26.01.2023

German Ostpolitik collapses

What lies behind the furore over sending Leopard 2 tanks to the Ukraine battlefield? Something deeper is going on, writes Daniel Lazare

US imperialism has Germany in its sights. First, there was Nord Stream, the dual gas pipeline that was supposed to solve Berlin’s energy needs for a generation, but which somehow got blown up exactly four months ago, although everybody is afraid to say by whom (hint: the perpetrator’s name rhymes with ‘Erika’). Then there was the Inflation Reduction Act, which president Joe Biden signed into law in August and which provides potent subsidies for German manufacturers wishing to relocate to the United States. Then, after the UK committed to sending 14 Challenger 2 tanks to the Ukrainian battlefield, there was the furore over Germany’s reluctance to do the same with its Leopard 2 tanks.

Olaf Scholz has now, of course, caved in. He told Bundestag MPs that his red-green-yellow coalition government will transfer 14 tanks and grant permission for other countries to send theirs too. In a quid pro quo Biden says the US will make available around 31 M1 Abrams to Ukraine. Clearly Germany has been set-up and bullied into submission following a concerted propaganda campaign.

“Germany’s hesitation is a critical challenge to western unity, and Mr Biden cannot sit pat in the face of it,” thundered The Washington Post.¹ Translation: Berlin must be beaten into compliance so that unity can be maintained. The New York Times meanwhile complained that Berlin is letting a little thing like World War II cloud its good judgment, and it has even found a pro-war intellectual - the ever-reliable Timothy Garton Ash - to back it up. “The German position is profoundly confused, with the old thinking dead and the new not yet born,” Garton Ash dutifully replied in pseudo-Gramscian tones.²

If only Germany was as clear-thinking as America, it would understand that tank warfare on the Eurasian steppe is no big deal. Considering how many millions the Wehrmacht killed the last time around, what’s a few thousand more dead Russians?

As a result, the Bundesrepublik finds itself hemmed in on every side - its energy supplies cut off, its industry lured away, its bravery questioned even by the ultra-right government of Poland. “What is your goal in this war?” a frustrated Dietmar Bartsch, a member of Die Linke (The Left), asked in the Bundestag recently. “If you think you can win a war against a nuclear power, then you are deeply mistaken.”³ But that is precisely what the US thinks, and it is what it wants Germany to think too.

Why has Germany wound up in such straits? The answer is that, while America’s primary target in Ukraine is Russia, Ostpolitik - Germany’s long-term policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union, the former German Democratic Republic and now the Russian Federation - has been running a close second. This is a policy that goes to the heart of the German Social Democratic Party - not only what it believes but what it is. But it is a policy that the US is now determined to tear out by the roots.

Ostpolitik began with Willy Brandt, the SDP mayor of the then-divided city of Berlin, in the late 1960s. Although the US was initially taken aback, it was mollified once leading conservatives of the day, such as Helmut Kohl and Franz Josef Strauss, endorsed the doctrine as well. While attitudes would wax and wane over the coming years, it was only after Vladimir Putin came out against Nato intervention in Libya in 2011 that US hostility began to harden. Other incidents followed: US support for an incipient ‘colour revolution’ in Moscow that raised Kremlin hackles; Russian military intervention in Syria against US-backed jihadis; American backing for a neo-Nazi-led coup in Kiev; Russia’s seizure of Donetsk, Luhansk, and the Crimea, etc.

Nord Stream 2

With each downward tumble in US-Russian relations, Ostpolitik grew increasingly suspect in US eyes. The US did not object to Nord Stream 1 when it opened in November 2011, because relations with Moscow were still more or less on an even keel. But it changed its mind as soon as Russia and Germany began discussing a second pipeline.

Joe Biden denounced Nord Stream 2 in his waning months as vice-president in August 2016, while Richard Grenell, Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany, threatened to impose sanctions on companies working on the project in early 2019. Senator Ted Cruz, the far-right Republican from Texas, whose gas exporters were eager to muscle in on European markets, also threatened sanctions.⁴ Democrats, hawkish think tanks like the Atlantic Council, and the corporate media all clambered aboard the anti-Nord Stream 2 bandwagon.

What had changed was not the pipeline, but the overall political atmosphere. As temperatures continued to climb, US attitudes went from hostile to downright threatening. “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward,” the neoconservative doyenne, Victoria Nuland, Biden’s undersecretary of state for political affairs, declared in January 2021.⁵ “If Russia invades … there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it,” Biden added on February 9: When a reporter asked how he would terminate a facility that was in foreign hands, he replied, “I promise you, we will be able to do it.”⁶

The comment, made at a joint White House press conference with SDP chancellor Olaf Scholz, was aimed as much at Germany as Russia. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky followed up by appealing to Qatar, that famous bastion of Middle East democracy, to replace Russia by shipping its own gas supplies. Then Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, blasted Moscow for imposing a 15% cut. (After blaming Russia for selling too much gas, western leaders then blamed it for not selling enough.)

Finally, he who must not be named opted to cut the Gordian knot by blowing up the pipeline on September 26.

With that, Ostpolitik came not just under ideological attack, but under military assault as well. The Biden administration was just as ruthless when it came to the $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act. Bombarded with European complaints that the measure’s manufacturing subsidies fly in the face of World Trade Organisation rules, the White House simply shrugged them off the way a horse shrugs off a pesky fly. All Biden cared was that the bill would create “tens of thousands of good-paying jobs and clean energy manufacturing jobs … all across America, every part of America” and that was it.⁷ The rest was so much background noise.

By January, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo was complaining that US officials were “calling firms, in a very aggressive way, to say ‘Don’t invest in Europe - we have something better.’”⁸ Scholz registered the same complaint a few weeks later at the World Economic Forum in Davos, although in much milder tones. The Inflation Reduction Act’s made-in-America provisions “must not result in discrimination against European businesses,” he said, because “protectionism hinders competition and innovation and is detrimental to climate change mitigation”. As to what to do in response, all he would say is that European Union members are “talking to our American friends about this”.⁹ Poor Olaf cannot bring himself to speak ill of a friend, even when he is stealing away jobs.

Then there are those German-made tanks. Easier to maintain than the M1 Abrams and dependent on ordinary diesel rather than jet fuel, the Leopard 2 is an excellent weapon in just about everyone’s estimation, which is why 14 European nations have them in their arsenals, along with Canada, Chile, Indonesia and Singapore. But sending them into battle where World War II Panzers had gone was a bridge too far in terms of German sensibilities ... for a brief moment. It is not only another mechanised war on the Eurasian steppe that has Berlin worried, but what Russia might do in response. As one Euro hawk explained, “The chancellery is enormously afraid of nuclear war, and they perceive that they are the prime target for that. I don’t know how this strange perception came about.”

Strange? Benjamin Tallis of the German Council on Foreign Relations added: “Russian propaganda has been targeting Germany in particular to try and sow this nuclear fear.”¹⁰ Evidently, Germany should not give into blackmail, even if a few mushroom clouds go off in its own backyard.

Germany’s plight is the result of the old crisis of imperialism and social democracy making a new appearance in the early 21st century.

Officially, the US-engineered war in Ukraine is going swimmingly. The Kharkiv offensive that Ukraine launched in early September boosted morale, the western alliance is holding firm, while public support is also holding up. Yet the old façade is starting to crack. Economic tensions are rising, as is public anger over energy prices and budget cuts. After years of anti-Russian propaganda, it is easy for the press to blame the war on an infinitely evil Vladimir Putin - “the new Hitler”, according to Garton Ash.¹¹ Yet, considering how many countries the US has invaded in response to its own paranoid security concerns, the argument is so ridiculous that it is falling apart under its own weight.

Mandelites

All it would take is a mild push from the left for it to topple over in a heap. But, given the latest rah-rah pro-Zelensky statement issued by such Mandelite luminaries as Samuel Farber, Alan Wald, Robert Brenner and Suzi Weismann, it appears that both intelligence and guts are lacking.¹² So the imperial propaganda machine is still able to stagger on, if only for a time.

The war is meanwhile not going well for Nato. The Kharkiv offensive has given way to a grinding war of attrition, as Russia tightens the noose around Bakhmut, 130 miles to the southeast. German intelligence is reportedly alarmed about “three-digit” Ukrainian casualties per day in and around the shell-torn city, while fears are growing of an impending Russian offensive.¹³ This is why western leaders were in such a panic over the Leopard 2s - because they are terrified of what Russia has in store and therefore want to arm Ukrainian forces to the teeth.

Obviously, 14 Challengers 2s, 14 Leopard 2s and 31 M1 Abrams can only have a marginal effect. That is why Zelensky and his cronies have been demanding at least 300 front-line battle tanks (as well as up-to-date combat aircraft). Meanwhile, Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, has denounced the delivery of western tanks as “another blatant provocation” and warns of a “global catastrophe”.