By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, January
25, 2022
President Joe Biden’s press
conference last week was atrocious, but one of his worst missteps amounted
to telling the truth about Germany, if not by name.
Biden said there’d be divisions within
NATO over a “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukraine. This is true enough,
and the chief cause would be a Germany that is staking a strong claim to being
our worst European ally.
If NATO is hollowed out over time, Germany
will have much to do with it. The country is too guilt-wracked over its
enormities in World War II to contribute rigorously to the defense of the West,
and too cynical to allow anything to interfere with its selfish interests, both
in Russian energy and the Chinese export market. It is attempting a kind of de
facto economic alliance with the revisionist autocratic powers, China and
Russia, at the same time it is allied politically with the foremost defender of
the democratic West, the United States.
Its defense spending is inching upward but
is still short of the 2 percent of GDP pledged by NATO countries. It stands now
at 1.5 percent of GDP. This is an economic powerhouse that has been shirking
its responsibilities, in part because it has been able to rely on the United
States — and its vast military might — as a crutch.
Germany imagines its unique contribution
is a commitment to soft power and peace through diplomacy. It’s hard to credit
German idealism, though, when it has tethered itself to Russian gas over the
long-standing objections of its allies. They warned that this would inevitably
increase the geopolitical sway of Vladimir Putin, and so it has.
In a fit of self-sabotage, Germany is
closing the last three of its nuclear power plants this year and is scheduled
to close down its coal plants by 2038. No one buys more gas from Russia, where
Germany now gets more than half of its supply. The country has been hell-bent
on the development of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to bring gas
directly from Russia to Germany, bypassing Ukraine and making it even more
vulnerable to Russian coercion.
Germany has to be calculating that if it
participates in harsh sanctions against Russia, it makes itself vulnerable to
Russian countermeasures. Already, Russia has been squeezing Europe’s gas
supplies. It’s not at all clear that Germany would give up on the pipeline even
if Russian tanks roll for Kyiv.
The Germans, meanwhile, aren’t willing to
make even the slightest gesture toward deterring Russia. They are blocking
Estonia, a fellow NATO ally, from sending howitzers to Ukraine that originated
in Germany.
Germany has no problem selling weapons all
around the world, including to the perpetually troubled, Taliban-supporting
government in Pakistan and the dictatorship in Egypt.
The justification for blocking the
Estonia-to-Ukraine transfer is that Germany was responsible for unspeakable
horrors in that part of Europe in World War II, so it has to be especially
sensitive to German weapons going there.
Needless to say, there’s a categorical
difference between the depredations of the Nazis and providing weapons to a
plucky independent nation in fear of being dismembered by a neo-imperialist
country to its east (a country, by the way, that once was allied with the
Nazis).
Not to worry, though; Germany is pledging
to open a field hospital in Ukraine.
When we talk about European divisions over
Russia’s menacing of Ukraine, we are mostly talking about Germany (although
France is always a nettlesome partner). The British have taken a hard line.
Sweden and Finland have been stalwart. Spain is deploying ships to the Black
Sea. The Dutch have said they are open to providing weapons to Ukraine.
All that is heartening and appropriate. It
is Germany, the laggard of NATO with a deep and growing conflict of interest
regarding Russia, that is the weak link — and Putin, unfortunately, knows it.
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