Author Leads Center for America and Europe at the Brookings Institution
“Look at us! We are now a serious, mature country!” was the self-congratulatory message that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had to convey to the world on Wednesday, as he spoke with his foreign minister. Accompanied by the ministers of , defense , finance and interior , he stood before the assembled national media.What they’re about to announce is historic: Germany just gave itself a national security strategy first.
Lazy applause could be heard throughout the western capital. Most people who have ever had to write such a strategy paper expressed a strong preference for some form of physical punishment, rather than the prospect of having to do it again.
Still, practitioners acknowledge that the exercise has practical uses. It forces the government to pool resources, explain its priorities, and state how it intends to achieve them: with itself, with voters, with allies and adversaries. Done well (and sometimes it does), it can articulate a coherent, even convincing narrative to unite citizens around a sense of national purpose. This is especially important in a major crisis.
In the United States, the new government has necessary Since 1986, Congress has produced national strategy documents early in its term.The UK, France, Canada, and Japan have all released similar documents, if not several; so have NATO.
Even the herbivore EU gave itself one strategy Year 2003(renew 2016), fueled by the horrors of the Taliban’s 9/11 attack on the United States and by the sight of the Bush administration marching into Iraq under the most insidious pretext.
Germany, a continental European powerhouse, is the only country (except Italy) in the G7 club of the world’s largest industrial democracies without a national security strategy. Why?
Schulz’s chief of staff, Wolfgang Schmidt, caused a brief uproar in Berlin last October when he suggestion Germany’s public debate on national security is still in its “teens”. His annoyance was aimed at experts who called on the reluctant prime minister to give Ukraine the Panther tank it had begged for. But he does (albeit inadvertently) point to a bigger problem. Germany’s teenage years have lasted longer than most countries: 34 years have passed since the reunification of East and West Germany and the restoration of full sovereignty in 1990.
In fact, the “five stages of grief” identified by psychoanalyst Elisabeth Kübler-Ross — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — also apply to Germany’s long adolescent farewells .
Denial: Germans see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent restoration of a “whole and free Europe” as an endorsement of decades of reconciliation efforts; no country on the continent believes so fervently in the “end of history” theory.
The outrage occurred in June 1999 when German troops were in Kosovo back It was the first firing with lethal effect since 1945. Bargaining: Despite doubling troop deployments, Germany’s favorite foreign policy tool has remained the checkbook for a quarter of a century.
Depression sets in with the realization that bargaining really isn’t working anymore — whether it’s with Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, the mullahs’ Iran, or Donald Trump’s America. The acceptance came when the so-called “traffic light” coalition set itself the task of writing a national security strategy in its 2021 coalition agreement, recognizing that after the incrementalism of the Angela Merkel era, It’s time for some changes.
Of course, they mean social justice (Social Democrats), saving the planet (Greens) and returning to zero debt (Liberal Democrats). What they got was a brutal, all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine that threatened the security order across Europe.
So the Germans will now again be – in the immortal Character Tom Lehrer – “Warrior and Mean”? Well, the good news in the new strategy document is that it explicitly supports nuclear deterrence (historically a sticking point for the Social Democrats and the Greens); calls for an enlargement of the European Union; and rightly emphasizes Germany’s domestic security as well as making it stronger and more The need to be resilient.
But there was also some decidedly not so good news.The question of whether Germany will meet NATO’s defense spending target of 2% of GDP is fabricated (defense budget is 50 billion euros, it’s still good short It needs 75 billion euros). Calling Russian imperialism a threat and China a systemic competitor is little more than describing the status quo. What if Russia expands the war? What if China takes the initiative to stand aside? What if the next US president turned around and left Europe?
In other words, the current deterioration in Europe’s security climate could turn into a strategic ice age. The National Security Council (or a similar advisory body) might be tasked with thinking about the unthinkable – but the Prime Minister has vetoed institutional innovation. So that job has been left to a governing coalition that has often seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown in recent weeks. Growing up is hard.