Jeffrey Sachs warns Germany: Why Europe's security needs to be rethought

Jeffrey Sachs writes open letter to Chancellor Merz

In his open letter to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, published in the Berliner Zeitung on December 17, 2025, the well-known economist and professor Jeffrey D. Sachs speaks out with a clarity that has become rare in the current European debate. Sachs speaks not as an activist, not as a partisan and not as a commentator from a distance, but as an economist and political advisor who has worked for decades at the central interfaces of international crises, security architectures and economic upheavals. The open letter contains an unusually sharp quote:

„Learn history, Mr. Chancellor.“

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Reach is not ownership - Why visibility is no longer enough today

Reach vs. ownership

A good ten years ago, I happened to watch a lecture on the transition from the information society to the knowledge society. At the time, much of it still sounded theoretical, almost academic. It was about concepts such as data sovereignty, ownership of information and the question of who will actually determine what is accessible in the future - and what is not. Today, with a little distance, this lecture seems surprisingly precise. After all, much of what was described as a development back then has now become reality. More and more data has migrated to the cloud. More and more information is no longer stored on in-house systems, but in external infrastructures. And increasingly, it is no longer the user but a provider, a platform or a set of rules that decides what is possible.

To understand this development, it is worth taking a step back. The information society in which many of us grew up was not a normal state. It was a historical exception.

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AI Studio 2025: Which hardware is really worth it - from the Mac Studio to the RTX 3090

Hardware 2025 for AI studio

Anyone working with AI today is almost automatically pushed into the cloud: OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, any web UIs, tokens, limits, terms and conditions. This seems modern - but is essentially a return to dependency: others determine which models you can use, how often, with which filters and at what cost. I'm deliberately going the other way: I'm currently building my own little AI studio at home. With my own hardware, my own models and my own workflows.

My goal is clear: local text AI, local image AI, learning my own models (LoRA, fine-tuning) and all of this in such a way that I, as a freelancer and later also an SME customer, am not dependent on the daily whims of some cloud provider. You could say it's a return to an old attitude that used to be quite normal: „You do important things yourself“. Only this time, it's not about your own workbench, but about computing power and data sovereignty.

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What does the tension in Germany mean - and what would the specific consequences be?

Tension case-Germany-2025

In times of increasing international tensions, a term keeps cropping up in political debates that many citizens hardly know how to categorize: the "State of tension". But what does it mean in concrete terms when this case is established in Germany? And how does the case of tension differ from the better-known case of defense, which is usually associated with an actual war? In order to be able to correctly assess the possible consequences, it is worth taking a sober look at the constitutional situation.

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