Germany's Merz Wants Confrontation With Russiahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxL2OOIlUwI | Richard Sakwa on Daniel Davis Deep Dive | Oct 9, 2026
Richard Sakwa is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. and Lt. Col. Daniel Davis (Ret.) is a Great America who emerged from the mire of the M-I-C and is trying to uncover what drives the problems in this world, and bring people along with him. Follow his podcasts from the link above.
RICHARD- The political west has become hyper-normal. By that I mean it can no longer examine the foundations and the basis of its own thinking. It has got locked into a rhetorical world of its own in which it becomes an echo chamber.
We hear it today when our Prime Minister Andy Burnham is in Berlin and all these endless, Macron in these recent days has talked about the Russian threat as existential. Now if it's existential that means all means are on the table. Hyper-normality means that a certain vision of reality becomes solidified. It becomes like marbleized.
I don't know whether that word exists, but if you like, solidified, and is no longer susceptible to challenge, you no longer can engage in dialogue or debate and so on. Whereas Russia, I mean we've just been to well, I mean we were at the East-West Forum with participants, was just a normal debate, at the Valdai meeting, it was a normal discussion between people from all over the world, Chinese scholars, Turkish scholars, Indian scholars normal - I haven't seen such a normal debate in the West for some time because it's always about friend and foe, enemy adversary advantage, who's trying to split the alliance, who's trying to drive a wedge - this block thinking is Cold War on steroids - that's my sort of beginning of an explanation.
DANIEL- Well that kind of makes some sense, but how do we get out of, how is it possible to break it, because you, I think what you're talking about, this solidified thing that's of the elite thinking and of the elite media, as well mainstream media, they seem literally locked in that, whether you're talking about UK media, US Washington media, New York, we seem to be locked into that's the only way to even think definitely at the political level here in the United States. But when you get right underneath that, people like the folks who are watching our show right now and the folks who watch it before, people who were attending some of these other conferences that you just mentioned in Istanbul, they see this and they're like, "What is wrong with you guys?" They see it. I'm talking Americans here. I'm talking Brits. Why can, how, maybe a better question is how can we penetrate this marbled area at the top without having to have a nuclear weapon blow up?
RICHARD- Yeah, absolutely. There's elite stagnation. I mean the quality of the elites in Western Europe today is lamentable. As so many people commented where are the Chiracs, even Helmut Kohl, the Mitterrands, the Mrs. Thatcher, even John Major, it's all it's gone. Ronald Reagan even, it's the quality of elites in the one side, but as you say, that log jam or if you like the iceberg, the ice floe at the top is gradually thawing from below. We have a level of societal dynamism. We see that in the election results. We saw that in Romanian election results last November, December which were cancelled of course.
We see that in the German election results. Paradoxically, it's the right wing nowadays calling for peace. The left of course also is, but it's been more marginal. But indeed, so when we have the Alternative for Germany along with Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany calling for dialogue, diplomacy, and peace, that is a sign and the election results show it that this, I think we're heading, there's all sorts of elements suggest that Western Europe is heading for a major crisis. We're seeing the riots in France at the moment. We're seeing Friedrich Merz in unparalleled unpopularity. There is an electoral tsunami building up. We've already seen the fall, you know, the tremors, of that to change analogy, of that coming earthquake, the earlier tremors of it. So as you're absolutely right, there's this if you like, the Cold War freeze is melting from below.
DANIEL- Well, and we just have to hope that we can fan the flames of that to get it to thaw a little bit faster because we have issues like the potential flash point in Kaliningrad which could spark things up here quickly before that thaw happens. And I wonder if you can kind of help us understand first of all, a lot of people when they hear Kaliningrad, it may sound sort of familiar, but they don't know much about it. Can you explain kind of going back to I think 1945, like you talked before. How did Kaliningrad get stuck in between on the other side with the Baltics, especially when the USSR fell apart in 1992? Why is it way over there, Russian territory, and it's not contiguous with Russia?
RICHARD- Yeah, this was the old part of East Prussia which was separated in the inter-war years by the famous, even the infamous, Suwalki corridor. And after the war Germany, Poland were countries on as Churchill put it, countries on wheels, and East Prussia was confiscated from Germany. And in fact the Polish border, Poland took half of it. The Soviet Union as a victor, on a city around Konigsberg. So it is indeed a legacy. Indeed, another of those legacies of 1945 which are coming back to bite us and Putin made this comment what last week I guess, that we mentioned a second ago, Gary showed you that headlines where he said hey, you know, if NATO does anything and we're going to defend it by any means necessary, all of our weapon systems and number one, I'm wondering why did he say something, right, then because I had not seen any headlines in the immediate period for that from the West, anybody talking about it. But I did see this from a year ago in in July of last year where US General Donahue said, "You know what? We could take this area at unheard of speed." And I remember at the time thinking, why are you even mentioning that? I mean, why would you want to talk openly about taking Kaliningrad, which everybody knows or should know, he should know, would spark a war with Russia just flat out? Why do you think he said that then? And why did Putin say this now?
In fact there have been in fact, a cascade of comments about Kaliningrad. One of them was the Polish, as I mentioned the Polish foreign minister and some others who have warned and who say that there's not many Russian troops left in Kaliningrad which is true. Most of them have gone on to fight in Ukraine. But of course it is armed to the teeth with missiles of one form or another, with aircraft and all the rest. So and of course it's part of the internationally recognized Russian borders. So it would spark a larger conflagration. Why they're doing it is to try to probe, if you, like Russia's soft spots, weak spots and indeed it's a type of trolling. So no, Russia was absolutely unequivocal. You mentioned the embassies in the West which also signaled and mentioned nuclear weapons.
Later the Russian foreign minister walked back on the specific mention of nuclear weapons because the Russian strategy, and like the United States, is always to maintain strategic ambiguity, not to say specifically the threat but it's always hinted at. So no, there's a genuine, now suddenly, as part of the war fever of Western Europe, it's now become back to the surface that, look at this, and of course this sort of fictitious Suwalki corridor, it was on your map just now, that bit between that's right, between Kaliningrad and well up Poland and in towards Belarus, south of Lithuania, that's considered, it's equivalent, I've forgotten, off the, is it the full gap or whatever, the yes it the full gap. Yeah. In Germany. So, it's now moved several hundred kilometers to the east. I'm not quite sure whether the full gap actually existed as it were in a sense of a strategic sense. And this gap, the idea being that Russia could seize it or dominate it. I mean, I'm not a military man, but it doesn't really make much sense because, you know, the idea would then be to cut off the Baltic republics and then seize them. But I mean there's no indication that Russia wants to take the Baltic republics or indeed invade any NATO territory. So it's yet again part of that war fever.
DANIEL- And let's see, make sure I'm actually okay. Yeah, I still am. Let me show you some of kind of a closer up situation, why they're calling it the Suwalki Gap. This is it right here. {see the map in the video at this time} If you can kind of look in the middle here, you see the terrain where a lot of this is, and it's sort of a pathway here, that where the idea is that the troops could come up here. So, it would make a natural flow to where you could get into, you know, go down one path to another. So, it's militarily, it's more of a vulnerability part. But you can see also from around it there are others around it too. So, it's not that big of an issue. But you can definitely see this is the Kaliningrad area right here. Definitely it's surrounded on all sides by potentially enemy territory. So it would be of some concern to the Russians. But what would be the value of it to the West? Because let's take a look at some additional things here. Chattam House wanting to kind of get in the game here. They're saying Russia's Kaliningrad threats show the value of Baltic preparations. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have accelerated preparations for gray-zone conflict of the kind of which Russia excels, including attacks on infrastructure. All three have disconnected their electricity systems from Russia and Belarus networks, progressively synchronizing them with a continental grid since 2025. You know, let's just look at that militarily. Those Baltics, I think together they had the equivalent of maybe one combat brigade if you put all of them together and then you had this narrow band there and then Kaliningrad. So, it's not as though that Russia, if they wanted to, they could, and this is a literal statement, they could take it in a day. They could put enough combat power and there's literally nothing that could stop it and they could roll it down. So, why then do we want the Baltics instead of just saying, "Hey, we're just going to be quiet, stay on the side here, so nobody has any reason to look at us." Instead, NATO is like saying, "Hey, no, look at the Baltics, man. They're doing gray zone stuff, and they're going to put troops." I think Lithuania put some troops up near the Kaliningrad border. What is that all about?
RICHARD- And more than that, they're now planning to build a vast militarized border with what's it called? Dragon's teeth, tank traps, and all barbed wire and placements all along a thousand mile or thousand kilometer line.
DANIEL- I'm sorry, Richard, but I keep thinking the Maginot Line comes to mind. I'm sure that would be very effective.
RICHARD- Yeah. That's one thing. And don't forget also, that for the last few years there's been NATO, that's German forces there actually in Lithuania and Poland and British forces in the Baltic and others, and Canadian forces, as acting as so-called tripwires if Russia went there then that would provoke a larger response and as a warning sign. So it's a militarization and the third thing that what's going on is that within Estonia and Latvia the pressure against the Russophone population is increasing. The language teaching, the rights of Russian minorities, is being reduced.
So these are the model of state building in post-communist years in Estonia and Latvia, and Ukraine ultimately became a type of restitutive nation-building going back to some mythical, well in the case of Estonia and Latvia, very specific the inter-war years before the influx of Russians during the time of when there was the Soviet Union. So it seems in other words, as you allude or suggest, it's one provocation on top of another. When Russia responds it's taken as escalation, and the response is further intensification of the provocation. So we're locked in a cycle which has it seems, and this cycle is getting faster and faster. In other words it's an accelerating, intensifying dizzy, dizzy-making, because it's so absurd. As I said, {some name??} talking about an existential challenge. The danger is that we in the West talk ourselves into a war which...
DANIEL- Well that's exactly what I was going to ask here, especially on this issue with the Baltics given their strategic vulnerability and the, you know, the ease with which it would be for Russian forces to move in and the difficulty with which it would be for NATO forces to come to their defense. There's a number of military reasons why that wouldn't be. Then why do you want to move physical troops down to the border from Latvia, I think it was or Lithuania, onto the border with Kaliningrad which could only be seen as a provocation on the Russian side. It's definitely has been viewed that way. But the bigger issue to me, I mean, Richard, I almost I got to ask it, starts to look like more than just this ossification and solidification, marbleization, whatever you called it, of the elite thinking but now looks like active provocation as though we want it to. This issue you mentioned here, with the Baltics and cutting out the Russian language etc., and starting to suppress the Russian population. I mean, especially now, when that was seen as one of the direct causes of the Russian intervention into Ukraine, into eastern Ukraine, specifically, because the Russian population was being marginalized there.
Why would you do that? Because what is, what I don't see any, and I mean zero gain from doing that, and you've already seen that provoked a cross-border move by Russia once. Why would you do it now unless you actually wanted that to happen?
RICHARD- Well yeah, I mean we're all left almost certainly, us who are in the peace-mongering camp are just left speechless. It's so irrational and pointless. One incidentally, like the larger Ukrainian war itself, ultimately, when historians look back will say - what on earth was all that about - why did you know Ukraine is fighting a war so that it can join NATO, so it wouldn't have to fight a war of this sort, it simply doesn't make sense and therefore you have to go down perhaps to the philosophical, I hesitate to use the word, but even a metaphysical basis of what has happened to the West, and we could use, you know, various philosophers to make sense of it, the ones which I've been talking about lately, you know, and I don't want to burden you too much with it but, you know, thinkers like Leo Strauss who quite clearly, you know, has had an influence on neo-conservative thinking, that constituency which becomes ultimately locked in its own cycle of thinking of hegemony, of opponents, and Straussians are famous for their inability to engage with others. They don't engage in dialogue and on international policy framework. That means not engaging in diplomacy with Russia and not even dialogue. And another philosopher underlying if you like, the thinking of what has happened to the Atlantic West, is Carl Schmitt and he divides one of the foundations, he argued that politics is all about defining a friend and an enemy.
Now of course that's a normal dynamic in international politics even though the alternative models available, but the Chinese talk of win-win situations, you know, much mocked and derided in the West, but the philosophy underlining it is very different from the philosophy underlining what has happened to the political West. There as you say though, this Atlantic West is far from homogeneous. There are voices even within the Atlantic alliance. NATO: Spain, for example, is far from enthusiastic for this end, for this new forever war on the eastern flank of Europe. Italy is not all that keen either, though Meloni has bought into it. So, you know, no one is saying it's homogeneous. No one is saying it's monolithic, and as you say society, just recently Germany was trying to recruit 300,000 conscripts and when it was announced of the 300,000 who should have, you know, signed up, not actually to join the army but to be on the reserve, so what have you only a few minimum I think two or three thousand signed up out of 300,000 so clearly there's a disconnect between the rhetoric and the narratives and all this media stuff about Kaliningrad and the Sikorskis and others who, by the way, when the history books are written, will one of the threads which will be the role of Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish Foreign Minister then at an early point then the gap and once again, now he was the one, for example, who insisted along with {Karl Duke??} built on the insertion of art article 42.7 in Lisbon Treaty which is an equivalent, sort of soft equivalent, of NATO's article 5 which in other words it transformed the European Union from a purely economic societal regulatory body into a quasi-military alliance and allegedly people tell me I can't have had it independently verified. People tell me they did it as built, the Swedish foreign minister and Sikorski, they did it deliberately to annoy Russia. So that logic which you just alluded to - why are they doing this? Why are they baiting the bear? They've been doing this all the way back since the late 2010s.
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