Standing Up to Putin: Inside Germany’s Foreign and Security Policy Revolution
Europe will also now have to come to terms with the fact that it must also become a security union, and that it must move forward here far more quickly than in other areas. It has been the focus of plenty of talk in recent years, but little has been done. And it must be done in a manner that doesn’t depend too greatly on the Americans. Putin, to be sure, has dramatically strengthened the trans-Atlantic alliance, but that could change radically if Donald Trump were to win the next presidential election.
A Plea to Relocate
And it’s not just about Russia. Germany has also become deeply economically dependent on authoritarian China, as well, which could also present dangers should Beijing opt to attack Taiwan or aggressively seek global dominance. Europe would have to exhibit significant strength were such an eventuality to come about – ideally alongside the Americans, but not dependent on them.
In 2002, the American thinker Robert Kagan wrote in an essay: “On major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” The red planet, named after the god of war, and Venus, the planet of love, where German foreign policy preferred to reside. Scholz’s speech was essentially a plea to relocate.
Doing so faces Berlin with a number of organizational problems. And the FDP was quick to raise the question as to whether the Russia crisis could provide an opportunity for institutional reform. Ulrich Lechte, the FDP’s foreign policy spokesman in parliament, proposed the creation of a national security council to further integrate diplomacy, development policy, defense and intelligence.
Still, such a radical shift won’t be easy. Last Tuesday afternoon, SPD lawmakers gathered for a virtual meeting, and floor leader Rolf Mützenich was the first to speak. It was a difficult moment for him. For the SPD, throwing 100 billion euros at the military is a major cultural shift, and for Mützenich, agonizing personally. He has been fighting for peace and disarmament for almost his entire political life. Now, though, he demonstrated loyalty to Scholz: Such decisions, meeting participants quoted him as saying, “aren’t just the chancellor’s right, but also his duty.”
In his Ph.D. thesis, Mützenich wrote about “nuclear weapons-free zones,” a favorite project of the peace movement in the 1980s. Now, though, the SPD was handing out money for warplanes, rockets and even armed drones, a taboo for many in the party.
And suddenly, a zombie raised its head in the discussion: military conscription. The draft was eliminated in Germany by Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2011, but some have openly discussed its possible reintroduction in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Mützenich, though, rejected the idea. “Discussing that issue is uncalled for at the moment. In such unsettling times, we shouldn’t be bringing up new issues by the hour, but concentrating on that which is feasible.”
Those close to Mützenich say it is clear just how stressful he finds the current situation. Scholz didn’t just force him and his party into a complete about-face. He essentially ambushed his own party.
Mützenich apparently only learned of the planned military fund just 30 minutes ahead of Scholz’s speech. And almost all other parliamentarians learned of it from the speech itself. Immediately, SPD lawmakers began exchanging incredulous text messages. It was a shock for the party. Can it bounce back?
The mood was explosive on Monday following the speech. Left-wing SPD lawmakers, the most powerful segment of the parliamentary group, gathered for a meeting, and reports indicate that many of them used the opportunity to voice their frustrations.
Unusually Emotional
But things started looking markedly different the very next day. Party leftists spoke with Chancellery Chief of Staff Wolfgang Schmidt to discuss technical issues relating to the budget and new debt – and the tone remained calm and businesslike. Nor were voices raised later when the entire parliamentary group met, a meeting that included Chancellor Scholz. After Mützenich shared his thoughts, it was Scholz’s turn, and he provide a powerful depiction of the threat. Meeting participants say he was unusually emotional.
Scholz and Mützenich sought to assuage some of the concerns of the gathered lawmakers. They pointed out that German parliament still has the last word on specific military projects, and there was apparently a surprising lack of criticism. SPD co-chair Lars Klingbeil also sought to soothe the SPD soul: Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Social Democrat and of having promoted the cause of peace, he said according to participants.
Still, not everyone within the party is willing to leave Venus behind. The day after the SPD parliamentary group meeting, the left-wing SPD group known as Forum Demokratische Linke 21 released a joint statement with other groups. The special Bundeswehr fund and the increase to Germany’s defense budget, they wrote, is “an unparalleled paradigm shift and one which we vehemently oppose.”
Might Scholz’s move come back to haunt the SPD? Floor leader Mützenich prefers to look ahead. “Humanitarian aid for the people of Ukraine has priority for me, along with attempts to put an end to the slaughter and barbarism,” he says. “That should be the baseline for further agreements and assistance.”
But the SPD wasn’t the only party taken aback by Scholz’s speech at the special session of parliament. The Greens, too, were shocked, with cameras capturing numerous expressions of disbelief, with co-floor leader Katharina Dröge even turning around in her seat several times, apparently in an attempt to see how other Green lawmakers were reacting.
The erstwhile party of peace had already experienced a paradigm shift on the previous day, with the decision to deliver weapons to Ukraine. On that Saturday, Jürgen Trittin, a weighty voice on the party’s left wing, was still expressing his disagreement with the plan, and Baerbock had also been a vocal supporter of maintaining the status quo.
And now this. A completely new security posture for the country. That morning, Habeck and Baerbock informed party leaders of the planned special military fund, DER SPIEGEL has learned. But they did not discuss how large it would be.
On the Monday following Scholz’s speech, Green Party lawmakers gathered in a hastily called video meeting. Did Vice Chancellor Habeck and Foreign Minister Baerbock know of the 100 million euros. “I was surprised by the number,” insists Green Party co-floor leader Britta Hasselmann. Sources close to the government, though, say that Habeck of course knew of the size of the fund.
Habeck, for his part, felt validated, uttering the following noteworthy sentence in an interview with German public radio: “The weapons deliveries, that have now been approved, would have perhaps been a way to prevent war in the first place.” Habeck, after all, had urged way back in spring 2021 that defensive weapons be provided to Ukraine. His comments at the time earned him a number of stiff rebukes, including from Baerbock, who was the Green Party chancellor candidate at the time. Now, he used his radio interview to set the record straight on who had proposed the better strategy, though he did admit that such deliveries likely wouldn’t have been enough to stop Putin.
The Greens Again Facing War
The Green Party was born out of Germany’s peace and environmental movement. And they have always been at the forefront of the fight against nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. Still, its first stint as part of a governing coalition, when it was paired with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s SPD from 1998 to 2005, produced a number of pragmatists when the party made the painful decision to join the military mission in Kosovo.
And here we are again, with images from the fighting pouring on the pressure. Many Greens find themselves reconsidering their former positions on foreign policy. Indeed, elements of the party continued to view NATO with a certain degree of mistrust until a few weeks ago, whereas now it suddenly looks like a necessary protective shield. Early last week, initial signals began to emerge that the party would support a constitutional change to enable the special military fund.
Some have insisted they intend to demand something in return for that support – more money for the climate or social welfare, for example, or a reform of Germany’s “debt-brake” balanced budget law. But it remains unclear if they’ll get what they’re asking for. Indeed, many have long been concerned that Green Party cabinet members would have a hard time pushing through the party’s interests against Scholz and Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who is head of the FDP. “If we are now going to talk about the special military budget and greater investments in security,” says Hasselmann, “then we also have to be talking about energy security, humanitarian aid, civilian crisis diplomacy and civilian protections. Security has to be approached across a broad front.”
But what else can they do? War has broken out and the power of the images coming out of Ukraine is immense, as is the pressure to act, even if there has been some resistance. Left-wing Green parliamentarian Andreas Audretsch was among the first to criticize Scholz’s military plans. But many in the party’s base are also dissatisfied. “We feel betrayed,” says Gazi Freitag, a Green member from Kiel. “Putin would have attacked even if we had delivered weapons earlier.” Marcus Neumann, a Green member from Erfurt, says it is “unacceptable” that Scholz didn’t include the Greens in his decision to present the military fund “even though the vice chancellor is from our party.” Dozens of party members have signed a letter demanding that the government halt all weapons deliveries to Ukraine. But party functionaries have remained largely quiet.
On the other side of the aisle, the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian partners with the Christian Social Union (CSU) have the luxury of watching the government’s reversal with a fair degree of equanimity. In his reaction to Scholz’s speech, CDU chair and conservative floor leader Friedrich Merz offered the chancellor his “comprehensive assistance and support” in upgrading the Bundeswehr. “We will support it and won’t stand in the way.”
And yet? “We’re not going to simply hand the government a blank check,” says Thorsten Frei, a senior conservative parliamentarian, adding that the CDU and the CSU would like to be part of the planning. Some conservatives have also voiced skepticism of the need for a constitutional amendment to make way for the military fund, as both Scholz and Lindner are seeking. Others have expressed doubt as to whether the entirety of the 100-billion-euro fund must be financed with new debt.
Either way, the conservatives want to have a say. Some of them have even been joking that the war has essentially made them part of the governing coalition.
Meanwhile, the 180-degree shift in German security policy has the deepest implications for the Bundeswehr, which is perhaps not completely unprepared for the wave of new funding – nor, though, is it well prepared. The Russian annexation of the Crimea led to the crushing of many a pacifist dream in Germany and the defense budget has ticked upwards since then, from 32 billion euros a year to around 50 billion euros.
Until that point, the German military participated in foreign military operations at most with small and lightly armed units. Now, though, the troops are to once again be prepared to defend the homeland and for a conflict against worthy opponents. Militaries, though, aren’t always the most responsive of organizations.
The first steps, to be sure, have been taken, but until now, the Bundeswehr had always lacked the funding to undertake a comprehensive modernization. There are hardly any units in the German military that have the training and equipment necessary to be quickly shifted to NATO’s eastern flank. Furthermore, German troops are out of practice when it comes to brigade- or division-sized operations of the kind that would be necessary to defend German or NATO territory.
The Need for Better Cyberdefense
Furthermore, after years of being underfunded, there are significant doubts about the Bundeswehr’s ability to sensibly invest the sudden injection of 100 billion euros.
Germany must also boost its ability to deal with cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. In 2015, Putin’s hackers stole data from the German parliament. More recently, attackers apparently from the Russian secret service agency GRU sought to force their way into the email accounts of German lawmakers, likely to launch a smear campaign.
Shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Federal Office for Information Security proclaimed the second-highest warning level of orange. And Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, warned of “an increased risk of cyberattacks against German targets” in response to the sanctions against Russian and weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Russian secret services, an internal paper notes, possess the ability to “substantially and sustainably sabotage” both critical infrastructure and military facilities. Serious cyberattacks could even be sufficient to trigger NATO’s Article 5, according to which an attack on a single member is an attack on the entire alliance.
Experts have their doubts as to whether Germany is prepared to offer much resistance on today’s new digital battlefields. There are numerous agencies in the country that are active on the issue, but it isn’t always clear who is responsible for what. “We finally need to establish a national cybersecurity council worthy of the name and which is equipped with a clear mission and new capabilities,” says Sven Herpig from the Berlin-based think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung (SNV).