crisis(in part due to the UK and David Cameron relenting on their historic opposition in 2014) but also one only covering the Eurozone. Then after that, we of course have Brexit with US Banks based in London losing their Single Europe Act "passporting" rights and having to move operations to the EU27 from London as of January 1st this year and now coming under the full authority of the European Central Bank regulation and supervision department(accountable to the usual anti-American suspects in Brussels). But this probably requires me to write a whole article on these implications a lot of which are not clear at this point.
Anyways hopefully I might get around to writing my own article on the further implications of these recent changes in the EU in the near future.
Something else we haven't discussed is NordStream2 just to remind everyone. I know Toomas Ilves has some very strong views on this subject.
And maybe an expansion of my previous comment although one moving somewhat off the topic of Germany it is by belief that as a consequence of Brexit, Central and Eastern Europe have been hurt quite badly in a strategic sense losing the UK as by far the largest "Atlanticist" member state of EU. Now countries like Estonia are "stuck" dealing with not just the traditional continental European power like France and Germany but also a more prominent role in the governance of the by countries like Ireland, Belgium, and the Netherlands who have more skeptical view towards Atlanticism without the UK around anymore.
Admittedly it’s only a quibble, but Adam Garfinkle is off base when he attributes a decline in American economic performance to the “massive under-investments in science, infrastructure and education.”
He may have a point about infrastructure but under-investment in this area can be explained, at least in part, by the classic competition between guns and butter. Americans pay for all the guns, freeing up the Germans to enjoy the butter. The price of one F-35 provides a handsome down payment for a brand-spanking new airport terminal in Frankfort. A squadron of F-35s would pay to weatherize the energy infrastructure of a place like Texas. Instead we’re spending money modernizing Ramstein
In his zeal to deny that the Germans are free-riders, Adam Garfinkle goes a bit too far.
Then there’s his assertion that the United States is deficient in its investment in science. Deficient compared to whom? The United States invests far more in basic and applied scientific research than Germany. It also invests far more than Europe as a whole.
Compare, for example, the amount of funding provided by American taxpayers to NIH with funds provided to the Medical Research Council of Germany. To cut to the punchline-there is no comparison. The same is true outside of the field of biomedical research. The NSF, NASA and DARPA are far more generously supported than any
similar German organizations.
None of this even accounts for the huge investment in scientific research provided by Americans through an impressive list of NGOs and especially, private foundations. Support for science from these types of agencies is negligible in Germany-and that’s on a good way.
When the topic of American subsidization of the German lifestyle comes up, the discussion usually focuses on defense spending. Actually it goes way beyond that. Every German who needs a chemotherapy drug, a medicine for an autoimmune disease or a hip, knee or shoulder replacement can thank Americans for the fact that those therapies are available.
Whether these therapies are developed by American manufacturers as many are or European or Asian manufacturers, they exist only because it’s the high prices paid by American patients that make the enormous research expenditures needed to develop those therapies possible.
If Americans paid for these therapies what Germans do, we would still be reliant on leeches and cupping as the go to therapies.
As the old saying goes, with friends like these...
"A squadron of F-35s would pay to weatherize the energy infrastructure of a place like Texas" isn't the way to think about it. The way to think about it is, "What's the cost, to the United States, of *not* having Germany's defense be a small fraction of our defense budget." Anyone who wants to find out what it would look like if Germany rediscovered its enthusiasm for Machtpolitik--or what it would look like if the rest of Europe, including Russia, discovered to its horror that Germany had rediscovered its enthusiasm for Machtpolitik--hasn't properly calculated the economic benefits that have accrued from three-quarters of a century of European peace. Nor are the benefits to be measured in dollars alone. They're to be measured in wars not fought, lives not lost.
As for the question, "Deficient in investment compared to whom?" That's not the right question, either. We're deficient in an absolute sense. How do I know? From the conversations I've had on Twitter in the past three months with an endless array of Americans who lack the fundamentals of a science education and can't understand the basic concepts they need to function in the modern world. Such as, for example, "How vaccines work and why they're essential to public health." We're now looking at the prospect of having four brilliant, near-miraculous vaccines, but being unable to achieve herd immunity, all the same, because a significant number of Americans believe in various species of premodern magic and *cannot* recognize a sound scientific argument. It doesn't matter what other countries spend if a significant section of *our* public is rapidly hurtling back to the 16th century and the life expectancies associated with it.
As for the argument that the high prices Americans pay subsidizes drug research for Germans--no. High US drug prices aren't related to the cost of research. For at least the past decade, drug revenues have declined because blockbuster cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, depression and acid reflux drugs have become generic; to avoid reporting lower revenue and profits, pharma companies have been jacking up prices on drugs still under monopoly protection (Humira, Lyrica, Lantus, etc.) That's why the prices of these drugs are the highest in the world. The price increases largely fueled profits, not research spending. If anything, the US market is a source of global inefficiency (as explained here: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/are-other-countries-blame-high-us-drug-prices.)
I partially agree. There is one benefit to the current world order that is so profoundly beneficial to the United States that it dwarfs all others; it’s the fact that we control the world’s reserve currency. We get to decide how much of the stuff to print and the fact that the world has an insatiable demand for our greenbacks is so advantageous to our country that it can’t be overstated.
I get it; with that privilege comes responsibilities and obligations and defending ingrates like the Germans just comes with the territory. So be it.
With that said, while it’s true that Prussia and later Germany have been bombastically aggressive since the days of Bismark, that doesn’t mean that but for the defense subsidies that Germany receives from the United States, it’s bound to rediscover it “enthusiasm for Machtpolitik.”
Bismark famously said that if the British army was ever to invade Prussia, he would send out his constabulary to arrest it. In the 21st Century, Germany is so pathetically weak that if it ever became uppity, we could send Sheriff Andy Taylor and Deputy Barney Fife from Mayberry to subdue the country.
Then there’s the fact that Germany’s demographic implosion is so remarkable that if Germany was ever to rediscover its martial spirit, it would need to rely on its aged pensioners to threaten anyone.
Claire, it is simply inaccurate to claim that the development of new drugs is not facilitated by high drug prices in the United States. The average new medicine costs about $1 billion from inception to approval. There are multiple failures for every success. There have been revenue declines caused by patent expirations but there have been numerous new drugs that have taken the place of newly generic products. Many of these new products are biologics (made from living tissue) and they cost far more to develop than more typical small molecule drugs.
I could mention numerous examples but I’ll mention only two; Keytruda (Merck) and Opdivo (BMS). For some patients these are miracle medicines. Previously unresectable and incurable lung cancers are now forced into remission for years thanks to these drugs. Jimmy Carter’s melanoma, which had metastasized to his brain was cured by these drugs.
They cost billions to develop and they are both extremely expensive for American health insurance companies (and Medicare and Medicaid) to pay for. If BMS and Merck relied for their profit on the amount paid for these drugs by the Germans, they never would have been developed in the first place.
If Americans paid for their medicines what Germans (and the French) paid for theirs, the international pharmaceutical business would be a mere shadow of what it is. Even European pharmaceutical firms (AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Novartis, Novo-Nordisk, Hoffman La Roche) would be dramatically less innovative but for the prices paid by their American customers.
Those miraculous Covid vaccines you mentioned would never have been produced so rapidly without a worldwide pharmaceutical industry that’s as vibrant and innovative as it is. Believing that the vaccine developers could have pivoted as quickly and successfully as they did to develop Covid vaccines if they had to rely for profit on what Germans pay for their products, simply strains credulity. To be fair, it’s not just the Germans, it’s all Europeans.
On an unrelated note, it’s really great to see Adam Garfinkle here from time to time. No one is more interesting than he is and there’s not a pundit anywhere who writes more beautifully. Several years ago, Adam wrote a fantastic book on political writing. I look at it all the time, though sadly, I’m a poor student.
Everyone should buy his book.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B008JEXP4M/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1614811074&sr=1-1
I'll concede that my comments about drug pricing and medical research were too simplistic. This would be a good subject for a longer essay: I'll put it in the hopper.
The US is modernizing Ramstein because the US wants to modernize Ramstein for its own purposes and quite frankly for your own purposes WigWam and people like E Hines too as I laid out in my own comments.
I am actually going to recommend this video by Adam Posen at the American Enterprise Institution to both the Cosmopolitan Globalist and Trumpist readership. The video of officially about Brexit but in reality, it is more about the US, British, and Germans relations among themselves and more broadly as Posen describes the moral values of Brexitism and Trumpism vs the moral values of Cosmopolitan Globalism.
My link jumps into the video part way at the point which Posen talks about Germany specifically and his own experiences dealing with Helmut Kohl but I would recommend watching the whole video afterwards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcIkIz98zXU&t=1067s
I watched the whole Brexit discussion with interest. Thanks for the link.
I am glad you liked the Posen link. I brought it up in part as I think you could rephrase in part what he said along with David O'Sullivan about Germany and Brexit to US-German relations which is that Germans like the US, Germans consider the existence of the US-German alliance along with NATO to be in Germany's enlightened self-interest but Germany isn't going to roll over for this that or the other because members of Congress in Washington or DC think tanks want it to. I think the problem on the US side is too many Americans think it is there birth right as Americans to demand Germany roll over for this that or the other as Posen puts it. Hence I the high demand by readers here to talk about US German relations here at the Cosmopolitan Globalist.
I would also recommend even as someone who is no particularly a big fan of Margaret Thatcher to watch the Posen video above in combination with Claire's book about Thatcher or at very least watch Adam Posen along with one of Claire's old book talks such as below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwy5meym-PY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCI7KqOwFrE
You will notice both our own Claire and Adam Posen talk a lot about the moral values of free and open markets and liberal societies.
"If you ask these questions of an intelligent German, they are apt to be taken as an arrogant, ignorant, and probably deliberate affront. Why? Because the tenor of the US-German bilateral relationship in recent years has made it so. Ex-President Trump was and remains a zero-sum-fixated person who has never been able to wrap his “big brain” around mutually beneficial relationships at any level...."
And therewith Garfinkle exposes himself for the same arrogant, ignorant, and probably deliberately affronting commenter of which he accuses the questioner of being.
Confirmed by this overtly deliberate smear:
"I don’t assume that our questioner is a fan of Donald Trump or Richard Grenell. If he is a fan, then I have better things to do than try to explain reality to a willful nitwit."
After that, nothing of what Garfinkle has to say can have any seriousness, and I have better things to do than wade through his words, no matter how otherwise prettily he might arrange them.
Eric Hines
To expound upon the current argument about US/German relations and to expand upon my own previous response I think there are two facts of life of the US/German relationship and NATO that are not properly understood both by the Trumpists and the Cosmopolitan Globalists.
1. My first point directed towards the Trumpists, is that the actual direct US costs in terms of money and manpower towards the US remaining a member of NATO in good standing or even the most prominent and powerful member of NATO are actually quite low in the context of the entire US military budget. The number of US troops in Germany and the rest of Europe along with the US contribution to the NATO command structure are way down compared to their numbers during the cold war and even during the cold war as, like today, US troops in Europe operated on a day-to-day basis in a very benign environment. Troops in Germany neither today or prior to 1989 are being shot on a daily basis like in Iraq or Afghanistan.
More importantly, the US forces in Europe provide a large logistics platform to project American military outside of the North Atlantic NATO Treaty area into places like Africa and the Middle East. This was apparent already during the second half of 1990 only months after the Wall fell when US forces stationed in Germany to block a Soviet invasion were retasked to Operation Desert Storm expelling Saddam from Kuwait cutting the deployment distance to the theater well over half of what it would have been in a direct deployment from the US(if that was even possible without refueling and rest stops between the US itself and Saudi Arabia in the Western European NATO members).
In fact, the biggest liability for the US in terms of NATO is really the contingent liability that there could be an actually Russian military invasion of NATO member state territory(other than the US itself) which isn't zero but is something that can be deterred.
2. The second point and this I think unlike the first is the blind spot of many Cosmopolitan Globalists more than that of Trumpists and Grenellists is that actual political support for NATO in the US at the political level is very shallow. Now from one perspective of looking at the glass half full, it doesn't go from being shallow to outright negative because as I pointed out in my first fact of life NATO membership is relatively cheap for the US and most politicians in Washington, DC that are least semi-mainstream know this. Even Trump and Grenell never called for outright NATO withdrawal although I suspect there will be at least one future Republican Primary candidate that will do so.
But anyways support for NATO I do believe IS very shallow and I think from the US perspective among Members of Congress and non-military political types the main plus of NATO for the US as they see it is not the logistics platform(like Ramstein AFB and Landstuhl Hospital) that the US military thinks highly of but the more political elements which have no basis in the NATO Treaty but I think could be understood as that the EU and the EU/NATO member states shall take no action politically or economically that expressly harms US interests outside of the NATO area(i.e. the Middle East, China, etc) or basically goes against the US political systems desires(and the security interests of the US are purely for the US to decide and for Europe to follow). I think former French Ambassador to the US Gerard Araud described this as Europe outsourcing its security to the US and in turn at a global level adopting US foreign policy as their own. If you watched ranking GOP member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee James Risch this morning it is obvious that while he claims to support NATO he really supports it on a transaction level is I just outlined.
So the risk as I see is that the Cosmopolitan Globalists are underestimating that Europe will do something from a geo-economic perspective with say China or Iran that really defies the wishes of the US political system and that while not perhaps immediately leading to NATO withdrawal might make it at least more mainstream(say 30 or 35 Senators calling for pulling out). Or more specifically people like Senator Risch whose support of NATO is very transactional, to begin with shifting towards an outright withdrawal position. And this could come from the other side with say Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and media figures like Rachel Maddow calling for NATO withdrawal over some type of economic deal between the EU and China.
Anyways I will have to talk further in the future about what I think are the implications of all this and what options Cosmopolitan Globalists might want to consider.
In response, I want to posit two of what I think are accurate statements that might explain in part the whole US/Germany/Rest of the EU and Eurozone relationship.
1. Prior to the Eurozone crisis having a single EU wide or at least Eurozone financial regulator I think would have significantly have mitigated at least the banking aspect of the crisis
2. In terms of global financial power and prestige the US institutionally in the form of the US Treasury Department and US Federal Reserve along with I think US politicians and officials of both parties, I think it is only fair to say the US benefited from lack a single EU financial regulator that would have been in charge of licensing and authorizing US banks operating in the EU and just more broadly competing with America prestige. US policies such as unilateral US sanctions say against Iran or North Korea in the late 2000s would have been far more tricky having to implement in the face of a single EU regulator more accountable say to more "Anti American" voices in the European Parliament in Brussels. In fact I would so far as to say if you accept my premise many of the Cosmopolitan Globalist writers who are deeply "Pro American and Atlanticist" might even agree that having a single EU bank regulator would have been a bad thing.
Now there is no evidence the US played any part in defeating or opposing a single EU bank supervisor and in particular, the creation of one inside the European Central Bank was very much contemplated in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and contemplated not just covering the Eurozone but the opt-out countries like the UK. However, the Treaty article that called for this type of regulation was somewhat vague and any actual implementation required the unanimous approval of all EU Member States so the whole issue was put off until after the Euro was introduced in 1999.
Furthermore back to the US perspective the Single Europe Act back from 1986 essentially gave US banks in London the power to operate across the entire EU but solely under the supervision of national UK regulators which as things in the UK typically work are very pro American and Atlanticist and were known to practice a "light touch" form of regulation. From a US perspective, I think you call this icing on the cake. What is clear is once the Euro was introduced EU Member States governments as a whole were very unenthusiastic to the idea of a single supervisor but the UK, in particular, was very opposed to this transfer of sovereignty to Brussels. In fact, many in the UK joked that the EU "already" had a single bank regulator that of the UK FSA in charge of the City of London. Was this view on the part of the UK taken in part to please the US? Probably not but it was a view that was widely supported in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American circles in the early 2000s(Remember this was around the time of the Iraq War)
Now, this probably would have to be a whole article on my part but suffice to say the EU did finally get a single EU bank regulator after the Eurozone crisis(in part due to the UK and David Cameron relenting on their historic opposition in 2014) but also one only covering the Eurozone. Then after that, we of course have Brexit with US Banks based in London losing their Single Europe Act "passporting" rights and having to move operations to the EU27 from London as of January 1st this year and now coming under the full authority of the European Central Bank regulation and supervision department(accountable to the usual anti-American suspects in Brussels). But this probably requires me to write a whole article on these implications a lot of which are not clear at this point.
Anyways hopefully I might get around to writing my own article on the further implications of these recent changes in the EU in the near future.