Current German foreign policy

It no longer requires any intellectual effort to recognize the fatal failure of German foreign policy since 2022. With the so-called Zeitenwende of that year, the turning point, elements of German foreign policy that had made Germany a respected and recognized player in international relations in recent decades have been abandoned: the peace imperative enshrined in the Basic Law, the German commitment to dialogue, moderation, and understanding, the will to establish good neighbourly relations across all dividing lines.

Today, the European continent is dominated by the old friend-or-foe mentality, which was effectively announced by the renewed military tensions that have followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. What was an almost universally shared hope during the process of German unification, the development of a “common European home”, as Gorbachev memorably put it, has failed.

German submission

Instead of uniting the Continent, Germany and the European Union submitted to the American claim to hegemony, which is presented as the defence of the so-called “rules-based order”. The “turning point” was accompanied by the adoption of a militaristic foreign policy and a confrontational economic policy. Since then, Germany has been a vassal of the US in its, America’s, struggle to halt its global political decline as the only remaining superpower. Germany has thus tied itself politically to the declining power in the major geopolitical changes of our time and deprived itself of the ability to act independently.
  Germany became incapable of playing an active mediating role in the early negotiations to end the war in Ukraine in spring 2022, as well as opposing an open-ended escalation of the war. Even now, in the face of a foreseeable military defeat in Ukraine, Germany continues to march along on the general course of war.
  It is by no means certain today whether or not our country will enter into direct war against Russia, as the U.S., Great Britain, and France have done not only by approving Ukraine’s use of long-range Western weapons against Russian territory, but also by directing and controlling the use of these weapons on the ground. This means that the threshold for direct military confrontation between two nuclear powers has long since been crossed with one foot.
  What was long considered a conspiracy theory or Russian disinformation has now become an undisguised reality. Ukraine is the proxy warrior against Russia, and as it weakens, the NATO states are throwing themselves into the breach to achieve the actual objective of the war, the permanent weakening of Russia.
  Even the Russian test of a hypersonic weapon against Ukraine did not force  the European NATO members off their course. Only the US was informed that this missile would be conventionally equipped. From Moscow’s point of view, it may be logical that it is enough to inform only the master and not the servants. From a German and E.U. perspective, it exposes the insignificance into which they have maneuvered themselves. German politicians and the vast majority of media are also singing the song of the Russian nuclear bluff in unison, as if the Continent, which could possibly be the first to be devastated by nuclear weapons, is located in a parallel universe for which they bear no political responsibility.
  For this was long since discarded when one joined the chorus of those who declared everything the Russian side announced to be bluff, lies and imperial spite, and surrendered to the neo-liberal war frenzy. The counterpart to this is the hysteria with which a Russian attack on NATO territory is painted on the wall, because Putin denied it.
  As a result, there was no decisive opposition from Germany to the US decision to supply anti-personnel mines to Ukraine to slow down the Russian advance in the Donbas and increase casualties. These weapons are outlawed by the majority in the international community, and for good reason [because they aim to injure and maim their victims to overwhelm the medical support system of enemy forces and to demoralize them; the editor]. Ukraine has also ratified the relevant convention. But it now turns out that the Ukrainian government, which carried the war into the Donbas regions in April 2014, gave itself a free pass to use such weapons in this territory if necessary. Where was and is the German protest?

Double standards

The handling of the International Criminal Court whose formation the EU strongly supported, is now also characterised by double standards. The court’s arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin for alleged war crimes, issued 17 March 2023, was found to be correct. The issuing of arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the Israeli prime minister and his former defence minister, was not part of the Western plan: In the “rules-based order”, the villains are always the others. Allies do not commit alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
  It is good and logical that Germany, due to its history, has a historical obligation toward the Jewish people, but this includes a responsibility toward all Jewish fellow citizens in our country. This historical obligation has become an empty formula because the genocide of the Holocaust did not lead to the realisation that all victims of any presumed genocide need our protection. It seems that German political perception has become deaf and blind to the deliberate announcements and responsibility of Israeli politicians for atrocities against Palestinian civilians.
  This is how Germany and the entire EU have failed. Now there is even a question as to whether we have become accomplices as a result of the mistaken historical deduction, which has led to unquestioning support and arms deliveries to Israel. And no, it is not anti-Semitic to subject Israeli policy to the same standards of assessment under international law as all other states. International law does not recognise any nation’s claim to exceptionalism. Just as it is not anti-American to apply the same yardstick with which one condemns the Russian aggression against Ukraine to decisions made by the US, to NATO, or, more generally, to Western activities vis-à-vis the so-called “rest” of the world. This reveals the duplicity, hypocrisy, and resistance to inevitable change that characterise the West’s international relations today.

Lost credibility

As a result, we are now sitting on two nuclear powder kegs, one in Europe and one in West Asia. A third, in the Indo-Pacific region, has long been in the making.
  Along the way, we have lost a great deal in the eyes of many states and peoples;  German credibility and also a long-standing trust in Germany’s peace policy have also declined. Who will sweep up the broken pieces and try to create new trust and give dialogue and understanding a chance? Can we expect this from German politics, from the broken coalition government? Which parties and personalities have the stature and courage to break out of the bondage of the U.S. and to stand up vocally and clearly against further escalation of war so that the danger of nuclear degeneration can be averted?
  It is no longer 90 seconds before the end of the world, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, first launched by Einstein, predicted at the beginning of 2024. Without determined cooperation between the US, Russia, and China, the clock is ticking inexorably toward the end of civilisation. This is the reality that we no longer want to see due to ideological blindness and war-mongering.
  The domestic political price for the changed, highly ideologized and militarised foreign policy is very high. Friend-or-foe thinking in foreign policy, along with  hybrid warfare, are also changing the situation in our country. Society is becoming more divided, more hateful, more silent. At the same time, authoritarian temptations to suppress possible dissent are growing.
  It didn’t all start with the Zeitenwende. As early as 2019, a survey by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research found that only around 18 per cent of Germans express themselves freely in public, while 59 per cent still do so among friends. At that time, there was already a feeling that there were unwritten laws and taboos on some political topics that imposed limits on what could be said. In 2023, the institute stated that more Germans believe they can no longer speak freely than vice versa. This is a threat to democracy, of which freedom of opinion is a constituent element. Anyone who refers to the legal protection in the Basic Law in this context and therefore understands the whole thing as merely a “feeling” does not understand the creeping erosion that our country is experiencing.
  Freedom of opinion is eroded when politicians and media attack dissidents or pose as authorities of absolute truth. Thinking is increasingly “supervised”, democratic discourse vigorously discouraged. This goes hand in hand with a loss of the reality attaching  to words and ideas, so that language no longer corresponds to facts or the actual course of events.
  This is causing more damage in our country than the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian hybrid warfare that has long been suspected everywhere could ever achieve. Because just as democracy can be neither exported nor imported, it cannot be destroyed from outside without violence. Apart from war, coups, or other sorts of “regime change” operations, the work of destruction always takes place internally. It does not proceed from the bottom up, but is set in motion when the democratic claim that all power (“state power”) comes from the people degenerates. This is the price of the chosen neoliberal foreign policy, which was not determined in elections but proclaimed from the pulpit as a Zeitenwende.
  Its most recent equivalent was the courtly re-enactment of the U.S. decision to deploy medium-range weapons, including hypersonic weapons, which is to take place in Germany in 2026.
  Instead of realising that anyone who fuels the war in Ukraine is bringing the war back to Germany, Washington’s supreme warlord, President Biden, was honoured in Germany before his departure from office last month, and his personal decency – his purported decency – was portrayed as a light that shines far and wide. At the same time, it was acknowledged that Europe is now at its most dangerous moment since the Second World War. How could it come to this? In any case, leadership responsibility, human decency, or a willingness to reach an understanding have not been dominant in recent years, but the delegitimisation of diplomacy and open militarisation have, as if the “continuation of politics by other means” were the only way forward.
  In fact, this approach takes the citizens’ tax money out of their pockets, throws it down the throats of a few war profiteers, and makes life miserable and uncertain for billions, while the people of Ukraine are sacrificed (sent to the slaughter) and the ungrounded hope of defeating Russia militarily is maintained.
  This is the opposite of responsible or even morally determined policy, internally and externally alike. The only way out of this double dilemma is to overcome speechlessness and embark on the long and arduous journey toward peace, which the majority in our country, if you believe the polls, have long been demanding. •

This essay was first published in WeltTrends, Journal of International Politics, Issue 203, Winter 2024/25;
Reprinted with kind permission.

* Petra Erler, born in the G.D.R. in 1958, earned her doctorate at the Institute for International Relations at the Academy for State and Law in Potsdam. She was part of the peaceful opposition and, after the parliamentary elections in the spring of 1990, was initially a (non-partisan) advisor and member of the planning staff of Foreign Minister Markus Meckel (SDP, the Social Democratic Party of the GDR), and then as a state secretary in the office of Prime Minister Lothar de Maizière (CDU). After 3 October 1990, the date of German reunification, she worked as head of the European Commission’s policy department at the Brandenburg state representation in Bonn from 1991. In 1999, she became a member of the inner circle of Günter Verheugen, who was then an E.U. commissioner. Between 2006 and 2010, she was his head of cabinet. Since 2010, Erler has served as managing director of the European Experience, Potsdam (pe@european-experience.de). Together with Günter Verheugen, she published Der lange Weg zum Krieg. Russland, die Ukraine und der Westen – Eskalation statt Entspannung (The Long Road to War. Russia, Ukraine and the West: Escalation instead of détente), Heyne, ISBN 978-3-453-21883-3) 2024.