Germany isn't a sovereign country. Having foreign (US) troops on your soil makes you dependable on the policies of that foreign country. There are many other reasons why Germany cannot (and doesn't want) to "say GFY" to the US.
If the German economy was capable of taking on re-unification costs, Germany could easily handle greater autonomy w.r.t. the US.
It's not like we could not shoulder the economic impact, in terms of the gross domestic product that's a tiny amount, it's rather that in terms of how the political landscape looks like we don't want to. (It would probably also require to sift more budget to the military etc.).
However, I doubt that the US military would give up its Airbases in Ramstein and Frankfurt over Snowden. They're far to important in the current conflicts in the middle east.
Germany wants the money the bases bring and likely the perceived protection they present. If they didn't see the latter then the money point is key. How much does the US spend to maintain those bases and do they pay fees beyond that to have them?
As a Libertarian I would be more than happy seeing us out of every country that is peaceful. We have no real need to be there in this day and age with the ease at which power can be projected. I won't go into the question of being in certain other countries because of disagreements which led to war, declared or not.
Each Chancellor has to sign a paper called Kanzlerakte, that he agrees, to give up sovereignty at lot of cases, e.e. intelligence, military.
We have peace now since more than a few decades. It doesn't need a signed peace treaty to have peace in a country.
The 2+4 contract has explicitly stopped the allied control.
US barracks are extraterritoriality zones, and US soldiers are not under German jurisdiction.
And better read the 2+4 itself, and not 3rd party writeups like Wikipedia.
US barracks are not extraterritoriality zones, please cite your claim.
"US soldiers are not under German jurisdiction", this is only partly true. It's part of the "NATO-Truppenstatut". With Art. 19 Abs. 3 Satz 1 ZA (Zusatzabkommen) the foreign soldiers are part of German jurisdiction.
Again, please cite your claims.
There were plenty of shenanigans going on between the U.S. and German politicians in the early BRD days. But the scanned document everyone's been passing around purporting to refer to the so-called Kanzlerakte is obviously a fake.
I've written about the "journalist" Udo Ulfkotte over the years and was pleased that he seemed to have faded from view, disappearing into the pages of the 9/11 Truther Site of Kopp Verlag. Ulfkotte distinguished himself as a racist and anti-Islam hatemonger, demanding that all Muslims be deported from Germany in order to create more Lebensraum for ethnic Germans. For years he has been publishing articles and books that distort the truth, or are outright lies. A few examples: Ulfkotte claimed that Muslims were waging a "fecal Jihad" against Germans"because Turkish women were allegedly defecating in fields of strawberries that were exported to Germany. He warned Germans to stay away from the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, since black African "savages" were planning to rape and murder European visitors. Of course, President Obama is one those black African savages - or at least a 'half-breed" - whom he hates. He lied that Obama was persecuting Christians in the United States, and had given orders to burn Bibles. I could go on and on. Actually, I cannot identify any examples where the "journalist" Udo Ulfkotte reported truthfully about anything.
http://www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2015...
All you have to do is put some labels on him, take things of out context, attribute things not said or done to the said person, and pretend to debunk him.
This way you never have to make the counterargument to the argument made by that person. You just dismiss him in whole.
I don't know if that's the case here, but considering the name-calling from the start, the typical labeling (racist, homophobe, islamophobe, Nazi, RT-shill), I'd say it fits.
As a non-Russian and non-US person, I find it way more balanced.
My Russian friends would probably laugh at what you're saying. You have to be very, very naive about what's happening in Russia these days to have that impression.
It's a kind of selection bias: the kind of Russian friends that laugh at RT are the kind of friends a westerner would make (especially if they are involved in entrepreneurship and IT or social media etc).
They are the kind of people with little experience of modern history and a strong western bias that westerners find everywhere (e.g. even in places like the Middle East, and make general examples out of them). They are not representative of the majority of Russian population, though, who predominantly voted for Putin.
Kind of like liberal lefties reading Counterpunch and the like are not representative of the majority of the US population.