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The German Greens’ candidate for chancellor Annalena Baerbock on Thursday called for Germany to be more active on foreign policy, but expressed skepticism about NATO’s target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense.
“I think it’s very much not only appropriate but also needed that Europeans, therefore Germans, have to take more responsibility for their own security,” Baerbock told an Atlantic Council event.
But she said she had “doubts” about the NATO target “because it is related to” GDP. “This means that in a crisis like now where everything is insecure, rationally we would have to invest less because 2 percent of a GDP which decreases is not the same as when the economy is growing.”
Baerbock also said Germany had been too “passive” on foreign policy in the past.
“I believe one of the problems of the European Union of the last years is that we didn’t have an active foreign policy … and this is due to the lack of an active German foreign policy,” she said. “It’s not about Germany telling the others what to do, but if we are behaving very passively, it’s hard for the others” to act, she added.
Asked about her prospects of winning the German election in September, Baerbock said: “Currently we are at the top [of the polls] … but we still have five months to the elections … So everything is still possible.”
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