The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - A New Wave of German Strategic Defense Policy

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

When your country's history has more than one tally mark next to the category - "World Wars Started" - it makes sense to avoid any form of strategic defense policy. Former German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht did just that. She wasn't a skilled defense policymaker. She wasn't a military strategist. And that's exactly what Germany needed...until now.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/a-new-wave-of-german-strategic-defense-policy

Hey, everyone, Peter Zion here, coming to you from Colorado. I'm inside the day because it's way too cold to be outside. It's actually humid, which is weird. Anyway, this is Pandor. She's my copy editor. Today, the big news is that the German defense minister, a woman by the name of Christine Lambrecht, has finally resigned her position. Now, Lambrick is not somebody with defense experience. She's a politico. She has been up relatively high in Germany's Social Democratic Party, which is a center-left party for decades. So it's not that she's a nobody. It's just she doesn't have a lot of skills that are appropriate to her current portfolio. This has not been a problem. In fact, her specific, deliberate, intentional incompetence in defense matters in many ways was seen by the SPD as a plus because until we got to the point that the Germans were reformulating, oh, you take it off

candy? Okay. Until we got to the point that the Germans were reformulating everything because of the Ukraine war, the general position in Germany as a whole and specifically in the SPD was that the defense ministry itself is unnecessary. That in the aftermath of the Cold War, the threat to Germany is gone. And while we find that a little bit naive, you have to look at it from the German point of view. whenever Germany has had to act in order to protect its own interests, things have gotten a little out of hand. The German state is in a bit of a geopolitical pressure cooker. It is surrounded by rivals and potential rivals. And in any era where the Germans have felt it's necessary to have a defense ministry,

they've discovered that being surrounded and having a defense force that's worthy of the name generally triggers a lot of angst everywhere. And so you get one of two things. Either all the countries surrounding Germany gang up on it in order to put it in a box, in which case Germany loses a catastrophic war, or the Germans act preemptively in order to remove some of those potential rivals from the scene, in which case you get a war that ultimately puts Germany in a box. And whipping back and forth be these two extremes has been absolutely horrible for the Germans.

So for the Germans, the post-Cold War environment in Europe has been the best it's ever been. You're talking about a golden age because NATO has provided defense, but all the countries that border Germany are either neutral like Switzerland or are members of NATO, which is basically everyone else. And in that sort of environment, the Germans can kind of dither and become pacifist socialist, which, to be perfectly blunt, looking at the long stretch of German history, is much, much, much, much, much, much better. for everyone than the alternative.

Now, Lambert, anyway, was put in charge of the defense ministry to basically continue slowly sliding it into functional oblivion. The Germans have been spending less and less on defense for years ever since 1992. And basically, the unofficial goal with Lambert is to make the military a non-thing. Well, that doesn't work in an environment where the Russians are back on the war path, and the Germans need to be starting thinking not just about 20th century military strategy, but 19th century military strategy. And Lambert was completely unprepared,

professionally, personally, and ideologically for this sort of shift. And so when the government decided to basically double the size of the defense budget, she had no personal experience, professional experience, and how to do that. And the result was a series of policy mishaps. She also had a lot of the built-in distrust for the United States that comes from the German center left, which really doesn't like the idea that the United States rights,

German defense policy to a degree, which obviously clashes with the goal of getting rid of the defense ministry altogether. So there wasn't really anything about the current environment where she was an appropriate candidate anymore. The strategy had changed, the reality had changed, the geopolitics had changed, and she hadn't. So obviously she had to go. The question now is what else goes with her? The Germans have been very reticent to provide top-tier military technology to the Ukrainians, not because they don't want the Ukrainians to ultimately win the war, but because the German position in this space has been specifically to avoid a military conflict, and that goes back to before 1992. The Germans have always known that if there was a military conflict of size, they would

obviously be drawn in. And in a world where they are trying to make up for the sins of the past, having any sort of proactive military policy digrates against everything that they have been raised to believe since 1946. They're dealing with a change in circumstance, and that's uncomfortable, and that is grading, even without the ideology. But now we're nearing an environment where the Russians are not just mobilizing, but mobilizing in force. They're finally beginning significant industrial upgrades.

They're finally starting to turn out missiles and ammo and tanks in numbers, and they are finally doing a full-scale mobilization. This isn't the 300,000 that they did a few weeks ago. We're talking about at least another half a million men likely being in the theater within a very few number of months. And so by the time we get to May and June, the Russian military is going to look very different. And in that environment, especially with this lead-up, where the Russians aren't quite ready for big offensive operations,

where they're lobbying missiles and drones into civilian infrastructure, it's really cracking through the ice and the German political discussion on what a strategic policy means. And that means more and better equipment is going to be going to Ukraine. And Lombrick, the former defense minister, was part of an obstacle system that prevented that from happening. Now she's gone. So we're probably going to be seen movement in Berlin on things like leopard tanks.

Now, the leopard tank is one of the top two tank systems that exist in Europe, the other one being the M1 Abrams from the United States. and there are a large number of NATO countries specifically in Europe that have a relatively large fleet of these tanks in storage or in use. And they are probably the easiest ones for the Ukrainians to absorb in numbers. So there are a number of countries, specifically Denmark and Poland, who have been pressuring the Germans in order to allow them to take these exported tanks and then send them on to Ukraine.

That requires Berlin's approval. and Berlin to this point has been demurring. But the coalition now involves almost every single country that the Germans have sold the leopards to. And so all of a sudden, with Lambert gone, all of this is in motion. And I think we're going to see the Germans relent on at least letting other countries send their leopards

within a very short number of weeks because these tanks have to be absorbed by the Ukrainian military before we get to that May and June offensive and so time is running out. We'll then have a conversation in Germany about strategic policy. And so probably in February and March, the Germans themselves are going to publicly decide whether or not they are going to contribute their own leopards and spin up their own industrial complex so that more leopards can be made and refurbished to get into the fight as

well. But that's a conversation for another day. First step is simply removing the obstacle that prevents other countries from sending their tanks on. I think we're going to see a movement on that very, very, very soon. All right, that's it for me. Until next time.