A 10 Point Plan for Germany’s Geopolitical Renaissance
Germany’s leadership and population were shocked awake by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. Germany is not hard-wired for Russophobia the way America seems to be; it has long sought balance and engagement in its relationship with Russia. Moreover, Germany’s shame and regret over the German armed forces’ slaughter of 27 million Soviet citizens from 1941–45, and gratitude to the Gorbachev regime’s permission for the reunification of the remaining German lands in 1991, coupled with the realist recognition that tussling with the Russians cannot result in any good outcomes, have for decades led German politicians to emphasize dialogue rather than confrontation with Russia.
But in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany abruptly changed gears. It now sees Russia under “Putler” as a genuine threat. On February 27, three days after the Russian invasion, during a special session of the Bundestag (Germany’s Parliament), Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany’s annual military spending would immediately increase from about 1.4% of GDP in 2020 to at least 2.0% — and that’s not including a special fund for buying military hardware of €100 billion (about $110 billion at current exchange rates). In short: Germany is going to re-arm. It will soon have the third-highest level of military expenditure in the world, although it will still be far less than that of the USA or China, and it still will not have its own nuclear weapons.
What should Germany spend that money on — and what should it NOT spend money on? And what should the geostrategic perspective be that guides that spending? In what follows, I’ll provide several suggestions, from my perspective as a journalist and policy analyst who has lived in Germany for the past ten years.
Goals
Germany’s grand strategy should be oriented towards leading the world in the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which include promotion of peace, prosperity, health, climate stability and biodiversity conservation. A key thrust of Germany’s grand strategy should be to actively wage peace on a global basis and to lead the world in global health, climate stabilisation, clean technology deployment, and ecological restoration initiatives.
It should also be oriented towards empowering the European Union and its institutions, not least the Euro currency, which should become a key instrument of power projection not only within Europe, but also globally, especially in Africa, the continent whose burgeoning population Europe will become increasingly engaged with as the century wears on.
Let’s look at some of the broad priorities and possible instruments consistent with this SDG and EU focused Grand Strategy.
Strategies
1. Germany should seek to strengthen the European Union’s unity, economic integration, prosperity, food security, and technological autarky (especially in terms of electronics and energy), and enhance the EU’s ability to exercise both hard and soft power by means of common European institutions, freed of the requirement for unanimous consent for policy initiatives from every member-nation government.
For this to be possible, Germany should propose to give the European Union a limited right of direct taxation and the European Parliament a limited ability to initiate legislation, and the European institutions should be able to agree on policy actions as long as a consensus of national governments representing at least two-thirds of the EU’s population is achieved. The rule that unanimous consent is required from every one of the EU’s member nations before any significant action is taken is absurd and it must end. Europe will not be able to unfold its potential or achieve economic and political security unless this changes.
2. A key goal is to reduce Europe’s and Germany’s dependence on the United States for the continent’s military defense, given that Donald Trump or some other unpredictable nationalist with a zero-sum worldview on global affairs may soon return to power in Washington. This means Germany should increasingly integrate its defense with European partners, above all France, Italy, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and preferably with Poland as well, provided Poland recommits to liberal democratic norms and institutions and that its government and military can be restrained from adopting an unnecessarily provocative stance vis-à-vis Russia.
3. Germany should build global citizen engagement institutions that develop communications and cooperation channels between citizens of different countries in ways that cannot readily be censored or interrupted by authoritarian governments.
The strategy for managing relations with Russia in particular should include counteracting Russian government propaganda and brainwashing, which seeks to mischaracterise the nature of central and western European societies in the minds of Russians as “enemies” of Russia, decadent, weak, unhinged by bizarre postmodernist ideology, and somehow populated largely by transgendered pedophiles. Active measures to counter-message such nonsense are badly needed now that the Kremlin has ended Russian media freedom almost entirely. Germany and Europe should invest in top-quality free media and social media channels which Russian citizens can access without interference from their governments, far more actively than they have done to date, and propagate these globally. For example, Germany could fund non-propagandistic top-quality journalism for propagation via the Telegram social media app.
Germany’s strategy should include funding institutions tasked with active outreach to the citizens and institutions of badly governed and authoritarian countries, to promote understanding, build cooperation, and engage them in constructive initiatives guided by the UN SDGs. Rigid ostracism and reliance on heavily armed deterrence are not going to work in maintaining peace or resolving conflicts in the long term. Engagement and promotion of benign metamorphosis is necessary, even in relation to countries with truly vile governments.
4. Peace-building efforts should include shared multilateral initiatives involving of people from Europe, Russia, China and other advanced Asian nations together with indigenous people working in integrated teams contributing to development projects in least-developed nations. Some of these teams could be civilian, along the lines of a German-funded International Peace Corps whose members are drawn from countries around the world, and others could be military units deployed for civilian SDG project development in least-developed countries. For the latter, imagine an institution called SDG Engineering Corps that is like a hybrid between the US Army Corps of Engineers, France’s Foreign Legion, and Engineers/Doctors/Nurses Without Borders: i.e. an integrated multinational force composed of mixed teams of soldiers trained for civilian technical duties and civil-military cooperation, deployed to least-developed countries to work on infrastructure projects and SDG-related services.
Add to this joint global educational initiatives, e.g. via the establishment of at least three generously funded top-quality global universities: one situated in Germany, another in Africa, and another in Asia, which bring together talented young people from around the world — including especially people from non-democratic countries — to build personal relationships and understanding. The alumni of these explicitly global universities may become the diplomats, policy-makers, and businesspeople whose personal friendships and network relationships, rooted in shared experiences and equipped with an excellent education in SDG-inspired peace-building skills will, later in the present century, prevent wars, resolve conflicts, and contribute solutions.
6. Germany and Europe should lead the world in climate stabilisation policy measures. The key metric should be prevention of sea level rise — and that means doing what’s necessary to prevent the Arctic ocean from going ice-free and the Greenland, West Antarctic, and Wilkes Basin Ice Sheets from continuing to melt away. Those ice sheets are nearing nonlinear thresholds in their physical ice mass loss dynamics, or “tipping points,” beyond which they will irreversibly continue to melt away no matter what we do. If that occurs, we’re facing at least 15 meters (50 feet) of sea level rise over several decades or centuries, and we’ll eventually lose our coastal cities — London, Mumbai, New York, Boston, Seattle, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Tokyo, Jakarta, among many other cities; we’ll lose the entire coastal belt of China under the waves, with its densely populated industrial coastal cities; and we will also lose entire countries, including the Netherlands and Vietnam, amongst others.
There is a menu of actions that need to be taken during the 2020s to prevent these physical dynamics from going past the point of no return. Germany is in a good position to be a global leader in taking the necessary measures, which include (i) rapid deployment of clean energy supply chains — not only within Europe, but worldwide, at a profit, by means of a European Clean Energy Investment Fund, (ii) funding the development and deployment of “negative emissions” technologies (also known as “carbon dioxide removal” or “CDR” technologies) for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and oceans and permanently re-sequestering them in mineral form, by means of a German and European policy campaign advocating for the creation of an IMF-managed and SDR-issuance-funded Global CDR Fund (SDR=Special Drawing Rights) to fund a global competitive market of at least ca. €100 billion annually in CDR projects, and (iii) building an international consensus in favour of deployment ASAP of solar radiation management (SRM) measures to ensure that the Arctic Ocean doesn’t go ice-free (if it does go ice-free, what will certainly result is radical global climate disruption and the onset of accelerating, irreversible ice mass loss dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet, leading to 7 meters (23 ft) of sea level rise from that source alone).
7. Together with European Union partners, especially France, Germany should expand its green-tech industrial development activities worldwide, guided by the SDGs. This can be implemented where appropriate by means of negotiating the establishment of Special Economic Zones in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, in which contracts are governed by EU regulations. The enormous power of the Euro has until now been underused; just as there is a global dollar banking system (“Eurodollar” market), there is the potential for the Euro to function as the basis for financial instruments and innovations that could extend EU financial and economic power southward. Germany should invest massively — and on a net basis profitably — in key measures for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals in Africa and in the poorer countries of the Middle East and South Asia. If this is not done, by mid-century the geostrategic challenge from Russia will come to seem trivial in comparison with that of billions of desperate, poorly educated people striving to leave chaotic, ill-governed countries made unlivable by overheating, poverty, and overpopulation. Vast populations will attempt to migrate northward into Europe unless they have good prospects at home. Well-meaning gestures and drop-in-a-bucket aid budgets are not enough. A systematic “Aufbau Süd” (Build Up the South) geoeconomic strategy is needed that makes use of innovative Euro-linked financial mechanisms and harnesses the technological capacity of European industry to the productive potential of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian populations to build prosperity in the Global South.
8. Germany should lead the world in building a global network of ecological reserves, prioritizing the world’s poorest countries which lack the governance capacity and will to achieve effective nature conservation by themselves. This could entail imposing a modest “biodiversity user fee” on European consumers of commodities, levied through a small (e.g. 5%) surcharge on every ton of nature-based commodity at the point of production or import: e.g. every ton of wheat produced in Europe or cacao or palm oil imported from overseas. These surcharges would be entirely at the expense of Europe, not of producer countries, and thus would not entail any downside for the economies and citizens of the latter. On the contrary: the money raised from Biodiversity User Fees levied in Europe would be collected into a Global Biodiversity Conservation Fund and from there, dispensed to the most effective nature conservation NGOs in developing countries with the approval of their governments and under contracts that ensure conservation measures are co-designed and implemented by local and indigenous people, to their benefit.
9. In regards to military technology, Germany should avoid making the mistake of spending vast amounts of money on yesterday’s weapons technologies — although the temptation to do so will be great, since major German weapons manufacturers are specialized in producing these. In particular, German politicians will be lobbied to buy battle tanks. However, they might just as well spend money on cavalry horses: today, tanks can easily be destroyed by man-portable or drone-mounted anti-tank weapons that cost less than 1% of the price of a tank. Battle tanks are essentially nothing more than very expensive metal coffins for the troops carried inside them.
Had anti-tank weapons like Javelin missiles and Bayraktar drones been distributed to Ukrainian troops in sufficient numbers before the Russian invasion began, not a single Russian armoured vehicle would have penetrated more than a few km into Ukraine’s territory.
Tanks are yesterday’s technology. Equipping the Bundeswehr with tanks would be a complete waste of money. Tanks are militarily useless against any enemy with the technological sophistication to build and deploy anti-tank weapons. Tanks are unnecessary and inappropriate instruments for repelling enemy tanks. The only remaining use of tanks is to fire large projectiles a few tens of km toward enemy targets from a mobile ground-based platform — but missiles are a better choice for that purpose, as they can be fired from a soldier’s shoulder or from hardened positions as well as from concealed mobile platforms that, unlike tanks, aren’t easily recognisable as military hardware and hence easily targettable.
Anti-tank weapons are getting cheaper, more diverse, and more effective year by year. Tanks are hugely expensive and helpless against modern anti-tank weapons. Let’s save some money by deciding right now to not waste German taxpayers’ money on buying tanks. Sorry, Rheinmetall.
10. Instead, Germany’s military would be well advised to spend its generous new budget on four main purposes:
(i) Drones — including automated or semi-automated anti-tank weapons that can destroy armoured vehicles without any risk to a German soldier, whilst taking into careful account the extremely dangerous nature of automated weapons systems. An arms race in these technologies is already underway, and it will accelerate toward an omega point over coming years. A well-designed set of automated weapons deployed in sufficient number (including land, sea, and air drones) will be able to destroy any invading army composed of flesh-and-blood soldiers, by remote control or even entirely automatically.
The challenge of the future will be to figure out how to avoid genocidal cataclysms carried out using weaponised drone swarms and how to prevent targetted assassinations from being carried out by means of AI-guided automated weapons of various kinds as these get ever smaller, “better,” more diverse, more numerous, and cheaper. Not deploying such devices while other countries do is not a very good option; and building tanks when cheap automated drones will be able to easily destroy any tank is an act of idiocy. Let’s forget about the tanks, Bundeswehr procurement office, okay? Focus on buying drones. And the German foreign ministry should, in parallel, be working very hard toward international agreements for limiting these awful machines, as proposed by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.
Given appropriate European or NATO fleets of well-maintained and well-managed drones, any Russian army units that attempt incursions onto NATO territory or airspace would find themselves rendered inoperable within minutes. The Russians will know this, and so they will not make any such incursions.
(ii) Anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems in a variety of forms, capable of reliably destroying any and all invading enemy aircraft and incoming missiles.
(iii) Electronic warfare systems, including both offensive systems and defensive measures to ensure that German industry and society can continue to function no matter how aggressive an EMP attack or cyberattack is launched by a sophisticated enemy (Russia could do enormous damage with such an approach if it chose); and
(iv) A global system of German and allied SDG Engineering Corps, modelled loosely on the US Army Corps of Engineers, for deployment in training and advisory missions overseas to help African, Middle Eastern, or South Asian militaries develop SDG Engineering Corps of their own. The long-term goal should be to make war obsolete — by repurposing the profession of soldiering away from preparing for or fighting wars, and focusing army units on peace-building, ecological restoration, health services, and economic development projects and skills instead.
Repurposing the World’s Militaries: A Grand Strategy Goal for Germany?
Let’s imagine a future in which German, French, Russian, Chinese, American, and Nigerian soldiers (among others) work together in integrated SDG Engineering Corps units deployed to least-developed countries, developing solar power and water treatment plants, building and staffing mobile health clinics, and managing wildlife conservation and reforestation projects, and gradually becoming friends and comrades — rather than continuing to play the tournament sport called “war” against each other, which in our era has become fundamentally pointless.
In the past, war had a point — it served a purpose that was seen as legitimate. Historically, the sport of war was a sport of kings, and its point was to defeat the armies of rival kings, conquer territory, establish empires and grab women and booty. In the modern era, conquering territory and establishing empires is seen as immoral and has become illegal. The shock of the two World Wars of the 20th century made it clear that this sport needed to end. This is why every country renamed its military establishment from “Department of War” to “Department of Defense” — everyone pretends that they would never attack, never seek to conquer.
Most nations respect these norms. However, a very few countries continue to ignore the ban on sending armies of conquest into other countries — the United States first and foremost, but now also Russia, and in a limited way even a few smaller countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, whose armed forces have recently participated in the invasion of Yemen and (unofficially) occupied and taken territory. In all cases, the offensive military expeditions of these countries are mislabelled as something other than what they are — they are misrepresented as defensive rather than offensive operations.
The men staffing and commanding the world’s armies need something better to do — a more compelling mission than readying themselves to inflict mass slaughter on each other or on civilian populations, pseudojustified by some trumped-up story politicians cook up. Armies should be repurposed.
Germany’s Grand Strategy goal in regards to militaries should be to make war obsolete by developing new international institutions and engagements aimed at actively repurposing militaries for carrying out constructive peace-building work inspired by the SDGs. Hence my proposal for Germany to take the lead in the formation of SDG Engineering Corps as a new category of institution, a new pole of attraction for the world’s militaries.
Initiating a global drive to repurpose militaries away from war and toward peace-building would be a good way for Germany and its Bundeswehr (federal army) to pay interest on the unrepayable debt the German nation incurred from 1939 to 1945 — still within living memory: my own mother was 19 years old and wearing the uniform of a women’s auxiliary unit of the Luftwaffe in the last few months of the war, and at the age of 96, she’s still alive to tell about it — when Germany’s armies followed the orders of a racist ultranationalist madman and plunged Europe and Russia into a campaign of ethnosupremacist genocide on a scale that only the likes of Genghis Khan had previously implemented.
Let’s see how we go, Deutschland. Please try to be benign, smart, far-seeing and innovative rather than stodgy, near-sighted and traditional in your new role as Europe’s re-awakened pillar of strategic might.
