Germany’s Federal Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius has issued a stark warning to the public, calling on Germans to “get used to the idea that there could be the threat of war on the European continent.”
In an interview on the state broadcaster Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen’s (ZDF’s) program “Berlin Direkt,” which aired on Sunday, October 29th, the defense minister—while reviewing Germany’s defense capabilities, the state of the Bundeswehr, and other related topics—stated that the country must ready itself for war, be defensive, and prepare the army and society for such an eventuality, Die Welt reported.
Germany “has to become ready for war. We have to be defensive. And prepare the Bundeswehr and society for it,” Pistorius, a member of the left-liberal Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), told the show’s host.
The minister cited the Russo-Ukrainian war as well as the worsening confrontation between Israel and Palestine as examples illustrating that armed conflicts could potentially arise in other regions as well.
Pistorius dismissed criticism that Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s globalist ‘traffic light’ coalition, whose popular support collectively stands at a dismal 35%, has been sluggish in modernizing the German armed forces.” It doesn’t get much faster,” he insisted, claiming that steps are being taken to compensate for the decades of neglect and underfunding.
“Everything that has been messed up in 30 years, sorry to say that, and has been run down cannot be recovered in 19 months,” he went on. The minister then pledged that in the next three to four years, the Bundeswehr would undergo a profound transformation, and underscored that, as things currently stand, the German military ranks as among the most formidable in NATO and Europe.
The minister’s interview aired the same day as an interview with Fiona Hill, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former Russia advisor, was published by the Los Angeles Times. In her comments, Hill suggested that the Russo-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts had the potential to be “global-system shifting wars” like “World War I and World War II, which reflected and produced major changes to the international order.”
“In a sense, the Hamas attack on Israel was a kind of Pearl Harbor moment. It opened a second front,” she said.
The sentiment expressed by Hill echoed statements made days earlier by Israeli Energy Minister Israel Katz, who, during an interview with the BILD Zeitung, compared Hamas’ October 7th rampage to September 11th in the United States. Israel, which the minister says has the “most moral army in the world,” is waging “World War III against radical Islam.”
“There are many countries that would have wiped out their neighboring country after such events,” Katz claimed, adding that this war does not only concern the Jewish state. “The commitment in Europe and the USA is very understandable to me. Because it’s not just our war. The war is also within Europe.”
Following the Israeli military’s response to the events of October 7th, which according to Israeli government officials resulted in the deaths of more than 1,400 Israelis, increasingly massive protests with pro-Hamas leftists and Islamists have enveloped the whole of Europe, with many taking place in North America and Australia as well.
