Reading Pepe Escobar's latest article [1] in OPEDNEWS what stands out is economic development, not war, is the focus of the BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Add in the many other nations that will soon join and benefit as the BRICS "New Development Bank" (NDB) becomes operational by the end of the year and its scope is phenomenal.
And this new development may very well include a German connection as Escobar points out, "Germany now exports 50 percent of its GDP. It used to be only 24 percent in 1990. For the past 10 years, half of German growth depended on exports. Translation: this is a giant economy that badly needs global markets to keep expanding. An ailing EU, by definition, does not fit the bill. German exports are changing their recipient address. Only 40 percent-and going down-now goes to the EU; the real growth is in Asia. So Germany, in practice, is moving away from the Eurozone."
But before this could happen Germany would need to follow its own national interests and not continue to be in lockstep with US machinations, particularly over the crisis in Ukraine.
That is a tall order. Yet at times Germany hasn't always followed the US lead. Germany (along with France) openly opposed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Lately Germany and France are openly opposed to the US plan to send lethal weapons to the Ukraine government as the two governments desperately seek a settlement of the war in eastern Ukraine. To that end German Chancellor Angela Merkel and France's President Francois Hollande traveled to Moscow in early February to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin-after conferring with Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko a day earlier- which lead to a new ceasefire brokered in Minsk, Belarus a few days later in order to end the crisis.
It's notable the US wasn't part of this "peace" initiative by Merkel and Hollande.
Of course all who met in Moscow are aware of the pivotal role the US State Department and the CIA played behind the scene helping to initiate the coup that overturned the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych in February last year, then worked to bring Poroshenko to power along with the neo Nazi Right Sector and the ultra nationalistic Svoboda party that were integrated within the post coup hierarchy and who are now conducting an ethnic cleansing operation against the ethnic Russian speaking Ukrainian's in Eastern Ukraine.
So this Minsk II cease fire agreed to may follow the Minsk I agreement brokered last September that never held. And now with the US itching to escalate the war by sending in new lethal weapons to Kiev this new ceasefire is unlikely to hold.
But the sense of urgency by the two European leaders is understandable.
An intensified war in Ukraine with new heavy weaponry supplied by the US could be the red line Putin finds unacceptable and force him to openly defend the ethnic Russian speaking Ukrainians in the east which would likely bring NATO into a wider war that could go nuclear and engulf all of Europe.
That is the horror which Germany and the rest of Europe faces so it comes down to Germany and to a lesser degree France that need to be the countries in the West to follow their national interests, bite the bullet and openly defy and resist the US neo-con instigated madness in Ukraine.
That open resistance to US hegemony over them is the linchpin to prevent a new war in Europe.