One doesn’t often think of Germans as Churchillian — for obvious reasons. Yet the term applies to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s extraordinary address to the Bundestag in Berlin on Sunday.
Declaring that “Russian President Putin has started a war of aggression in cold blood”, Scholz said Germany must limit economic interdependence with Russia and must bolster its badly neglected military defenses.
What Germans are already calling a “revolution” in their security policy represents a strategic defeat for Vladimir Putin — and a strategic victory for the United States and its European allies. Putin might yet conquer Ukraine, but he has clearly repelled and galvanized the European Union’s richest, most populous country, failing in his long-term effort to co-opt Germany via energy and commercial ties, such as the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
No longer the bland politician who plodded up the ranks of German politics for decades, Scholz did not quite promise Germans “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. He did, however, abandon quasi-pacifist post-World War II and post-Cold War German shibboleths that had prevailed especially strongly in his own Social Democratic Party — and had still constrained his center-left coalition government’s response to Putin only days earlier.
Embracing “hard power” as few, if any, of his predecessors in Germany’s post-1949 democracy have done, Scholz framed the issue as “whether we have it in us to keep warmongers like Putin in check. That requires strength of our own”.
Accordingly, the chancellor said, Germany would change long-standing policy and ship arms to one side of an active war — Ukraine. Germany will create a $113 billion fund for defense in 2022 and then spend more than 2 percent of gross domestic product annually, even if it requires a constitutional amendment to allow budget deficits. Germany will pursue aircraft and tank development with France and provide a more modern version of outdated German planes assigned to carry U.S. tactical nuclear weapons. Germany will pipe less gas from Russia and build terminals to receive liquefied natural gas from other sources.
The sudden turn of this previously vaguely Russophilic center-leftist, and the 78 percent support that his decisions received in a new poll, reflect the anguish Scholz and many other Germans feel for having been naive and complacent toward Russia.
“I am so angry at ourselves for our historic failure”, tweeted Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who had served as defense minister under Scholz’s conservative predecessor, Chancellor Angela Merkel. Even after previous Russian aggression in Georgia, Crimea and Donbas, she added, Germany underfunded its army, forgetting that “we have to be militarily strong enough to make non-negotiation not an option for the other side”.
Scholz, who alluded in his speech to “hours of direct talks” that convinced him Putin seeks a Russian empire, is said to be personally enraged at the Russian president. Over champagne with Scholz at the Kremlin last month, Putin sounded interested in peace, inducing the chancellor to suggest a diplomatic solution that fudged Ukraine’s request for NATO membership. Then Putin invaded and made Scholz look like a dupe.
Scholz’s proposals are “the plan of a government that fears, if Ukraine falls, to be partly guilty for it”, Michael Link, a member of the Bundestag from Scholz’s coalition partners, the Free Democratic Party, told me.
The unspoken corollary: This is also a government that — rightly — does not fear accusations of repeating past German militarism, and the crimes that entailed.
Scholz credibly portrayed his proposals as part of the European Union’s collective deterrence on behalf of democratic values. The modernized German military he envisions would work with NATO allies — former German enemies — France and Poland. It would face only eastward.
Though “NATO” came up repeatedly in Scholz’s speech, “United States” did not. The omission seemingly finessed Germans’ awkward dependence on U.S. protection at a time when the Biden administration has Europe’s back but doubts linger about the long-term direction and dependability of post-Trump America.
No problem: The United States should welcome a more united, more militarily capable European Union, ready to share the transatlantic defense burden with us and Britain.
Higher German defense spending removes a big irritant in U.S.-German relations. It could even help stabilize our domestic politics by eliminating Donald Trump’s populist grievance against NATO free-riding. U.S. liquefied natural gas exports to Germany will diminish the bilateral trade deficit and create jobs in the United States.
Another iconic 20th-century Englishman, George Orwell, wrote of the human tendency to persist in “believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right”.
“The only check on it”, he wrote, “is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield”.
This has just happened to Germany’s illusions about itself, about Russia and about the world, on a battlefield called Ukraine.
Charles Lane is a Post editorial writer specializing in economic and fiscal policy, and a weekly columnist.