GERMANY - The German army (Bundeswehr) is preparing for new military interventions. The plans were announced by the German defence minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), on Monday at a Bundeswehr base in Saarland. “We would be able to undertake additional missions today,” she boasted. Five years after the German government announced the end of military restraint at the Munich Security Conference in 2014, the ruling class can no longer hide the fact that it is basing its foreign and great power politics on the militaristic traditions of the German Empire and the Nazis. In his major lecture on foreign policy at the end of October, the president of the German parliament, Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU), described 1945, ie, the date of the downfall of the Third Reich and the defeat of Germany in World War II — as a “catastrophe.”