Hiding Behind The Americans

Now that outcome no longer seems so ensured. "The Left Party has veto power over German politics right now," says Jan Techau, head of European policy at the German Council on Foreign Relations. With national elections next year, Merkel is still shellshocked by the experience of 2002, when Schröder snatched a last-minute victory by playing the highly popular "peace card" against the American buildup to Iraq. The much deeper problem—with effects reaching far beyond next year's election—is that the German political class has consistently lacked the courage to explain to a deeply pacifist and isolationist public that the country's security and prosperity might come with a price, says Techau. "Instead of debating what's at stake in Afghanistan and how the alliance should deal with an increasingly difficult security situation, our leadership has held up the illusion that we can get by and even 'shape globalization' with humanitarian missions," he says.

Exhibit A in reality avoidance: the Bundeswehr, which remains vastly underfinanced and underequipped. Germany spends only 1.5 percent of its GDP on its military, compared with Britain's 2.4 percent, France's 2.6 percent and America's 4.1 percent. In Afghanistan, German troops lack state-of-the-art field communications and depend on Ukrainian planes to transport equipment. At closer look, even the humanitarian efforts on which German politicians take such pride are underfinanced and poorly coordinated. Germany has declared itself the lead nation for building up Afghanistan's police force. Yet it has sent no more than a few dozen trainers; the United States outspends the Germans on police training alone almost 50 to 1, according to a recent report by RAND. Three years after the EU determined that German, British and Italian efforts to build up the courts and police were running wastefully side by side, there has been virtually no progress on effective coordination, says Daniel Kurski at the London-based European Council for Foreign Relations. He calls Afghanistan "Europe's Forgotten War."

Germany may be the European power with the deepest isolationist tendencies, but there is little indication that other European countries are much more bold. Take the EU's expansion to the east and south. Here lie Europe's closest geostrategic challenges: how to stabilize its eastern frontier, North Africa, Turkey and beyond. Yet the debate seems to be driven by fear of immigrants and the dangers of open borders. "The Europeans are still very far from being able to order their environment," says John Kornblum, former U.S. ambassador to Germany and now an executive at Lazard in Berlin. "Europe sits there, naked in the world, dependent on global stability to export its products and import its resources. It sees a decaying world all around but cannot analyze the security issues involved, let alone act." As long as the geopolitics of Germany and its neighbors are constrained by populism and fear, that's not going to change any time soon.

© 2008