In an article headlined “Washington’s Green Branches in Europe,” Diane Johnstone writes in the anti-war journal Consortium News that the Greens’ chancellor candidate Annalena “Baerbock is a perfect product of transatlantic leader selection. In between jumping up and down on the trampoline, her professional interest has always been international relations from an Anglo-American angle, including her masters degree in international law at the LSE in London.
“Her initiation into transatlantic governance includes membership in the German Marshall Fund, the World Economic Forum’s Young Leaders Program and the Europe/Transatlantic Board of the Green Party’s Heinrich Böll Foundation….
“The Greens are in perfect harmony with the Biden administration’s new ideological crusade to remake the world on the American model. Echoing Russiagate, and with no evidence, the Greens accuse Russia of malevolent interference in Europe, while advocating their own beneficent interference in Russian domestic policy on behalf of some theoretical ‘democratic opposition.’...
“The Greens favor rigid sanctions against Russia and a complete stop of Nord Stream 2: ‘The Nord Stream 2 pipeline project is not only harmful in terms of climate and energy policy, but also geostrategically – especially for the situation in Ukraine – and must therefore be stopped.’
“The Greens also demand that the Russian government implement its Minsk agreement commitments to end the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, ignoring the fact that it is the Kiev government’s refusal to carry out the agreements that is preventing a solution.
“Baerbock is all for ‘humanitarian intervention.’ The Greens thus propose changing United Nations rules to make it possible to bypass the Great Power veto (held by the U.S., Russia, China, the U.K. and France) in order to use military intervention to ‘stop genocide.’ Her enthusiasm for R2P (the Responsibility to Protect, used so effectively in Libya to destroy the country) should resonate happily in a Biden administration where former U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power is on the lookout for victims to rescue.”
Johnstone also writes that “the Green economic program sounds very much like the Great Reset advocated by the World Economic Forum at Davos, with a new economy centered on climate change, artificial intelligence and digitalization of everything. International capitalism needs innovation to stimulate productive investment, and climate change provides the incentive. As a World Economic Forum young leader, Baerbock has surely learned this lesson.” https://consortiumnews.com/2021/05/03/diana-johnstone-washingtons-green-branches-in-europe/
In contrast to Baerbock, with respect to Russia, Armin Laschet, the chancellor candidate of the Christian-Democratic Union, called for a multi-vector policy and warned against curtailing the dialogue with Russia and China. “Foreign policy has always been geared to the search [for ways of interaction], including cooperation with countries having different social models. This concerns China, Russia, and the Arab world countries,” Laschet told the German business daily newspaper Handelsblatt, and also stating that, otherwise, Germany would have to confine itself to having relations with a handful of European countries.
