US allies in Europe should not have to keep relying on Washington for a nuclear deterrent, the German ruling party’s top candidate for the upcoming European Parliament election said on Tuesday.
Katarina Barley, the leading MEP from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), was asked to comment on recent remarks by US presidential hopeful Donald Trump that Washington should not defend NATO allies who fail to meet their payment targets.
“In view of Donald Trump’s recent statements, we can no longer rely on” the US providing European NATO members with its nuclear umbrella, Barley told the German daily Tagesspiegel. A “European bomb” could become a step on the way to a ‘European army,’ she added.
If the US stops supplying Ukraine with weapons, the EU will “have to take on this responsibility” because “We must take [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s threats seriously and behave accordingly.” She accused the Russian president of “publicly questioning the territorial integrity of Poland and Lithuania.”
Barley’s remarks were condemned by Martin Schirdewan, the leading EP candidate of Die Linke (The Left). He told AFP that the appropriate answer to “nonsense” coming from Trump was not nuclear proliferation but de-escalation.
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