With war drums banging, Germany gets thumped
Rhetorically deserved? Maybe. Substantively deserved? Not so much.
Thank goodness Dry January is over because German Officialdom could really use a Feierabend drink. Even though we’ve been watching Russian troops mass on Ukraine’s borders since early November, the whole thing seems to have taken the government here by surprise only in the last few weeks.
In fairness, there was Christmas in-between, and that Feuerzangenbowle wasn’t going to drink itself. Also, after nearly 16 years of Angela Merkel running things, the three-way coalition that took over has only been around since early December. Most officials are probably still trying to remember the number of their fax machine.
Except — wasn’t Olaf Scholz, despite coming from another party (the Social Democrats, or SPD), billed basically as the continuity candidate, who as Merkel’s vice and finance minister knew his way around the Chancellery?
Even I got caught up in the cliché.
And in many ways, we got what we voted for. When was the last time Germany had a clear, forceful position on anything of import and took decisive action as a result? Yes, the refugees, but that very much got walked back in the years since.
Merkel was so good at saying nothing that they made a verb out of her to mean exactly that. With Russia especially so: For years, the German government has gone to great lengths to keep its commercial interests from stepping on the many political landmines strewn between the two countries.
Even with Vladimir Putin thorn, Alexei Navalny, lying in a coma down the street from her at Charité two years ago — flown in on the German government’s invitation — Merkel was still saying mal sehen on the question of Nord Stream 2 and, for that matter, other consequences for a poisoning Germany itself held Russia responsible for.
It was a perfect, indeed bizarro, example of Germany’s penchant for moral high ground facing a full frontal assault from its lesser economic instincts.
Much as her conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) might like to see it, now that they’re in the opposition, policy reluctance is not a bug in SPD-led governance; it is a feature of German postwar thinking. (Of course, the SPD has its own flavor of well-publicized Russian fealty, on top of seeing itself as a lefty party of peace and disarmament, and its Ostpolitik history.)
More broadly, however, the moral of recent-ish German history is no. sudden. moves. We’ve done the militaristic, wounded hubris thing before — led by a loud guy offering all the clear, forceful positions you could ever want — and it did not go well.
But that is only part of the story, because “because the war” is getting kind of old by now and could have gone the other way: rewiring German DNA in Churchillian fashion, which sees the need to confront bullies that threaten peace and stability with force. (It can happen — hey, even DNA mutates in unexpected ways.)
That it has instead gone more the Chamberlainian route — negotiation and engagement to the end — is largely the result of German Officialdom cherry-picking the history it feels responsible for, and lacking the electoral pressure to do otherwise.
Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany makes a pretty compelling case when he says that the inheritors of Nazi crimes need to think as much about what they owe Ukraine as they do Russia. In the same vein, the benefactors of the so-called postwar order owe the ahistoric peace they’ve enjoyed since then to the very threat of military force many of them now balk at.
And that military force wasn’t, in large part, their own.
For all the public love here for all things American and the deutsch-amerikanische Freundschaft (which, let’s not forget, is not everyone’s experience here, when “here” was two heres), it is more politically convenient and morally less icky to overlook the security architecture that established and protected that staus quo from the get-go. As a result, Germany is content selling its cars and toasters without much thought about what it takes to ensure a system that lets it sell its cars and toasters. And yes, also lots of weapons.
This helps explain how we get to a place where Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock goes to Kyiv and says with a straight face that treating some wounded Ukrainian soldiers in Berlin, or helping build a military hospital there, count as “intensive support” from Europe’s largest power. Not to be outdone, Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht’s followed up with 5,000 helmets as a “strong symbol” of her country’s unshakable solidarity with Ukraine.
These overtures start to make sense when seen from the perspective of a country that neither understands itself nor wants to be a global, or at least regional, power. Because power is bad, demands taking responsibility for your actions that may rub some the wrong way, and anyway we have the United States for that.
Or that was the going assumption until Donald Trump’s shenanigans started to reveal an alternate universe, making it easier to prove the negative.
Germany, and Europe more broadly, had to start thinking more about a less present U.S. This process was already underway before Trump, and turning a battleship takes time, especially when it’s an old and poorly maintained one. Setting aside the moral position of “historical responsibility,” how realistic is it to expect Germany to quickly deliver weapons to Ukraine out of its own stash when the Bundeswehr itself has been lampooned for years for running a lemon of a force?
Swapping Trump for Joe Biden has not been the sigh of trans-Atlantic relief many here were hoping for, as evidenced by the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the AUKUS bait-and-switch. Germany was caught flat-footed on both, nor has it had much to say as tiny country and fellow European Union member Lithuania takes a stand against China vis-a-vis Taiwan.
Here, too, Germany is only just starting a long process of acknowledging the political complications of commercial engagement — nuance a less weighty country in the world can get away with ignoring, but a more influential one cannot.
As a big country with a provincial mindset, German Officialdom is routinely surprised that others around the world might like to know what it thinks about any number of pressing issues. Often caught off guard, the messaging suffers, even if the policy positions themselves are reasonable.
If you are going to reject weapons deliveries, oppose cutting off SWIFT and equivocate on Nord Stream 2, then you better be prepared to clearly express why: Arms can exacerbate tensions without substantially improving Ukraine’s military odds; banking and similar punishments might do little, or even backfire; and Germany has very real energy needs, shared by the entire European Union, for which Scholz can only solve 23 years from now with the promise of being free of fossil fuels by then.
You don’t have to agree with these positions, but at least they are tangibly defensible and a basis for discussion in a way a fuzzy understanding of “historical responsibility” is not. Germany is not helping itself with doubling down on that line.
If anyone should be able to understand the more contemporary and concrete reasoning that it’s complicated with Russia, it should be the United States, which for years has been simultaneous friend and foe to countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
And perhaps it does, which is why Biden was very clear during Monday’s joint news conference with Scholz:
Strange that suddenly it’s Germany’s committment to the western alliance getting called into question, when until what seems like only four minutes ago, it was America’s.
This is all a long way of saying that a heavy eye-roll at German dithering is understandable, but the withering criticism it has endured in the last few weeks, especially from many corners of the anglo media, less so. To say Germany is falling short begs the question: falling short of what?
If Germany has been a disappointment, at least it has been consistently disappointing. So why the huffy surprise?
Expectations management is important here. Many commentators and permanent residents of the Twitterverse bought too easily into the new government’s “dare more progress” slogan. Merkel’s conservative rule stretched from before there was an iPhone, so there has been understandably a lot of excitement about something new coming from Germany’s lefty-green-liberal crowd: younger, bolder and way more Insta-friendly.
The Greens have in particular set a high bar for themselves, talking big on standing up for democratic values and human rights around the world, even if the economics would like them to keep mum. Doing so might take a bit of muscle, which the Greens struggle with. This is the party that has supported the few combat missions Germany has signed up to, but dreams of a world mit arms control and ohne nukes. When then party co-leader Robert Habeck, (now running the economics ministry, which approves weapons exports), came out last year in favor of giving Ukraine “defensive” weapons, he got it from all sides and quickly clarified he really just meant mine clearing.
None of this hand-wringing is new to Germany observers, and still somehow an expectation got set that Germany would stop being Germany just because it’s under (slightly different) new management.
This expectation was out in force at Monday’s news conference at the White House, when talking heads on and off Germany Twitter couldn’t handle Scholz not echoing Biden’s direct but non-specific Nord Stream 2 threat verbatim. It wasn’t enough to say “we will be united. We will act together.”
Folks, you’re not going to get Scholz to say anything much more concrete than that. He went an entire campaign last year — largely free of foreign policy issues — dodging specifics on pretty much every issue except minimum wage and new housing. Like Merkel, he got through by saying as little as possible and benefiting from his opponents’ weaknesses.
Germany and the United States are coming from different universes of understanding when it comes to military force. Put very simply: the former starts wars; the latter secures peace — regardless how many examples to the contrary history is littered with. That view seeps not very subtly into media coverage.
Ahead of the news conference, NBC News couldn’t get enough of a new Pentagon assessment outlining how horrific a Russian invasion would be, overlaid with slick b-roll — courtesy of the Russian defense ministry — of armored vehicles ploughing across expanses of snowy fields. Neat!
There’s been plenty of coverage to this effect, with a lot of armchair speculating in the subjunctive about Putin’s mindset and what the Hot War that never (directly) happened might look like. It’s like rubbernecking, except the car crash hasn’t happened yet.
I haven’t seen so many headlines including “the Pentagon says,” or “according to U.S. officials” since Iraq coverage circa 2002. That’s a tricky spot to be in, admittedly, because the government saying something is, by very definition, news and needs to be reported. Yet doing so opens up media to serving as the conduit for defense and intelligence services do their job: prepare for the worst, issue dire warnings and maybe dabble in a bit of (counter-)psyops themselves. After all, a hammer is always going to find a nail.
If U.S. media are increasingly emboldened to say up top “without evidence” when it comes to Trump’s delusions of election fraud, they need to do the same when Biden’s Defense Department drops a claim about fake Russian videos.
Compare the circular logic of State Department spokesperson Ned Price from last week, above, with Dick Cheney’s from 2002.
NB: The big difference, it must be said, is that aluminum tubes were about as nonexistent as Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, whereas Russia does actually have at least 100,000 troops hanging out on Ukraine’s borders. A key question is, though, is this the main act, or a classic sleight of hand that even the most basic street magician knows is essential to any trick? Odd how Belarus, the Caucasus and central Asia have all fallen out of the news cycle.
The risk is turning a potential distraction into its own show. So with the war drums beating, maybe it’s OK to have an ally in the room whistling off key, even if it can come off sounding hollow. Germany might shirk from shock and awe itself, but it isn’t opposed to helping others do so. If that’s not enough, the problem might not be one of policy, but expectations.