NATO: (Another) German Wrong Turn?

By Andrew Stuttaford

Sunday, February 18, 2024

 

Ulrich Speck tweets a quick comment on a story in Die Welt. The story is disturbing on two levels.

 

Speck’s tweet:

 

Welt reports that Biden proposed [Ursula von der Leyen] as Nato Sec Gen, but Scholz refused because she “is too critical towards Moscow, which could become a disadvantage on the long term”.

 

If Die Welt’s story is accurate, it’s disturbing that President Biden would think that Ursula von der Leyen, who is currently the EU’s top bureaucrat, should take NATO’s top job. There has been nothing particularly distinguished about her time at the helm in Brussels. But a far more important strike against her is her unsatisfactory term as Germany’s defense minister between 2013 and 2019. Some of the country’s problems were the product of a long, long period in which Germany had neglected its defenses. Nevertheless, von der Leyen doesn’t seem to have done much to fix them. Germany may have only been spending some 1.2 percent of its GDP on defense at the time (well below the NATO target of 2 percent by 2024), but that was 1.2 percent of a large sum, suggesting that the problems within the German military were more than just financial.

 

A Carnegie Europe note from February 2018 doesn’t make for pretty reading. Its author cites a report published by Hans-Peter Bartels, Germany’s parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces (my emphasis added):

 

“The army’s readiness to deploy has not improved in recent years but instead has got even worse,” Bartels said. “At the end of the year, six out of six submarines were not in use. At times, not one of the fourteen Airbus A-400M could fly,” he added, referring to aircraft specifically designed to transport troops and military equipment.

 

Just to add to this catalogue of woes, the Bundeswehr has only nine operational Leopard 2 tanks, well short of the 44 needed for the VJTF. Forget about having fourteen Marder armored infantry vehicles. There’s only three to hand.

 

As for the Eurofighter and Tornado fighter jets and the CH-53 transport helicopters, they can only be used on average four months a year. They are in constant need of repair. And by the way, there’s a shortage of spare parts for maintenance. Just to add to the miserable state of the armed forces, the troops lack night-vision equipment and automatic grenade launchers.

 

This sorry state of affairs is actually a recurrent one that raises serious problems about the ability of the Bundeswehr to modernize the armed forces. It also raises many questions about Germany’s commitment to pull its weight in NATO and EU missions, as if the defense ministry wasn’t aware of these shortcomings.

 

Put another way, von der Leyen was part of the problem, not a solution. And that problem, so far as Germany’s geopolitical position was concerned, went beyond an underequipped military and extended through much of the policy pursued by the Merkel government, from the reliance on “cheap” Russian natural gas to the encouragement of the German industry to develop a close relationship with China, a relationship that (predictably) has proved to be a trap.

 

And then there are comments, such as this (via CBS) from February 2015:

 

In a newspaper interview, German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen said giving the Ukrainians arms to help them defend themselves could have unintended and fateful consequences.

 

“Weapons deliveries would be a fire accelerant,” von der Leyen was quoted as telling the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily. “And it could give the Kremlin the excuse to openly intervene in this conflict.

 

Let’s just say that von der Leyen would not be an ideal candidate to lead NATO.

 

Even more disturbing was the reported veto of von der Leyen by Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz. Any such decision might have (in part) reflected domestic politics. Von der Leyen comes from the (vaguely) right-of-center CDU, Scholz is a Social Democrat. Nevertheless, the reason Scholz reportedly gave for rejecting von der Leyen (that she was “too critical” of Moscow, which “could become a disadvantage in the long term”) is, if accurate, a sign that Scholz has learned very little from the history of the last few years. The Kremlin would regard such an attitude not as a declaration of goodwill but as an admission of weakness.

 

Moreover, it would bode ill for NATO members in Europe’s east if being “too critical” of Moscow were to be a barrier to taking NATO’s top job. If NATO had paid more attention to warnings from the Baltics or Poland about the path that Russia was taking, the Kremlin might have felt less confident about embarking on its invasions of Ukraine.

 

To pick someone from Eastern Europe (there are some obvious candidates) now would send a valuable message to our allies in that region, and to Russia. It’s the way to go.