Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, U.S., March 17, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Bloomberg: Merkel Takes on Trump Over Demands for German NATO Spending
* German chancellor says she’ll keep focus on development aid
* U.S. president’s pressure on defense rankles German leaders
Chancellor Angela Merkel sharpened her tone against President Donald Trump’s demands that Germany spend more on defense, saying she’ll keep insisting that targets on development aid are just as important.
The U.S. administration has ruled out counting foreign aid toward the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s target of spending 2 percent of gross domestic product in member states on defense. Trump has said Germany owes “vast sums of money” on security.
As much as the U.S. government demands meeting NATO’s 2 percent defense spending goal by 2024, we will stand just as much by our 0.7 percent spending on development aid,” Merkel told an industry club in Hamburg on Friday. Germany spends about 1.2 percent of GDP on defense.
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WNU Editor: International aid and defence/national security spending are two separate files .... but apparently not in Germany.
4 comments:
In theory it makes sense (as development aid reduces poverty and in return reduces footholds for terrorism and extremism). However, this was not the intended meaning in previous agreements and Germany's military needs to be stronger. These are testing times and you can't throw development aid at extremists - the left keeps telling you it will work (and I agree - but the time frames are in the decades and centuries.. meanwhile we need conventional firepower to send extremists and other aggressors to their makers :P)
Times and semantics have changed. In the past it was called Tribute, Dane Geld, etc. It buys time, which is never ever used wisely.
To be called "tribute" a recognition by the payer of political submission to the payee is normally required; the large sums, essentially protection money, paid by the later Roman and Byzantine Empires to barbarian peoples to prevent them attacking imperial territory, would not usually be termed "tribute" as the Empire accepted no inferior political position. Payments by a superior political entity to an inferior one, made for various purposes, are described by terms including "subsidy".
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribute
Yes, you're quite right..... and they still paid. They also comforted themselves on their superior political position while they waited on their Gallic estates for their doom.
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