If in a dark hole, dig deeper, especially even deeper than feckless German ex-chancellor Olaf Scholz. That seems to be Berlin’s new motto. Under Friedrich Merz’s new mis-management, the German government is clearly setting out to worsen its current abysmal non-relationship with Russia. That is a sadly ambitious aim, because things are already more dire than they’ve been at any point since 1945.

But Merz and his team, it seems, are not satisfied with playing a key role in fighting a proxy war against Russia that has been a ruinous fiasco; not for the Russian economy, but for German y’s. Even by February 2023, German mainstream media reported that the war had sliced 2.5 percent off GDP.

That, by the way, is a large figure in and of itself, but consider that between 2022 and 2024 Germany’s annual GDP growth (or, really, reduction) rate has varied between -0.3 percent (2023) and 1.4 percent, and it looks even worse.

And yet, instead of sincerely – and finally – trying to use diplomacy to end this war against Russia via Ukraine, Merz’s Berlin is now taking the risk of escalating the current mess into the nightmare of a direct military clash between Russia and Germany (and, hence, presumably NATO – though not necessarily including the US any longer). Such a confrontation would be devastating in a manner that Germans have not experienced for a long time, as even a recent German TV documentary had to admit, despite its obvious purpose to boost the country’s current re-militarization-on-steroids.

The single most obvious symbol of Berlin’s new, industrial-strength recklessness is the Taurus cruise missile, a sophisticated, very expensive weapon (at €1-3 million each) with a full name you will want to forget (

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