Outrage at Trump is not enough. We must arm ourselves
To fully grasp the significance of the scandal in Washington, we must look back. When President John F. Kennedy told the residents of West Berlin, surrounded by a wall and barbed wire, "Ich bin ein Berliner!" in 1963, he did not ask if there were rare earth metals, oil, or gold in the divided city's soil. With a single phrase, Kennedy gave the people of West Berlin, and thus West Germans, a promise of protection.
This promise was more valuable than any article on mutual defense in NATO and remained unchanged until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
How much the world has changed was demonstrated by the current U.S. President Donald Trump and his Vice President J.D. Vance: they brazenly and mockingly humiliated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in public and sent him home empty-handed — merely because he asked for security guarantees in exchange for access to his country's natural resources.
Trump openly threatened to stop military aid to Ukraine, which is fighting for survival. And now all of Europe is asking itself: Wasn't America our friend just recently?
One might think that Europe's time has come. And the initial statements by European leaders indeed sounded promising:
"We will step up our support to Ukraine so that they can continue to fight back the aggressor," promised the EU's chief diplomat Kaja Kallas.
"Ukraine can count on Germany and Europe," stated current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
"We stand by Ukraine — in good times and in bad," added his likely successor Friedrich Merz.
But conferences and talks are not enough.
Since European NATO countries do not have sufficient stockpiles of weapons and ammunition to replace U.S. aid if necessary, and the Western European defense industry is also unable to quickly meet these needs, Europeans will have to allocate additional billions to Ukraine so that it can purchase the necessary military equipment from the United States.
In simple terms, this means: either more taxes or more debt. But are we ready for this?
Only now are our eyes being opened to the fact that in this world, we cannot simply rely on someone else. However, our biggest problem is that we cannot even rely on ourselves.
It is telling that the war in Ukraine played almost no role in the Bundestag election campaign, although all parties should have understood what the "turning point" in Trump's version would look like. Trump, in essence, holds up a mirror to our own incompetence.
The unpleasant truth of the Washington scandal is this:
Three years after Putin's attack, the West has no idea how to end the war in a way that is fair to Ukraine.
The fronts are bogged down in a war of attrition, with no military victory in sight for either side, nor a diplomatic solution.
To this day, there are not even any informal diplomatic contacts between the two warring sides.
Clearly, this cannot continue. Outrage at Trump is not enough — military might is primarily needed.