German rearmament, the "turning point" for the EU, and the Leopard 2 tanks
Ukraine is requesting/demanding advanced German Leopold 2 tanks for their current war against Russian invasion. Deutsche Welle has this current report1:
Additional Deutsche Welle reports: Is German reluctance to send tanks undermining the country as a reliable European partner? 01/20/2023 and Why has Germany still not decided on Leopard 2 tank supplies to Ukraine? 01/20/2023.
What’s behind the current debate?
First, Germany and the rest of NATO are actively supporting Ukraine in its war against the Russian invasion, even though Ukraine is not a NATO member and would, even if the war stopped today, be years away from qualifying to join the alliance. NATO ascension involves meeting a rigorous set of standards, not least among them: “Invitees are also required to implement measures to ensure the protection of NATO classified information, and prepare their security and intelligence services to work with the NATO Office of Security.“2 Just as with US decisions on which weapons to supply Ukraine and how many and when, the argument is over timing, quantity, and, of course, the types of weapons to be provided.
The US just announced another $2 billion package of military aid to Ukraine, including “[90] Stryker armored vehicles, 59 more Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and a large number of rockets and artillery rounds.”3
Second, in the EU and in NATO, the European nations have long practiced a kind of “good cop, bad cop” routine, in which eastern countries like Poland and the Balkan states take the bad-cop role of warning about the dangers from Russia and demand more and faster measures against them, including NATO expansion. While the Western countries and Germany in particular take the good-cop position of trying to draw Russia into more cooperative and mutually-dependent relationships with the goal of reducing the risks of war. (This is not meant to imply that the public positions are phony, but rather to emphasize their function in diplomacy.)
The long-standing German position was known as the Wandel durch Wandel (change through trade) strategy. Controversial deals like the NordStream 2 pipeline were part of this approach. Although the profit motive of course played a significant role, left lingering suspicious of corruption, and produced more than a few statements by political figures that since last February’s invasion are painfully embarrassing in retrospect.
Third, the German slogan of Wandel durch Handel has now been superseded by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ declaration of a Zeitenwende, a “turning point,” in which a boosting of German and European military power is a central priority, along with a concentrated effort to reduce or eliminate Europe’s dependency on Russian oil and gas.
From my own understanding of the last 150 years of European history, “Germany is committed to massive rearmament” will never sound like entirely good news.
On the other hand, the fears of the internal opposition to rearmament by West Germany in the 1950s that it could lead to new militarism and imperialist adventures were not realized in the rearmament and NATO membership that actually took place. (Much to the regret of some German rightwingers, no doubt.)
Fourth, the Zeitenwende has created a new urgency for both a more unified EU foreign policy and for a much more robust and independent EU military capability. With the Trumpist takeover of the US Republican Party, the Republicans - and Donald Trump in particular - are more-or-less hostile to both NATO and the EU. Even during the Clinton Administration and ever since, the general American preference was a larger but less cohesive European Union that would be both useful in stabilizing post-Soviet Europe but also incapable of becoming a “peer competitor” of the US. And the January 6, 2021 Trumpist insurrection in Washington showed the EU that they can no longer be so assured of US defense support in case of Russian aggression.
If the grotesquely hawkish John Bolton can be believed, Trump in a second term “may well have withdrawn from NATO. And I think Putin was waiting for that.”4
The immediate effect of the Russia-Ukraine War was to strengthen NATO and US leadership within it, although the US has always been the unquestioned leader of the alliance. But the US began its “pivot" or "tilt" toward Asia in 20115 during the Obama Administration, more than a decade ago. This vision of the US priority being competition against China as a rising world power continued through the Trump Administration, even though crediting Trump’s government with anything so grand as a foreign policy “vision” sounds a bit dubious.
John Bateman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has recently argued that the Biden-Harris Administration’s economic sanctions against China are potentially much more drastic in their effects than the foreign policy commentariat has recognized:
U.S.-led technological decoupling from China has had enormous consequences in just a few short years. It has rewired international relationships, unsettled the global economic order, and transformed technology policymaking and politics in many countries. In this high-stakes game, Washington has been both card player and card dealer, making its own moves while constraining the choices of others. Now the United States has gone all-in—wagering like never before and placing its cards on the table for all to see. The decisive U.S. gamble: to openly block China’s path to becoming an advanced economic peer, even at significant risk to U.S. and allied interests. Bigger U.S. moves are probably coming in the future.6 (my emphasis)
China and Europe are mutually important trading partners, so the tightening economic sanctions against China also affect Europe, at the same time that Europe has officially over a decade ago become a secondary strategic concern of the US after China. The current war has not changed that prioritization.
It’s generally assumed that unity in the EU is dependent on France and Germany acting in accord. Since France is the only nuclear power in the EU, a genuinely independent European defense capability against Russia would have to include a French guarantee of a “nuclear umbrella.” Especially if the US were to leave NATO altogether.
However, the newer NATO members that are also EU members have at times sided with US on security issues against the positions of France and Germany, notably during the Iraq War.7 And countries like Poland and the Baltic states are more immediately interested in the nuclear umbrella that NATO provides than they are in following the lead of Germany and France. At the same time, France and Germany also know that the current strengthening of NATO could undercut their ability to develop a robust EU defense force. While they also realize that having the former Warsaw Pact countries that are now in the EU, will need to be increasingly reliant on German and French armaments than on American ones i order to reduce the ability of the US to promote inner-EU division between what Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld called a good (i.e., more hawkish and pro-American) “new Europe” (good) and the bad “old Europe”.
So what’s the deal with the tanks?
Immediately after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s Chancellor Scholz announced a €100 billion defense-buildup fund and, in addition, Germany’s intent to raise its defense spending to 2% of its GDP, i.e., an increase by a third over what it was spending in 2021. Germany had agreed to such a target in 2014 but has not yet met it.8
The current hullabaloo is around Ukraine’s demand that Germany provide Leopard 2 tanks. Welt news in a long report on NATO weapons for Ukraine9 featured this table showing five EU countries and their supply of Leopard 2's :
How long it will take for German weapons manufacturers to provide substantial numbers of the Leopard 2 tanks is a matter of some dispute.10 But it's not as though they are able to crank out dozens of new Leopard 2 tanks in the next couple of weeks. Germany is in the process of a big military buildup of its own capabilities. So it's understandable that the government may have some reluctance to reduce its own preparedness by sending its own tanks to Ukraine.
And it's obvious from this table that Poland has more of these tanks than Germany itself does. And Spain has almost as many as Germany. So there is an obvious practical issue here. And this isn’t the only one. The Ukrainians have to be trained on these very advanced tanks, and they are a lot more complicated than driving a car. There is also an important security consideration, which is that the NATO countries don’t want the Russians capturing any of those tanks.
So the public recriminations we’re currently seeing over the Leopard 2 tanks is in no small part another episode of the good-cop/bad-cop routine. Everyone expects Ukraine to make maximum demands of its allies, even if calls for direct NATO combat engagement with Russia, e.g., a no-fly zone, are surely more than a little annoying in Washington and other NATO capitals. And eastern European or American public griping about how Germany is dragging its feet on the tanks is also good politics for Rumsfeld’s “new Europe” leaders. And it provides some amount of political cover for the German government in the face of concerns by other countries of “old Europe” and also from domestic antiwar critics on the right (the Putinist far-right AfD/Alternative für Deutschland) and the left (part of the Left Party and some of Scholz’ Social Democrats). The German Greens are pretty much solidly hawkish on supporting Ukraine.
It’s of course considered bad form by most media outlets and foreign policy institutes to give close scrutiny to the influence of military lobbyists. But this surely looks like a new golden age for them. And like a good opportunity for conservative politicians who prefer a hawkish posture anyway.
In the meantime, we’ll likely see more news stories along this line:
The continued delay in a decision comes after days of bewildering signals from German officials about whether they would allow the Leopard 2 tanks to go to Ukraine.
Allies have been imploring Germany to dispatch a fleet of Europe’s Leopard tanks to Kyiv’s forces. Berlin holds the key, given that it both manages its own cache of Leopards and must approve other countries’ donations of the German-made vehicle.
But Scholz has been reluctant to make a move, signaling both publicly and privately that he wants the U.S. to move first and ship its own tanks to Ukraine. 11
It’s part of the post-Zeitenwende world.
DW News (2003) YouTube channel: Why is Scholz hesitant to support Ukraine with Leopard tanks? 19.01.2022 (Accessed: 2023-20-01)
Accession Process. In: Enlargement and Article 10 06.07.2022. NATO website. <https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_49212.htm> (Accessed 2023-20-01)
Tucker, Patrick (2023): US, Allies Push Armor and Rockets Into Ukraine. Defense One 19.01.2023. <https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/01/united-states-allies-push-armor-and-rockets-ukraine/381996/> (Accessed: 2023-20-01)
Metzger, Bryan (2022: Former National Security Advisor John Bolton says 'Putin was waiting' for Trump to withdraw the United States from NATO in his second term. In: Business Insider 04.03.2022. <https://www.businessinsider.com/bolton-putin-waiting-for-trump-to-withdraw-from-nato-in-2nd-term-2022-3> (Accessed: 2023-20-01)
Lieberthal, Kenneth (2011): The American Pivot to Asia. Brookings website 21.12.2011. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-american-pivot-to-asia/> (Accessed: 2023-20-01)
Bateman, Jon (2022): Biden Is All-In on Taking Out China. In: Foreign Policy Winter 2023, 7-10. <https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/12/biden-china-semiconductor-chips-exports-decouple/> (Accessed: 2023-20-01)
Pond, Elizabeth (2004): Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance. Washington: Brookings Institution Press.
Weisgerber, Marcus (2022):Germany Pledges Defense Spending Boost as EU Vows to Send Arms to Ukraine Defense One 02/27/2022. <https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2022/02/germany-pledges-defense-spending-boost-eu-vows-send-arms-ukraine/362497/> (Accessed: 2023-20-01)
WELT YouTube channel (2023): UKRAINE-KRIEG: Viele Nato-Staaten schnüren für Ramstein-Treffen Waffenpakete 20.01.2023 (Accessed: 2023-20-01)
Hegmann, Gerhard (2023): Doch schon in diesem Jahr? So will Rheinmetall die Leopard-Lieferung beschleunigen. In: Welt Online 19.01.2023. <https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article243299509/Leopard-Panzer-So-will-Rheinmetall-die-Lieferung-beschleunigen.html> (Accessed: 2023-20-01)
Von der Burchard, Hans (2023): Germany snubs Ukraine’s tank request. Politico EU 01/20/2023. <https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-war-tank-leopard-2-conflict-weapons-pistorius-russia-kyiv-zelenskyy-putin-nato/> (Accessed: 2023-21-01)