Germany’s hapless defense minister Christine Lambrecht resigned on Monday amid mounting pressure on her country to provide Leopard battle tanks to Kyiv. But increasingly there is a feeling that the real problem is the lack of real leadership at the top floor of the chancellery in Berlin.
Lambrecht’s job has always been the most difficult in the German cabinet: there have been nine chancellors since 1949, but her successor will become the twentieth defense minister. During the Cold War, the main task of semi-sovereign West Germany was to defend the border with communist East Germany from invasion by the Warsaw Pact countries with huge numbers of infantry and tanks. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the reunification of Germany in 1990, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR in 1991 – and 30 years of madness for Western defense ministers.
But the Germans misinterpreted the supposed “end of history” (in historian Francis Fukuyama’s phrase) and the expansion of NATO and the EU as justification for their post-war pacifism. Many representatives of the Social Democratic Party and the Greens demanded to abolish the armed forces and dissolve NATO!
Instead, al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 forced NATO to regroup for the “global war on terror”; member states were ordered to downsize and professionalize their militaries to fight expeditionary warfare around the world.
Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 forced allies to return to defending Europe and pledged – at a NATO summit in Wales – to increase their defense budgets to 2% of gross domestic product.
Most German defense ministers were content to trail the rearguard of the Western security consensus. The few who struggled to make decisions (as Lambrecht’s predecessor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer did so recently) faced a complex set of forces of inertia: the bureaucracy, generals, mayors, the defense industry, legislators and even the chancellor.
Three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave a powerful speech pledging support for Kyiv. He announced a historic turning point for Germany’s security policy and its armed forces, as well as the creation of a special investment fund of 100 billion euros. This could promise greatness for Lambrecht. But in the end, on the contrary, she may well be considered the worst defense minister of her country, indifferent to a series of mistakes and rude to the point of harshness. The failure lies not only with Lambrecht, but also with Scholz, who stubbornly refused to acknowledge the disasters in the Ministry of Defense. Nor will responsibility for solving the problems fall solely on her successor Boris Pistorius, Lower Saxony’s interior minister, who is respected and close to Scholz but has no defense experience.
Scholz came to power promising change for a Germany rich and complacent during its long peace. Now he must operate amid the worst security crisis Europe has seen since 1945.
Berlin has achieved the feat of completely decoupling from Russian fossil fuel imports in less than a year. On defense, his successes are much less impressive. Puma combat vehicles promised by NATO turned out to be defective. Germany gave Kyiv powerful, effective weapons – but always belatedly and reluctantly; and she is still holding on to the Leopard tanks that the Zelensky government wants.
Thirteen NATO member states use German-made Leopard tanks, giving Berlin a veto over their exports. Poland and Finland have already announced that they want to send some of theirs to Ukraine. The UK promises to give a few of its own. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is expected in Berlin in the next few days on the eve of a key meeting of Ukraine’s Western military suppliers in Ramstein. It is difficult to imagine further refusals from Germany.
Horrific footage of a Russian rocket attack on a residential building in Dnipro raises the stakes, and not just for Ukraine. Scholz had no intention of becoming wartime chancellor. But now it is the work by which history will judge him.