It reminds me of somebody who said, way back when NATO was being formed, that the whole point of it was to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.
That's certainly not the case anymore.
It's an anomalous situation because they do have extraordinary economic power for obvious reasons, but their military capabilities don't match their economic power. Further, you've already seen the beginning of some significant cuts in the German defence budget, and we're going to see more significant cuts in the German defence budget.
I think that Germany today is not in any way the nation that it was in 1945. This is a thoroughly democratic modern country. It's one that I'm glad we have a partnership with in Europe, and I think we need to try to expand that partnership as much as we can, recognizing that they have certain geostrategic problems that they have to deal with—like where they get their natural gas from, which is Russia—and they have the other sorts of economic issues that they have to deal with, which I think are fairly obvious and I don't have to go into here.
The other thing I've found—because my university has an exchange agreement with the German equivalent of the Royal Military College and we get students coming to do their graduate degrees at the University of Calgary from the German armed forces and so on through other exchange agreements—is that the extent to which pacifism has taken root within the German people is something that we, in this country, really do not understand. We complained during our active involvement in Kandahar that the Germans were not getting more active in combat operations, but as for the Germans, the whole issue was whether they were going anywhere near Afghanistan, let alone getting involved in combat operations.