“No to war!” declares an emotional online appeal signed by 600 German public figures, influential people spanning politics, culture, religion and science. They begin by stating their solidarity with Ukraine — and then go on to denounce the dramatic upgrade in Germany’s defense capabilities recently announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Their protest illustrates the scale of the opposition that Scholz will confront as he attempts to reshape the country’s foreign policy.
Last month, when Scholz told parliament that the government was embarking on nothing less than the biggest and fastest rearmament program in the country’s postwar history, he received standing ovations. But as he moves to implement his planned 100-billion-euro investment in national defense, many old anxieties are resurfacing. Money alone will not be enough to make Germany a serious military power.
It would be easy to dismiss the pacifists behind the appeal as naive. The hand-drawn imagery for their campaign features a man stamping down on a missile , a woman breaking a rifle in two over her knee, and another trying to pull a drone out of the sky with a net on a stick. But the signatories are not a handful of idealistic undergraduates. They are trade union leaders, pop stars, actors and parliamentarians — naive, perhaps, but also prominent.
Pacifism has grown strong roots in Germany’s soul. The fact that the country’s own reunification in 1990 coincided with the end of the Cold War seemed to reinforce Francis Fukuyama’s optimistic verdict that the “end of history” had arrived — an apparent happy ending for a country that had caused and experienced so much wartime horror.
The notion that the last three decades have been at best a break from history rather than its end discomfits many Germans. Scholz ignores this at his peril. In a democracy, a foreign policy reversal requires consent. As the appeal demonstrates, Germany’s new chancellor needs to show leadership by bringing about a cultural transformation, too, not just a financial one.
That will require effective communication that makes the costly military upgrades transparent and explains their purpose. A common idea among pacifist circles in Germany is that “acquiring conventional weapons such as fighter jets ... as a deterrent amongst nuclear military blocs is pointless”, as the appeal puts it. This reveals two dangerous misconceptions.
The first is that the 35 F-35 fighter jets Germany plans to buy from the United States are rendered moot by Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s nuclear arsenal. In fact, the planes represent an urgently needed modernization of NATO’s nuclear deterrent. (Germany has no nuclear weapons of its own.) Right now, the only German aircraft capable of carrying U.S. nuclear bombs are 40-year-old Tornados. Once operational, the F-35s will be a crucial factor in keeping Putin’s finger off the nuclear button.
By opting for the Lockheed Martin F-35s, the German government is not only choosing the quickest option — it is also reinforcing its ties with the United States, a relationship that has experienced considerable strain in recent years. Along with the chancellor’s pledge to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense and his decision to suspend the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Scholz is thus forging a deeper transatlantic relationship even as he strengthens capacity to deter further aggression from Putin.
Then there is the appeal’s peculiar description of Germany as a country located “among nuclear blocs”, as if it were a helpless child trapped between two angry adults whose arguments it cannot understand. Putin’s war should have shattered, once and for all, the notion that Europe can remain a bystander amid Russian rampages. It cannot and should not be left to American, British and French taxpayers alone to hold an expensive shield over Europe while the continent’s largest power pretends that Russia’s threats are somebody else’s problem.
Russia is still the world’s largest nuclear power. The only thing that prevents Putin from exploiting this horrific capacity is the likelihood that his side, too, will be destroyed if he does. But the deterrent effect holds only as long as the West has the capacity and credible will to strike back immediately — not least with U.S. bombs delivered from German soil.
German pacifists who decry Russian aggression and profess their concern for “the future of peace and security in Europe and the world” need to understand that there is a price for maintaining this peace.
Scholz is following the correct course, and there are encouraging signs that he is taking the public with him. A recent survey showed that two-thirds of Germans support the planned rearmament program while being realistic about the costs this will entail. Scholz is helping Germans to find a new and more realistic sense of their place in the world. And he is right to embed this policy shift in the constitution itself, so that coming administrations will find it easier to resist the naive antimilitarism that still pervades German society at all levels.
The adage holds: If you want peace, prepare for war. The sooner Germany understands that, the better — both for Europe’s security and its own.
Katja Hoyer, an Anglo-German historian and journalist, is the author of “Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918”.