By Oskar Lafontaine*
The well-known German politician Oskar Lafontaine has published on Facebook a confessional opinion about what he thinks is happening to his country.
He served as Minister-President of the state of Saarland from 1985 to 1998 and was federal leader of the Social Democratic Party from 1995 to 1999.
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We have translated and reproduced the text below:
For most German politicians and journalists, the war in Ukraine began on February 24, 2022. With this view, which leaves out the full prehistory of the occupation of Ukraine by the Russian army, Germany cannot contribute to peace.
The poet Aeschylus is credited with the sentence: In war, truth is the first victim.
It follows that one must return to truth or truth to find peace. And this includes the fact that every war has its own history.
And the history of the Ukrainian war begins with the self-image of the US as a chosen nation with a claim to be and remain the sole world power.
Therefore, the US must do everything possible to prevent the emergence of another world power. This is true not only for China and Russia, but also for the EU or, in the future, perhaps for India or other countries.
If one accepts this claim and at the same time knows that the US has the largest military apparatus in the world, then one can conclude that the best thing to do is to take shelter under the wing of this one world power.
However, this reasoning is correct only if the defending power pursues a peaceful foreign policy and does not surround new rivals militarily, constantly provoking them and thus accepting the risk of war.
Suppose that the defending power has military installations on the territory of its allies from which it conducts its wars. In that case, you risk yourself and your allies with aggressive geopolitics.
Ramstein Airport, for example, was indispensable to the US war in the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine. Therefore, when the Americans make wars, Germany is always a party to the war, whether she likes it or not.
Because he saw this connection, Charles de Gaulle, for example, did not want NATO, that is, US facilities on French soil. A country, he said, should be able to decide for itself war or peace.
That Germany is not a sovereign country became evident again when the US Secretary of War Lloyd Austin invited to a conference in Ramstein, where the vassal states had to give their contribution to the war in Ukraine.
Of course, the US also claims the right to decide whether a country like Germany should be allowed to operate an energy supply pipeline like Nord Stream 2.
WARS WITH A LONG HISTORY
The history of the war in Ukraine includes the considerations of American strategists that Ukraine is a decisive state in relation to dominance in the Eurasian continent.
For this reason, former President Carter’s national security adviser Brzezinski wrote in a 1997 book titled “The One World Power,” Ukraine should become a vassal state of the United States.
Even as shrewd American policymakers like George Kennan warned against making Ukraine a military outpost on Russia’s border, Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden continued to push for NATO’s eastward expansion and the rearmament of Ukraine.
Although Russia had indicated for more than 20 years that it would not accept US troops and missiles on its border with Ukraine.
More recently, with the 2014 Maidan coup, the United States was unwilling to consider Russia’s security interests.
They installed a US puppet government and did everything possible to integrate Ukraine’s armed forces into NATO structures.
Joint maneuvers were held and persistent objections from the Russian government were heard.
In this context, the misleading argument is used that each state has the right to freely choose its alliance.
But no state should place a rival power’s missiles on its border with a nuclear power without warning and naively justify it with the free choice of an alliance.
Imagine Canada, Mexico or Cuba allowing troops from China or Russia into their territory while allowing missile bases from which Washington can be reached without warning.
Since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, we know that the United States would never accept this and would risk a nuclear war if they doubted it.
These considerations follow: An aggressive superpower cannot lead a “defensive alliance”.
After all the experiences of the past decades, how long will it take Germany to finally realize that it must take its security into its own hands and become independent from the US?
Some German politicians saw the danger posed by US policy and strove for an independent German foreign policy.
For example, Willy Brandt knew that peace had to be found with Russia and its Eastern European neighbors after World War II.
He called for disarmament and détente and was convinced that security could not be achieved against each other, but only together.
Helmut Kohl negotiated German unity with Gorbachev and accepted that peace and cooperation with Russia were prerequisites for a European peace order.
Hans-Dietrich Genscher had fallen out of favor with American politicians for a while because he feared a limited nuclear war in Europe and therefore did everything he could to bar short-range missiles and tactical nuclear weapons from German soil and European.
“Genscherism” became a dirty word in Washington.
In his excellent book The National Interest, the view of some American strategists that a limited nuclear war in Europe might well be waged was recently reiterated by Klaus von Dohnanyi.
HOW TO PREVENT EXHAUST
Currently, there is not even a hint of a foreign policy that puts Germany’s interests first.
The leading politicians of the German traffic light political coalition (Scholz, Baerbock, Habeck and Lindner) are loyal US vassals.
Scholz advocates rearmament and is proud to be able to announce arms shipments to Ukraine at increasingly short intervals.
He acts as if he has never heard of Willy Brandt’s Ost- und Entspannungspolitik.
The foreign policy of the FDP party is dominated by the arms lobbyist Strack-Zimmermann, who demands new weapons for Ukraine every other day.
The Greens have gone from a spin-off party from the German peace movement to the worst war party in the German Bundestag.
Annalena Baerbock’s statements that we must “destroy Russia” should already be called fascistoid.
Even the largest opposition party left.
The head of the CDU party, Friedrich Merz, a former employee of the American financial giant Blackrock, is a staunch Atlanticist, demanding even more arms shipments and even wants to close Nord Stream 1.
German foreign policy is harming the interests of our country and is not contributing to peace in Europe.
It needs a complete reorientation.
Suppose there is a risk of war between nuclear powers because of American geopolitics. In that case, it is the responsibility of German and European politics to do everything possible to keep our territory out of this confrontation.
Europe must break away from the United States and mediate between rival world powers. Germany and France together have the potential to build an independent European foreign and security policy.
It’s time to start doing that.
We cannot always rely on prudent military leaders to prevent a nuclear world conflagration when war comes to a head.
For example, Soviet naval officer Arkhipov, who prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo in the Cuban missile crisis, or Soviet colonel Petrov, who decided in 1984, when Russian computers mistakenly reported an approach of nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles. the USA, in order not to trigger the nuclear “counter-attack” actually ordered for this case.
It is time to not leave the peace initiatives to Turkish President Erdogan alone.
If the US is not already willing, by its own admission, to work towards a ceasefire and a quick end to the war in Ukraine, it should be in the existential interest of the Europeans.
The founder of the musical group Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, is right when he points out that peace can be achieved even now on the basis of the Minsk agreements.
If, on the other hand, the US declares that its goal is to weaken Russia so that it will never start a similar war again, this is pure cynicism.
How many more Ukrainians and Russians will die before the US gets close enough to its geopolitical goal of decisively weakening Russia?
Europe now has the highest energy prices. European industrial companies are in the process of migrating and setting up new branches in the US.
The huge orders for the US defense industry and the exorbitant profits being reaped by the environmentally damaging US fracking industry also make it clear who benefits from this war and sanctions galore.
Faced with this situation, even the politicians most opposed to traffic light foreign policy must understand that there is no way to avoid Europe’s self-assertion.
The first step would be to push for a ceasefire, present a peace plan and get Nord Stream 2 up and running.
Continuation of current policies, on the other hand, will impoverish large segments of the population, destroy entire sectors of German industry, and expose Germany to the risk of involvement in a nuclear war.
* Oskar Lafontaine is a German politician. He served as Minister-President of the state of Saarland from 1985 to 1998 and was federal leader of the Social Democratic Party from 1995 to 1999.
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