Former Federal Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (59, CDU) settles accounts with the foreign policy of the Merkel era after the Russian attack on Ukraine:
“I’m so angry at us because we’ve failed historically,” wrote the ex-CDU leader on Twitter on Thursday. “After Georgia, Crimea and Donbass, we haven’t prepared anything (…) that would have really deterred Putin.”
Kramp-Karrenbauer complained that the lessons of the former Chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl had been forgotten.
They would have known “that negotiations always come first, but you have to be so strong militarily that non-negotiation is not an option for the other side.”
In plain language, this means that Germany has repeatedly tried (only) with diplomacy to prevent conflicts without really being prepared and, above all, powerful for the worst case scenario of a military escalation.
An indirect attack on former Chancellor Angela Merkel (67, CDU) and her reserved policy towards Russia’s despot Vladimir Putin (69)!
Kramp-Karrenbauer is one of Merkel’s closest confidants, was positioned by the then Chancellor in 2018 as her successor at the top of the CDU and was Federal Minister of Defense in Merkel’s cabinet from 2019 to 2021.
So AKK itself sat at the most important lever of German military policy.