How to start a war with Russia in these easy steps: Just ask Merz’s Germany, by Tarik Cyril Amar

How do you reason with a government determined to start a war it has no chance of winning? From Tarik Cyril Amar:

Berlin would do well to heed Moscow’s warnings not to supply long-range weapons to Kiev

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz during press conference on May 22, 2025 in Vilnius, Lithuania. ©  Paulius Peleckis/Getty Images

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 Germany’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.

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