Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has begun warning Germans to prepare for decades of confrontation with Russia — and to quickly rebuild the country’s military in case Vladimir V. Putin doesn’t plan to stop at the Ukrainian border.
The Russian military, he said in a series of recent interviews with German media, is fully engaged in Ukraine. But if there is a truce and Mr Putin, Russia’s president, has a few years to restore it, he believes the Russian leader will consider testing NATO unity.
“Nobody knows how or if this is going to last,” Mr Pistorius said of the current war, arguing for a rapid build-up in the size of the German military and renewal of its arsenal.
Mr Pistorius’ public warnings reflect a major change at the highest levels of leadership in a country that has eschewed a powerful military since the end of the Cold War. Alarm is growing, but the German public remains convinced that the security of Germany and Europe has been fundamentally threatened by a newly aggressive Russia.
The position of defense minister in Germany is often a political dead end. But Mr Pistorius’ status as one of the country’s most popular politicians has given him a freedom to speak that others – including his boss, Chancellor Olaf Soltz – do not enjoy.
As Mr. Scholz prepares to meet President Biden at the White House on Friday, many in the German government say there is no return to business as usual with Mr. Putin’s Russia, that they expect little progress this year in Ukraine and that they fear consequences if Mr. Putin prevails there.
Those fears have now been mixed with talk of what will happen to NATO if former President Donald J. Trump is elected and given a second chance to act on his instinct to pull the United States out of the alliance.
The prospect of a re-elected Mr. Trump has German officials and many of their NATO colleagues discussing informally whether the nearly 75-year-old alliance structure they plan to celebrate in Washington this year can survive without the United States at its center. Many German officials say Mr. Putin’s best strategic hope is to break up NATO.
Especially for Germans, it’s a surprising reversal of thought. Just a year ago NATO was celebrating a new sense of purpose and unity, and many confidently predicted that Mr. Putin was on the run.
But now, with an unreliable America, an aggressive Russia and a struggling China, as well as a seemingly dead-end war in Ukraine and a deeply unpopular conflict in Gaza, German officials are beginning to talk about the emergence of a new, complex and disturbing world. , with serious consequences for European and transatlantic security.
Their immediate concern is growing pessimism that the United States will continue to fund Ukraine’s fight, even as Germany, the second-largest contributor, has agreed to double its contribution this year, to about $8.5 billion.
Now some of Mr Pistorius’s colleagues are warning that if US funding dries up and Russia prevails, its next target will be closer to Berlin.
“If Ukraine were forced to surrender, that would not satisfy Russia’s hunger for power,” German intelligence chief Bruno Kahl said last week. “If the West does not show a clear readiness to defend, Putin will not have no reason not to attack NATO now.”
But when pressed about a possible conflict with Russia or the future of NATO, German politicians speak carefully.
In the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, most Germans have grown accustomed to the notion that the country’s security would be assured by working with Russia, not against it, and that China is an indispensable partner with a critical market for German cars and equipment. .
Even today, Mr. Scholz, a Social Democrat whose party has traditionally sought decent ties with Moscow, seems reluctant to discuss the much more confrontational future with Russia or China that German defense and intelligence chiefs so vividly describe.
With the exception of Mr Pistorius, little known before he was chosen to lead the defense ministry a year ago, few politicians will address the issue publicly. Mr. Scholz is particularly cautious, leaning toward Germany’s relationship with the United States and wary of putting too much pressure on Russia and its unpredictable president.
Two years ago, he heralded a new era for Germany — a “Zeitenwende,” or historic turning point, in German security policy, one he said would be marked by a major shift in spending and strategic thinking. He fulfilled his promise to allocate an additional 100 billion euros for military spending over four years.
This year, for the first time, Germany will spend 2 percent of its gross domestic product on the military, meeting a target agreed by all NATO countries in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but which most experts warn is now very low. . And Germany has pledged to bolster NATO’s eastern flank against Russia, pledging to permanently station a brigade in Lithuania by 2027.
In other ways, however, Mr. Scholz proceeded with great caution. He has opposed — along with Mr. Biden — setting a timetable for Ukraine’s eventual entry into the alliance.
The most vivid example of his reticence is his continued refusal to provide Ukraine with a long-range, air-launched cruise missile called the Taurus.
Last year, Britain and France gave Ukraine its closest equivalent, the Storm Shadow/SCALP, and it has been used to destroy Russian ships in Crimean ports — and to force Russia to withdraw its fleet. Mr. Biden reluctantly agreed to provide Ukraine in the fall with the ATACMS, a similar missile, albeit with a range limited to about 100 miles.
The Taurus has a range of over 300 miles, meaning Ukraine could use it to strike deep into Russia. And Mr. Scholz is not willing to take that chance — and neither is the country’s Bundestag, which voted down a resolution calling for the move. While the decision appears to be in line with German opinion, Mr Scholz wants to avoid the issue.
But if he remains reluctant to push Mr Putin too hard, it is a caution the Germans share.
Polls show that Germans want to see a more capable German army. But only 38 percent of respondents said they wanted their country to be more involved in international crises, the lowest since the question began being asked in 2017, according to the Körber Foundation, which conducted the survey. Of that group, 76 percent said engagement should be primarily diplomatic, and 71 percent were against a German military leadership role in Europe.
German military officials recently caused a bit of an outcry when they suggested that the country should be ready for “kriegstüchtig,” which roughly translates to the ability to fight and win a war.
Norbert Röttgen, an opposition lawmaker and foreign policy expert with the Christian Democrats, said the term was seen as a “rhetorical overreach” and was quickly dropped.
“Soltz always said that ‘Ukraine must not lose, but Russia must not win,’ which showed that he was always thinking of an impasse that would lead to a diplomatic process,” Mr. Rotgen said. “He sees Russia as more important than all the countries between us and them, and he lacks the European feel and his potential role as a European leader.”
Mr Röttgen and other critics of Mr Scholz believe he is missing a historic opportunity to lead the creation of a European defense capability far less dependent on the US military and nuclear deterrent.
But Mr Scholz is clearly more comfortable relying heavily on Washington, and senior German officials say he does not particularly trust Emmanuel Macron, the French president, who has championed European “strategic autonomy”. Mr Macron has found few followers on the continent.
Even Mr Scholz’s main European defense initiative, a coordinated ground-based air defense against ballistic missiles known as Sky Shield, depends on a mix of US, US-Israeli and German missile systems. This has angered the French, Italians, Spanish and Poles, who have not joined, arguing that an Italian-French system should have been used.
Mr Scholz’s ambitions are also hampered by his increasingly weak economy. It shrank 0.3 percent last year and about the same is expected in 2024. The cost of the war in Ukraine and China’s economic problems — which hit the auto and manufacturing sectors hardest — have compounded the problem.
While Mr. Scholz acknowledges that the world has changed, “he is not saying that we have to change with it,” said Ulrich Speck, a German analyst.
“It says the world has changed and we’re going to protect you,” Mr Speck said.
But doing so may well require much more military spending—more than 3 percent of Germany’s gross domestic product. For now, few in Mr. Scholz’s party dare to suggest we go that far.
Germans, even Social Democrats, “have realized that Germany lives in the real world and that hard power matters,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a Europe expert at Georgetown University.
“At the same time,” he said, “there is still this hope that this is all just a bad dream and the Germans will wake up and go back to the old world.”
