<nettime> Germany's geopolitics

Reading over some of the Stormy Weather posts, I find Pit Schulz's ideas pretty close to the more jaundiced or realistic side of my thinking, just as Alex Foti's posts respond to my sense of what is to be done.

Pit wrote:

The decisive factor in the outcome, to use the language of board game
thinkers, is Europe and the bridging role of Germany, so the Ukrainian
war (including the recent debates over tank exports) is mainly about
disciplining Europe to submit to the fading glory of Western world
domination, the result being high inflation, an increasing debt
spiral, tech stock bubbles and derivatives markets at an all time
high, business as usual for the 1% ready to sacrifice more surplus
population for financialised profit.

I'm totally curious about Germany's bridging role - but between what and what exactly? In recent years I saw Germany developing a China strategy comparable in opportunism to the US Chimerica approach, without the wholesale abandonment of the domestic working class, for sure, but a similar attempt to profit off comparative advantages in tech, high-end manufacturing and capital for foreign direct investment. Germany definitely went for the awful Schmittean 'Land and Sea' geopolitics approach, opting for the land side obviously, banking on the so-called Eurasian land bridge that is central to the Chinese attempt to deal with capital overaccumulation - basically by industrialising all the way along the railroad that goes to Germany, pouring steel and cement and other producer goods along a vast geographic stretch, with the bottomless consumer markets of Europe at the end of the New Silk Road.

Now Germany realigns with the US via NATO, to overcome the old Eastern bear. Aren't the industrial and financial elites quaking in their boots as the Spiegel reveals the (supposed) Chinese plan to sell "kamikaze" (sic) drones to Russia? (See the newspapers if you haven't already) Is the bridge gonna break? Does anyone have a better plan than this awful old geopolitical nightmare?

Curiously, Brian

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