Whenever Izabella is off, Dario takes the chance to effectuate a coup of the Blind Spot newsletter. This week’s Blind Spot newsletter has thus been shunted aside in favour of Dario’s take on economist Noah Smith’s piece: “Europe’s fate is in Germany’s hands now”.
Noah Smith’s call to action for Germany to step up, get out of the shade of Nazism, and do its bit to save Europe from an enlargening Russian Empire, is not an uncommonly held view. Yet, until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany seemed to be doing everything but. For decades, Germany pursued a path of increasing integration with the Russian economy through the Nord Stream I and II pipelines. Former political elites, like Gerhard Schroder, went on to work for Russian state-owned energy firms like Nord Stream and Gazprom.
This behaviour seems absurd at face value. As widely broadcast by Donald Trump at the famously chaotic 2018 NATO summit: “So we are protecting you against Russia, but they’re paying billions of dollars to Russia?”
Germany’s recent about-turn makes these events seem all the more miscalculated. Since Russia’s invasion, the country has willingly tagged along behind American-led sanctions on Russia, handicapping its manufacturing with pricier energy imports, and lobbied hard for deliveries of weaponry for Ukrainian armouries from its own and other European countries. It also eventually ceded to US plans to tap frozen Russian assets to fund the Ukrainian war effort. Germany’s appeasement in hindsight seems all the more hilariously incompetent.
But what if this behaviour isn’t absurd or incompetent? What if Germany’s changed behaviour towards Russia instead represents how the United States has forced its hand, obliging it to end Ostpolitik while affording greater opportunities for the American penetration of Europe.
To think of the United States and Germany as more rivals than allies may seem counter-intuitive. But delve into any historical period and you’ll find the traditional narrative frame falls apart on closer inspection. It’s the raison d’etre of the Anglo-Saxon historical method. The Crusader States were never a unified bunch, but an inter-warring series of complex alliances that drew crusaders against crusaders, with Arab forces fighting both for and against. The Spanish El Cid, hero of Spain’s Reconquest, made his fortune and fame fighting for Moorish kingdoms against Christians. The Soviet Union’s industrialisation was backed by Western financiers who helped it import Ford-inspired production methods — bringing over American engineers, planners and managers.
The narrative reality supposes the NATO countries are one bloc versus the Russians and the Chinese. Reality is far more complex. And this mismatch between narrative and reality is something Noah Smith — wittingly or unwittingly — alluded to at the very beginning of his piece:
NATO’s first secretary general is said to have declared that the purpose of the alliance was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
Noah asserts this attitude “persisted for a remarkably long time”, including when Thatcher was vehemently opposed to German reunification. But his argument postulates that Germany “is not the villain of Europe anymore” and as such, is no longer oppositional to progressive Western interests against totalitarianism — now represented by Putin’s Russia.
Germany’s lack of leadership for the West, Noah contends, is caused by its ongoing regret and shame at the horrors it perpetrated during the Second World War.
But times have changed, he claims. The country has since matured into a well-regarded country with decades of genuinely liberal, democratic experience. If anything, Germany is the country most active in stamping out fascistic or totalitarian political movements in Europe — just look at the rapidity with which it rounds up suspected far-right plotters.
But what if things have not changed all that much? They’ve only been tweaked.
What if Germany’s strategy in the international game of states has always remained constant?
Consider the context. During its rise to power after unification in 1871, the nascent German nation was set against the incumbent French and British empires as it sought to make its place on the world stage. But, as shown by the First Moroccan Crisis of 1905, where Germany tried to wrest Morocco from French influence, any enmity between the French and British was quickly put aside to keep the Germans down. And on its right flank lay the gigantic Russian Empire. German strategy was thus shaped by the fear of fighting a two-front war, and the necessity to upstage incumbent empires from a position of weakness internationally continued to define German policy for decades (even if they still failed to avoid it the second time around).
The first priority was to establish alliances to target secondary and tertiary powers in the so-called ‘Third World’ that would circumvent or upstage their relationships with major Western powers. This matured into the German-influenced Ottomans declaring a jihad against the Entente in the First World War, as explained by Max Hastings in his piece, “The Turkish-German jihad”. Or look at the role played by small countries such as Croatia and Bosnia in their support for the Nazi regime, for instance. Or at the role of former Nazi German scientists in crafting Egypt’s ballistic missile program to face off against a nascent Israel, or in West Germany’s role in providing nuclear research assistance to Iran, apartheid-era South Africa, and Iraq.
The goal was to pursue unequal marriages of power where Germany could keep its upper hand. This beloved concept of German elites afforded her international independence, in theory, as opposed to a geopolitical alliance with the more powerful countries of the West.
And what Germany learned best, after its defeat in the First World War but especially after its defeat in the second, was the importance of establishing these alliances in secret. One of these strategies was termed Ostpolitik – Eastern Politics.
Ostpolitik led to Germany’s covert support of Lenin and the overthrow of the Provisional Government, its support of the Soviet Union’s industrialisation, and to the Rapallo Agreement, where German forces secretly eluded the Versailles Treaty by training its tank forces in Soviet territory. And it led, of course, to the Nazi-Soviet pact, which befuddled the European communists at the time as much as contemporary German actions towards Russia have befuddled Western watchers.
This Ostpolitik continued throughout the Cold War, with continuous attempts at rapprochement between the Christian Democrat-ruled West Germany and the communist East Germans. By the 1980s, their secret links went far — just look at the mysterious Uwe Barschel affair, where the former governor of an obscure German province was found killed in his hotel room.
The ensuing hall of mirrors was allegedly tied to the sale of submarines to arms-blockaded, apartheid-era South Africa by a complex transaction that involved the GDR and West German intelligence agencies and arms dealers working hand in hand. For more context watch Der Fall Barschal.
These efforts, as we all know, culminated in German reunification so rightly feared by some Western leaders.
The second German strategy was economic domination, first clearly seen with the Mitelleuropa economic ‘association’ included in the notorious Septemberprogramm drafted by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg at the beginning of World War 1, in 1914. This was to be an economic trade zone of equals that would be not-so-secretly dominated by German industry. While similar plans were drafted during the Second World War, it was Germany’s brutal military defeat that made its elites realise an economic (and hence more secretive) form of geopolitical power was its best shot at independence. And many, such as John Maynard Keynes, have argued the European Union is but a cheap copy of these first two failed attempts at German economic domination.
This places so-called German ‘appeasement’ of Russia in an entirely different perspective. German closeness to Russia prior to the Russo-Ukrainian war was a continuation of traditional German attempts to establish alliances in which it held the upper hand to place itself as an independent global power; one which could subsidise its industry with cheap energy and so empower its domination of the European landmass, a rule it could never securely enjoy as a subject to the United States and its NATO alliance.
For another, the US-led NATO’s goals have arguably not changed post-Cold War. We’d argue they still “Keep pushing the Russians back, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. After all, while both countries enjoy strong relations, American manufacturing is a competitor to German manufacturing in Europe, just as American energy providers compete with Russian energy providers in European markets. Some, such as John Mearsheimer, claim the United States’ continued encroachment eastwards, and its placing of ballistic missiles ever-nearer Russian territory, is just as responsible for the Russian invasion as Putin’s brutally old-fashioned approach is. This conflagration also forced Germany to pick the side it ostensibly belonged to. Germany’s foot-dragging, as emphasised by this article’s leading image; ‘scholzing, i.e., communicating good intentions only to use/find/invent any reason imaginable to delay these and/or prevent them from happening’, reveals German elite reluctance to abandon an independent stance.
As for the Russo-Ukraine war, as psychologist Carl Jung stated: “If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences, and infer the motivation.” On the one hand, you have the United States’ aid for Ukraine and sanctions on Russia which turned into an energy crisis for German manufacturers, and a de-facto subsidy for American energy providers and manufacturers. On the other hand, you have a fractured Germany in a weak coalition that, opposing Russia, has lost its cheap energy, billions in energy infrastructure investment, and much of its competitive manufacturing output. Ironically enough, Russia’s economy has arguably suffered less than Germany, with the IMF projecting it to grow 3.2 percent in 2024 versus Germany’s 0.2 percent. While this is an unfair comparison, it does help make our point: The outcome is clear, the United States is the winner, and Germany (not Russia) is the loser.
The motivations are much less clear. But one thing is certain. The Russia-Ukraine war is, in many ways, a proxy economic war between the United States and Germany, as much as it is a proxy military war between the United States and Russia. Noah Smith is right. Germany is already at war, but its enemy is the Anglo-Saxon West, and not the enfeebled Russian East. This was something Germany’s previous CDU rulers always seemed to understand. With the CDU-led coalition projected to win its next elections, I’ll be interested in seeing what happens. But, as ever, Germany will move secretly and with subtlety. Let’s keep our eyes peeled.
