We’ve left port on our way through 2022. We sail into Year 3 of a global — and often lethal — pandemic, chiefly because a substantial and vocal minority interferes with sensible public health measures. We see the usual big-power wrangling over geopolitical influence, caused not in no small part by cults of personality. And we watch as the world’s sole superpower, traditionally an inspiration to fans of democracy everywhere, continues to compile the ingredients for self-immolation.
Although new beginnings usually are grounds for optimism, an early example suggests that optimism, whatever form it takes, is misplaced. It shows leaders whose reflexive geopolitical thought processes are trapped in the past and, therefore, terribly inadequate for the present. The resulting abdication of power, the sensible and forthright assertion of which would be legitimate and useful, does nothing to foster stability.
As Russia is poised to invade Ukraine, Germany has decided not to join other NATO members in delivering weapons to Ukraine. This despite pointed rhetoric from the new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the new foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, about the “high price” that Russia would pay if it invaded and how silence on Ukraine was not an option. Baerbock’s response to Russian ultimatums? “[D]iplomacy is the only viable way” to “defuse the highly dangerous situation.”
Disconcerting is not Germany’s decision on weapons but the rationale offered for it, as expressed by a German academic: “The idea that Germany delivers weapons that then could be used to kill Russians is very difficult to stomach for many Germans.” Those many Germans are not thinking straight. The guaranteed way to prevent the killing of Russians is for Russians to stay on their side of the border. It is Russians who decide whether Russians live or die.
It also tells us that Germans elect not to distinguish between their country’s helping Ukraine blunt a far larger neighbor’s military incursion and launching against the USSR a surprise attack with an army of 3,000,000 over an 1,800-mile front for the purpose of erasing that country’s people. It certainly is possible that, if Russia invaded Ukraine, German-made ordnance could — and, if German salesmen can be believed, would effectively — end the lives of some Russian soldiers.
Worth noting is that Germany’s position does not rest on some squishy devotion to human life. In 2021, Germany exported nearly $9 billion in warships and missiles, a substantial portion of which went to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who are into their eighth year teaming up to slice and dice Yemenis (a project engineered by John Brennan’s CIA and blessed by Obama). No stomach trouble for Germans about their weapons’ killing people in a far-away place barely able to provide food and water.
Germany chooses to be trapped by its own history. Although Germany has spent decades atoning for World War II, it has used its guilt for that cataclysm to duck its substantive responsibility to the current world order. In the past two decades alone, and through Merkel in particular, it has normalized the criminality of Putin and the murderous land-stealing of Netanyahu. One was in pursuit of commerce, the other part of ritualistic and tawdry self-flagellation.
It is unknowable whether a more robust and tangible German contribution to Ukraine’s defense would dissuade Russia from an invasion of Ukraine. No doubt, were Germany to do so, the Russian propaganda machine would gear up with bile about “murderous Nazi revanchists” and the like. This appeal to deeply felt Russian sentiment about World War II could easily be blunted (e.g., takes one to know one) by a government not hedging its bets about new business opportunities in the east.
As it is, Germany will continue to aim high-minded palaver at domestic constituents, aware that Moscow will ignore it. Scholz and Baerbock will reiterate its “special responsibility” in light of 25 million dead Russians from eighty years ago. But, right as Faulkner may be (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”), clear-thinking leaders must calibrate for more immediate and deadly realities. That Germany’s leaders won’t will make a Russian invasion of Ukraine more likely, not less.
If that happens — for reasons known only to the mobster who runs Russia, for whom western media’s breathless will-he-won’t-he speculation has been, in Trumpian fashion, an aphrodisiac — expect German contortions to rival those of the Cirque du Soleil. Many Germans will even blame the US for leaving Russia no choice but to invade Ukraine. And most will smugly and cluelessly satisfy themselves that, decades on, they have finally become virtuous, regardless of the cost to others.
