Michael Lüders on moralism and reality in the new NATO-Russia confrontation

A German realist critiques the liberal internationalism that the German center-left has adopted

Michael Lüders is a German political scientist who has closely followed Western interventions in the Middle East in recent years. He is very much an advocate of the “realist” view of foreign affairs. It’s easy to see how someone who closely followed recent wars and interventions in that region would be accustomed to seeing cynical and ruthlessly pragmatic deals and alliances take precedent over moral considerations and over reverence for the “rules-based international order.”

His latest book is called Moral Über Alles?, which presumably needs no translation for English-speaking readers. The subtitle is “Why Values and National Interests Are Seldom Consistent.” Published June 21 of this year, it has information current to at least April.

His main theme is the peril of an overly moralistic approach to foreign policy, with special emphasis on Germany. And his focus is the current Russia-Ukraine War

One of the most important realist policy theorists was a theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote The Irony of American History (1952). And realists often point to the ironic fact that policies motivated - or at least rhetorically justified - by high moral principles regularly turn out to have results that are not only impractical and fail to achieve their aims. But they also far too often inflict costs in lives and suffering that are are deeply repulsive to any half-decent moral or religious outlook. Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Iraq War are only some of the better-known of many examples.

An interest-based view of the Russia-Ukraine War and the Democracies-vs.-Autocracies foreign policy narrative

Lüders calls attention to a RAND Corporation study released this year that describes the formal American interest in the Ukraine war this way, with the focus on how much Ukraine can gain control of more of its sovereign territory currently controlled by Russia.¹

But his focus in Lügers’ book is the divergence in interests between Germany and the EU, on one hand, and the US on the other. A divergence of which he argues that the Biden Administration is fully aware - despite its liberal-interventionist rhetoric about the rules-based order - but which Lüders thinks the German government is ignoring with a foreign policy justified by moralistic themes.

In particular, the US has an obvious policy of confronting Russia over Ukraine and has followed it for decades, actually. But it has also been and remains part of the US policy to prevent close relations between Germany and Russia. The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline in 2002 - a criminal act in international law - doesn’t yet have a clear perpetrator identified. But it is exceptionally hard to imagine that it was done without a green light from the Biden Administration. This was a major project for Germany and Russia which the US has always viewed negatively.

The long-time German policy of trying to maintain productive relations with Russia is currently characterized by its many critics as Wandel durch Handel (Change Through Commerce). The advocates of the policy, whose roots go back to the Chancellorship of Willy Brandt, call it Wandel durch Annäherung, or Change Through Political Rapprochement.

There actually was a time, beginning during the Nixon Administration, that American policy toward the Soviet Union was said to be in a phase of rapprochement (easing of tensions). The inveterate Cold Warriors, including the clique that became known as neoconservatives, always considered the idea of rapprochement deeply sinful. (Of course they did!)

A major theme of Lüders’ book is how completely he sees the current governing coalition - a “traffic-light” coalition of Social Democrats (red), Greens, and Free Democrats (yellow) - as having swiftly abandoned any bridge-building policy toward Russia in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion in favor of an embarrassingly moralistic anti-Russian position. From his realist viewpoint, Lüders considers it to be effectively a complete capitulation to the coldly pragmatic (albeit reckless) US policy.

But as Lüders accurately argues, the United States sees its primary international priority as containing a newly powerful China. A policy which is likely to remain for the foreseeable future. And that has indeed been the explicitly stated foreign policy of the US since the Obama Administration.²

Divergence in US and Ukrainian interests

The 2023 RAND reports states, “This Perspective focuses on U.S. interests, which often align with but are not synonymous with Ukrainian interests.”

This is plainly so. And this should be no surprise to anyone who doesn’t actually believe in the liberal-interventionist or neoconservative foreign policy positions. Or who isn’t a full-blown Dr. Strangelove. Ukraine has an interest in promoting greater direct NATO involvement in the war. The US has a perceived interest is doing damage to Russia, which could be served by a longer war, as long as it doesn’t involve direct conflict between NATO and Russian forces. But it also has an officially defined interest in concentrating on containing China as its top priority. Which isn’t best served by a protracted war in Ukraine that drives Russia and China into an ever-closer alliance.

The previously cited RAND report is titled, “Avoiding a Long War.” And the Biden Administration may indeed pivot to trying to bring an early end to the fighting in Ukraine.

The problem in all this is that Ukraine is being chewed up in the current war of attrition on its own territory. And is likely to be crippled for decades to come, even if the war were to end tomorrow on terms acceptable to the current Ukrainian government.

No amount of hyperbole about the stakes for democracy in the rest of the world or moralistic scolding about the iniquity of Russia’s invasion is going to rebuild Ukraine. A task which the Biden Administration seems to think should be left primarily to the EU and especially Germany.

Germany and NATO newly committed to US policy

A major theme of the book is Lüders’ argument that with the current war, the EU and Germany in particularly has tied itself closer than ever to US policy. President Biden is right when he talks about how united the NATO alliance is over the Russia-Ukraine War. But Lüders stresses that this unity is currently a matter of the EU subordinating its policies and its own distinctive interests to the demands of the US.

He worries that German leaders in particular may be so committed to the idea of a Western community of values that they may be giving far too little attention to the extent that the US pursues its own perceived great-power interest behind its rhetoric about the rules-based international order and Democracies-vs.-Autocracies:

But the Americans are not "value partners". Above all, and as a rule, they ruthlessly pursue their own interests. This is illustrated not least by the Inflation Reduction Act passed by the Biden administration in August 2022. This law is presented as progressive, meant to promote environmental protection and fight inflation. In fact, however, it is a declaration of war on local [EU] economies. This is because Washington lures European companies with billions in subsidies if they relocate their production site to the USA. German business leaders in particular are increasingly following this call - simply because of the incalculable and far too high energy prices in this country [Germany, resulting from the drastic reduction of Russian oil and gas supplies].³

Lüders stresses the immediate economic problems that Germany has faced as a result of the sanctions against Russia including the NATO policy against relying on Russian oil and gas supplies, partially enforced by the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines (whoever the actual perpetrators were). Some of the bleak picture he paints seems to be based on conservative fears of the evils of national budget deficits. On the other hand, the EU has imposed limits on budget deficits as a percentage of GDP, based on unfounded neoliberal assumptions that have been particularly popular among German elites. The EU’s potential problems with budget deficits are largely self-imposed.

Lüders argues that the adoption of moralistic foreign policy language by German leaders appears to be causing serious self-deception on the part of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) and, in particular, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Green). He points to her visit to China in April 2023, when she scolded China in a dubious departure from usual diplomatic rhetoric. As Politico reported:

Standing beside her Chinese counterpart Qin Gang in Beijing, the German foreign minister voiced a few appreciative remarks about China’s rise to the top world powers before turning up the heat on her host.

“Many in the world are asking how China will use this growing influence,” Baerbock said at the press conference in the palatial Diaoyutai state guesthouse earlier this month. “I have to say frankly, I wonder why the Chinese position has so far not included a call upon the aggressor Russia to stop the war.”

Along with Baerbock’s broadside against Beijing over its (not-so-indirect) support for Russia’s war in Ukraine came warnings to China that an escalation against Taiwan would amount to “a horror scenario,” as well as criticism over Chinese human rights violations. What had started friendly quickly descended into a tense meeting, with Qin snapping back: “What China needs least is a schoolmaster from the West.”⁴

The world of China ascending

Very much the foreign-policy “realist,” Lüders positions his criticisms of German leaders in the context of the geopolitical situation in which the US is no longer the dominant “unipolar” superpower it was after 1989-91; China is the rising economic and political power; Russia has recovered from the collapse of the 1990s and has started a war in Europe; and, the European Union remains a significant force that is more than a loose confederation but less than a unified federal entity that can act as a single nation can.

With the Russia-Ukraine War, Europe is currently tied more tightly to the leadership and defense capabilities of the US, and is largely following its lead in foreign policy to an unusual degree. Though France hasn’t given up Gaullist aspirations for greater European independence of the US. And NATO ally Turkey is maintaining diplomatic flexibility in dealing with Russia and extracting concessions from its not-yet-partners in the EU. But the war and the NATO sanctions have also driven Russia and China into a closer relationship than at any time since the early 1950s, though this time it’s China rather than Russia in the senior role.

Lüders argues that for Germany to regain the diplomatic flexibility it showed in dealing with the Soviet Union and later maintaining decent diplomatic and economic relations with Russia, it will have to focus more seriously on its own interest in maintaining good relationships with China - in realist terms, to use its relations with China to balance against the US. China is currently the biggest international trading partner of Germany (with Germany importing more than it exports). And since relations with Russia on the one side and Europe and the US on the other are currently in the toilet, Russia can’t be expected in the immediate future to actively side with the US or Europe to balance against China.

Meanwhile, nuclear proliferation and the climate crisis are critical and very present problems that can’t be solved without the mutual cooperation among the US, Europe, Russia, and China. And those solutions need to be put in motion now, not years or decades from now.

Ukraine and Taiwan

Lüders reviews the history of NATO expansion and Russia’s reaction to it, and its role in Russian policy toward Ukraine, in particular. The “realist” and “restrainer” schools of foreign policy analysis have generally argued that the US underestimated the real risks of NATO enlargement. John Mearsheimer has been particularly prominent among that group.⁵

But for Ukraine hawks and New Cold Warriors, any suggestion that NATO expansion was in any way an influence on Russia’s Ukraine policy is just Russian propaganda or the talk of “Putin sympathizers” (Putin-Versteher in the sarcastic German term.) And, of course, it is blasphemy against the sacred gospel of the Rules-Based International Order - as defined primarily by Washington.

But it’s also denial of reality. Yes, Russia’s invasion and annexations in Ukraine are violations of international law and do represent a danger for the stability and security of national borders in Europe. But since the US and the former Soviet Union began negotiating over German unification in 1989, the topic of NATO expansion has been a central concern of NATO governments and those of aspiring NATO countries and also for the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Mary Elise Sarotte has described that process in detail in her book Not One Inch.⁶ As she wrote an earlier article, “The evidence demonstrates that contrary to the conventional wisdom in Washington, the issue of NATO's future in not only East Germany but also eastern Europe arose soon after the Berlin Wall opened, as early as February 1990.”⁷

In the post-1989 era, the US and Russia were the countries with the primary burden of practical (and moral!) responsibility to seek long-term stability and cooperation, with less militarization of the East-West relationship. The tragedy element of the realist outlook would suggest that the international system of nation-states creates enormous pressure for large powers to preserve and expand their power in that system. But we are where we are today, with a new Russia-vs.-the West dynamic that is considerably more dangerous to both sides than the situation was in 1989, or 2000, or 2008, or 2014. There were decisions made on both side which may look like an inevitable chain of events in retrospect. But other options were both possible and were considered in real time that potentially could have produced more desirable results.

The US and China are in a military buildup against each other, and Lüders describes that large-scale process. Taiwan, which the US officially recognizes as part of China under the “One-China” policy that goes back to the Nixon Administration, is central in that confrontation.

Lüders also writes about other points of conflict of the US with China. “The real geopolitical flashpoint, however, is Taiwan. This is where the US is seeking a test of strength with China.”⁸

The US political and foreign policy establishments need to learn something from the road to the Russia-Ukraine War. And attempt to avoid a replay with China and Taiwan.

*****

Michael Lüders⁹ in a German presentation about the great power competition:

1. Charap, Samuel & Priebe, Miranda (2023): Avoiding a Long War: U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict. RAND Corporation Jan 2023. <https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html> (Accessed: 2023-05-08).

2. Anderson, Nicholas & Cha, Victor (2017): The Case of the Pivot to Asia: System Effects and the Origins of Strategy. Political Science Quarterly 132:4 (Winter 2017-18), 595-617. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/45175868> (Accessed: 2023-08-08).

Ross, Robert (2012): Problem With the Pivot: Obama's New Asia Policy Is Unnecessary and Counterproductive. Foreign Affairs 91:6. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/41720935> (Accessed: 2023-08-08).

3. Lüders, Michael (2023): Moral Über Alles? Warum sich Werte und nationale Interessen selten vertragen, 244. München: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag. My translation from the German.

4. Von der Burchard, Hans (2023): Germany’s sharp-tongued Annalena Baerbock rips up the diplomatic playbook. Politico EU 04/24/2023. <https://www.politico.eu/article/annalena-baerbock-germany-rip-diplomatic-playbook/> (Accessed: 2023-24-04).

5. Mearsheimer, John (2014): Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin. Foreign Affairs 93:5, 77-88. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483306> (Accessed: 2023-08-08).

6. Sarotte, M.E. (2021): Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

7. Sarotte, Mary Elise (2014): A Broken Promise? What the West Really Told Moscow About NATO Expansion. Foreign Affairs 93:5, 89-97. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483307> (Accessed: 2023-08-08).

8. Lüders, Michael op.cit., p. 218. My translation from the German.

9. Lüders, Michael (2023): Konfrontation mit Russland und China um jeden Preis? Michael Lüders YouTube channel 08/03/2023.