This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchler. Here's John Batchler.

Ukraine conflict, NATO conflict. I welcome Antonio Calabashanu in Romania in Bucharest to help

me with a story that is spilling out across Europe and the story is Germany. A very good

evening to you, Antonio. This is a story that requires all of my understanding of Europe

having only traveled there and read about it since the Second War. Antonio is a senior

geopolitical analyst at geopolitical futures in addition to being a lecturer on international

relations at the Romanian National University of Political Studies and Public Administration

in Bucharest. At the same time, she's a senior fellow for the Eurasia program of Foreign

Policy Research Institute in the United States. The problem is this. Germany is the banker

and the manufacturing engine of Europe. And your recent reporting speaks to a downturn

in all of Europe. And I have to believe a major contributor to this downturn and the inflation

that the central banks are fighting in Europe is Germany. What's wrong with Germany? The example

turns first on its ability to manufacture in the way it did before the pandemic and before the

war in Ukraine. The statistics can be misleading. Is Germany continuing in its course of being a

manufacturing superpower or is it changing its mind? Good evening to you. Good evening. Thank you

for having me, John. Indeed, the post-pandemic time in the war in Ukraine has have highlighted

something wrong with the model that Germany had for its economic growth. Something that was

there before, which is its dependency on trade and less on manufacturing per se. And right now,

we are seeing that even more with Germany basically becoming a trading house, which is to say that

more than 50 percent of the GDP of Germany is made of exports and almost 50 percent of the GDP

is made of imports, which is to say that very little is being produced for the internal consumption,

plus Germany had to adapt in the sense of having a sort of a fast transition to new ways of

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