(Bloomberg Opinion) -- A potential invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin has prompted the U.S. and Britain to make gestures of military deterrence. It has generated a parallel crisis, however, for Europe's dominant state. On Tuesday, Germany's new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, flew to Moscow to try and stem the emergency. But other than a call to return to the moribund Minsk peace talks and a lame joke about Putin's expected tenure, little was achieved.
Last week, Scholz made belated noises to suggest that an invasion of Ukraine would place in jeopardy the new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which would carry Russian gas directly to Germany and avoid Ukrainian territory, something of high economic importance to Moscow. Yet it is doubtful that anybody, least of all Putin, believes that Scholz was serious. Such is Germany's dependence on Russian energy that, whatever short-term measures Berlin might apply to punish Moscow, the German government would almost certainly seek a swift rapprochement.
It represents an extraordinary historical turnaround, after 2,000 years in which Germans were regarded as the most formidable military peoples in the world — see Tacitus, whom Adolf Hitler much admired, or a phrase attributed to the French revolutionary Mirabeau: “Other states possess an army. Prussia is an army which possesses a state.”
Yet today Germany, Prussia's creation, is the weak link in every attempt to bolster European defense and security. Even before Russia massed troops on the border with Ukraine, it had become evident to most of us who live in Europe that it is critical to do more to defend ourselves — to expect less from the U.S.
Europeans disagreed with former President Donald Trump about many things, but he was justified in attacking them for reluctance to pay a fair share of North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense costs.
In the wake of World War II, the U.S. was so much richer than Europe — and had made a handsome profit out of the conflict — that it seemed just for Uncle Sam to take the strain.
Those days, however, are long gone. Today Germany has a GDP of $3.8 trillion, or $46,000 per capita. This compares with U.S. GDP of $24 trillion, or nearly $60,000 per capita. But while America spends 3.7% of its GDP on its armed forces, Germany stubbornly resists any serious attempt to reach NATO's agreed target of 2%. Its current percentage is 1.4. In absolute numbers, its $52.8 billion defense spending is less than Britain's, with our much smaller population.
The Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin last week urged his host country to “wake up” because “the world is becoming more dangerous and Germany … cannot allow itself to stay neutral and go on sleeping and enjoying a comfortable life.” Yet ordinary Germans calling in to radio programs insistently say such things as “with weapons you cannot create peace.”
They overwhelmingly support their government's refusal to follow Britain in shipping weapons to Ukraine — explicitly, German-made howitzers. They reject the mockery heaped on their country for offering the embattled Ukrainians 5,000 helmets and medical supplies. This provoked Kyiv's mayor, Vitali Klitschko, to comment derisively, “What will Germany send next? Pillows?”
Latvia's minister of defense, Artis Pabriks, told the Financial Times last month: “Europe's security cannot be done without a German leading role. At this moment when we're looking at how they're acting on European defense and NATO, the reality of the Bundeswehr, the hesitancy to use military force, it's absurd for the current times.”
When Pabriks spoke of the “reality” of Bundeswehr, Germany's military, he meant that although the German armed forces have a paper strength of 183,695 uniformed personnel, nobody views them as credible warriors. I have had conversations with senior officers who wring their hands in embarrassment at the unwillingness of their country to contemplate fighting anybody. But this reality — of a German army that rejects war — reflects the will of its nation.
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock says primly that Germany acts in a “historically responsible” fashion. She means, of course, that even after more than 70 years, the memory of World War II still casts its dark shadow. How could it not, when a torrent of films, TV shows and books — some written by me — constantly reminds the world of the dreadful deeds wrought by Hitler's people?
For a few years after 1945, West Germany's neighbors congratulated themselves on their success in demilitarizing the nation that had caused us all so much grief. The other day I chanced upon a London Times editorial of February 1952, commenting upon impassioned French resistance to the creation of a European defense community:
The attempt to form a military union … has been proceeding under primarily American pressure, arising from an understandable desire that Western Europe should waste no time in taking up the military burdens that have fallen to it … The task … is nothing less than changing the status of Germany from that of a defeated enemy under military occupation to that of a free and trustworthy ally in the Atlantic system of defense.
Here we all are, seven decades later, and that task is still uncompleted — no longer because of French paranoia about a menace from Germany, but because today's Germans are stubbornly unwilling to see their soldiers fight — or even threaten to fight — anybody, in defense of anything.
It is striking to compare the differing legacies of the two World Wars. Following the first, the former Kaiserreich had suffered almost no material damage, and only the Rhineland was occupied by allied forces. This later made it easy for the Nazis to perpetrate the myth that the German army had never been defeated — that only enemies within had caused the nation to seek an armistice, and obliged it to accept the humiliating terms of the 1919 Versailles Treaty.
The Germany of 1945 presented an absolute contrast. I believe that the Anglo-American bomber offensive, especially in the last months of the war, contributed more to punishing Hitler's people for their crimes than to allied victory. Whether or not this is true, the condition of the country was indisputable. The great Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead wrote that he found among Germans no sense of guilt, but an overwhelming sense of defeat, such as had not existed in 1918.
The whole country, he reported, “presented a scene that was almost beyond human comprehension. Around us 50 great cities lay in ruins … Many had no electric light or power or gas or running water, and no coherent system of government. Like ants in an ant-heap the people scurried over the ruins, diving furtively into cellars and doorways in search of loot. Everyone was on the move … Life was sordid, aimless, leading nowhere.”
This is the folk memory that has passed down to modern Germans from their parents and grandparents: The whole thrust of the World War II experience, which they acquire from most of the modern books they choose to read, presents German people as victims, rather than perpetrators. Whereas I, as a historian of war rather than an apologist for the Third Reich, assert that the German army of those days — and, indeed, of the preceding century or two — was perhaps the most formidable fighting force the world has ever seen. Today's Germans show no pride in their warrior heritage. And absolutely no desire to revive it.
I often hear British army officers offer an ironic, rueful lament, when we discuss the need to strengthen Europe's defenses: “We overdid the demilitarization of Germany.” The country has become one of the most successful and prosperous societies on earth, and sees no need to compromise that achievement by once more forging ploughshares into swords.
The Social Democrats, who dominate the new German coalition government, have long promoted rapprochement with Russia, even in the days when it was still the Soviet Union. The party includes many “Putinversteher,” or “Putin understanders,” headed by former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who shamelessly denounced the Ukrainians — not the Russians but the Ukrainians — for “saber-rattling” the week before he was nominated for a lucrative seat on the board of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant.
The frustration, for some of us, in contemplating the weakness of Schroeder and his compatriots amid the brutish ugliness of Russian behavior is that in so many respects we admire modern Germany immensely. British journalist John Kampfner, who spent years as a foreign correspondent there, recently published a book entitled “Why the Germans Do It Better: Notes From a Grown-Up Country.” I was among those to review it enthusiastically.
Kampfner argues that, contrary to a widespread perception of German arrogance, the people of today's nation are self-critical, much more willing to learn than are the British. As a society, Germany shows an impressive gift for consensus, reflected in the success of worker representation on corporate boards. A million people belong to local voluntary fire brigades. German productivity is the envy of the world, despite shorter working hours than in most countries.
Kampfner notes that half of modern Germany's life span — since the state was forged in 1871 — “has been a tale of horror, war and dictatorship.” Yet the more recent half has been a narrative of atonement, stability and maturity: “No country has achieved so much good in so little time … Germany stands as a bulwark for decency.”
All the above seems true. Germany's success also owes much to its having a realistic understanding of its own middling place in the world, in contrast to Britain's persistent and foolish ambition — to quote a long-serving American correspondent in London — to be a “pocket superpower.”
Angela Merkel, the former chancellor, showed herself the most impressive statesman on the European stage throughout her more than 15 years in office. Henry Kissinger posed his famous rhetorical question “If I want to talk to Europe, who do I call?” a generation before Merkel assumed power, but the answer — to the chagrin of Westminster politicians — has long been Germany's chancellor, not Britain's prime minister.
And yet, and yet. It is a source of dismay to many of us Europeans, including the British, that Germany consistently declines to accept a role on the international stage, to bear a share of responsibility appropriate to its wealth, power, democratic status and continental primacy.
Scholz has called Nord Stream 2 a “private-sector project” that has nothing to do with Ukraine. Only in the past 10 days have there been signs that he is embarrassed by the exasperated Western reaction to his refusal to quarrel with Moscow. He has toughened his rhetoric and sent 350 troops to Lithuania albeit only, we assume, to rescue cats stuck up trees. Putin's yacht sailed prematurely on Wednesday from the Hamburg shipyard where it was being refurbished, presumably because he feared its sequestration.
There are reasons still to nurture a flicker of hope that the Kremlin will hold off invading Ukraine, less from fear of reprisals than because keeping the West in nervous suspense may suit him better, for a time at least, than precipitating a showdown.
We Europeans nonetheless face an intractable difficulty. We need — not for tomorrow or the day after, but to survive the decades ahead — a toughened common defense posture, which recognizes the unlikelihood that the U.S. will forever take the strain. Such a posture can only be credible if Germany shows itself willing to fight, as today it is not.
A heretofore implausible scenario is evolving, in which President Emmanuel Macron of France could secure re-election in April and emerge as the preferred European partner of the U.S., in view of the indecision and activism-aversion of the German government. Washington dislikes dealing with the mercurial French, but they seem a better bet than the enfeebled Berlin government.
There is here a huge overarching irony, mirror reversal of that of the 20th century. Before World War II, Britain and France were long blind to the menace posed by Nazi militarism, and our forefathers paid a heavy price. Today, Britain and France are willing to stand up to Putin, but the German government and its people have dug their heads deep and determinedly into the sand. Thus, in a perverse fashion, does Europe still pay a price for Adolf Hitler.
Related at Bloomberg Opinion:
- If Russia Takes Ukraine, Insurgency Could Be Putin's Nightmare: James Stavridis
- Bombast, Distance and Distrust: Your Guide to Ukraine Talks: Andreas Kluth
- If Russia Invades Ukraine, the U.S. Is Certain to Be a Loser: Hal Brands
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Max Hastings is a Bloomberg columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the BBC and newspapers, editor in chief of the Daily Telegraph, and editor of the London Evening Standard. He is the author of 28 books, the most recent of which are "Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy" and "Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943."
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