[1]Friedrich Merz (lead image) — Germany’s chancellor for just eight months with only 28% of the vote — is a Joseph Kennedy fascist. That’s the line which Kennedy, then US Ambassador to Germany, ran to President Franklin Roosevelt between 1938 and 1940 — “fascism is the cure of communism”.
Now that there’s no more communism to cure in Russia, the old rationale for making war against Russia has lost its camouflage and is revealed in Merz’s policies as rearming Germany to defend against a Russian attack Merz is both fabricating and provoking. He has been hoping to convince the Trump Administration that he’s their best candidate in Europe to wage this war and pay Trump’s asking price for his weapons – except that the German state budget doesn’t have enough cash and lacks the Bundestag votes to raise borrowing limits and taxes.
Merz has also been trying to convince German voters whose support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) now outnumbers supporters of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to switch their votes to him. But so far Merz is failing: since September he is growing weaker in the polls and the AfD has crossed over him.
The trajectory of the German aerospace and defence stock index also reveals that since August there has been a change of mind among Germany’s money men: the index line for the state’s warmaking industries has topped and started downward as investors and banks lending to them have begun to lose confidence in the future revenues, profits, and share price gains of Merz’s war against Russia.
Once calling [2] Merz “a very strong person and a very strong leader” who had “just won a great election, very, very strong election [3]”, President Donald Trump has also begun to lose confidence in the German. But not quite as much as President Vladimir Putin at a Defense Ministry meeting this week, who called Merz, along with French President Emmanuel Macron, “podsvinki” – little pigs running behind the hog.
Listen to the 55-minute podcast [4] with Dimitri Lascaris explaining why the führerlein Merz, little German fascist, is failing politically and economically – and also why American appeals to “German morality” will fail likewise.
[5]For follow-up reading and evidence to add to the discussion:
Putin’s points in the Itogi Goda (Results of the Year) press conference [6]:
“Stealing is not the right word. Stealing is a covert theft of property. But they are doing this openly. Therefore, it is robbery. Why aren’t they succeeding? Because the consequences will be grave for the robbers. What does this mean? First, it is difficult to accomplish. They have not said that they will rob and seize. One of their ideas is to issue a reparation loan secured by our assets.
What does issuing a loan mean? It means consequences for the budgets of every country involved; this will increase the budgetary debt of each country. If a country issues a loan secured by our gold and currency assets, this must be reflected in its budget. Take France, whose state debt has reached 120 percent [of GDP]. Our state debt is 17.7 percent, and theirs is 120 percent. It is true that our budget deficit is 2.6 percent, but it will go down to 1.6 percent next year, while France’s budget deficit is 6 percent. The new obligations will have to be added to the budget. I believe they are having big problems with next year’s budget. All this is the reason why it is difficult to take decisions related to the robbery of someone else’s assets.
But there will be graver consequences for those who might endeavour that. This will not just be a blow to their image, but this will subvert all the confidence in the euro area, since many countries store their foreign reserves in the eurozone. Not only Russia does that, but also those who have free reserves, primarily oil-producing countries. They will look at what is happening – they are already doing so, and they will have suspicions, doubts and fears. What if the same happens to them?
It is only difficult the first time, and then you can do the same under different pretexts. Today, they don’t like our special military operation and the fight against neo-Nazism in Ukraine. Later, they could be displeased with some country’s policy towards the LGBTQ community. There are very many strict laws in Muslim countries that protect our common traditional values. We don’t have such laws, but they do. This could be used as a pretext for seizing sovereign assets, sovereign resources and money. And why not? Or they can find some other pretext. Apart from image-related losses, there will be direct financial losses related to the contemporary financial architecture. That is why it is so difficult to accomplish. And the main thing is no matter what they steal, sooner or later they will have to give it back.
Besides, we will protect our interests. How? Most importantly, we will go to courts to protect our interests. We will do our utmost to find a jurisdiction that will be independent from the political context.”
US and European vulnerability to Russian tit-for-tat in asset seizure
[7]Source: “Implications of the Confiscation of Russian Sovereign Assets -- An Analysis of the Key Economic and Financial Stability-Related Concerns”, published by the Kiev School of Economics (KSE) Institute, in April 2025 [8]. This entity [9], supervised by Michael McFaul, the ex-US Ambassador to Russia, and Andrei Yermak, the ex-presidential deputy in Kiev, is financed by USAID, the British Government, the European Union, and other anti-Russian corporations, foundations, and government agencies. The Financial Times report of the US-European vulnerability quoted in the podcast was written by Max Seddon, a former FT reporter in Moscow who is now under German protection in Berlin; the data tables used by Seddon came from the KSE report [10].
The crossover in the German voter polls from CDU to AfD on September 9
[11]Source: https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/ [12]
German capital changes its mind on the profitability of war against Russia
[13]Six-month trajectory, June-December 2025
Source: https://markets.ft.com/data/indices/tearsheet/summary?s=FTWIDEU502010S:FSI [14]
Jeffrey Sachs’ “Open Letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz”, December 20, 2025
[15]Source: https://braveneweurope.com/jeffrey-sachs-an-open-letter-to-chancellor-friedrich-merz-security-is-indivisible-and-history-matters [16] For several months a group of retired German bankers and corporate directors has attempted to lobby the Merz chancellery in Berlin by inviting US analysts to assist in drafting, first a private letter to Merz, and then an open letter for media publication in the US and Europe. I was invited but declined, replying there was no useful purpose to be served in presenting reasonable arguments to Merz, least of all in a form to appeal to Washington. Sachs appears to have accepted the assignment. His text reveals many misunderstandings of German politics. His self-promotion as a lecturer on German morality is aimed at Americans.