Ukraine Dilemma: A Europe without Germany

Still flip-flop of Germany (domestic decision) to response Ukraine crisis, some people still weird: Why, after 15 years Merkel leadership, Germany decision (currently) still influenced with another Kanzlerin, which is Gerhard Schroeder, regardless he’s Gazprom axis. Yes, Olaf Scholz is SPD (same like Schroeder), the Schroeder era is 16 years ago, but why Olaf Scholz still “giddy” to send “much equipment military” to help Ukraine. 

New Poll commissioned by the Yalta European Strategy and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, even showed how low enthusiasm in Germany to support Ukraine. 66% in Poland, 61% in the US, 61% in Canada, 57% in France, 49% in Germany, and 47% in the UK favor NATO allies making a commitment to defend Ukraine from Russian aggression. 

(photo by International Reporter Mark MacKinnon, in Kyiv. No Germany in runtext)

For more highlights, the UK (47%) really sent much equipment to help the Ukraine military, and even The UK is considering a “major military offer” to NATO which could include doubling troop numbers and sending defensive weapons to Estonia as well as deploying fast jets and warships to NATO allies per statement just released. But we really admit a specific issue: the UK is really angry about the “Litvinenko case'', and this has never happened in Berlin, at least in the last 2 decades. 

Canada (61%), via Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand says all Canadian military trainers stationed in Ukraine have been moved west of the Dnieper River amid Russian invasion threat.

The July 2021 Chicago Council Survey, conducted before Russia amassed its troops outside Ukraine’s borders, found that a record high 50 percent of Americans said they would support “the use of US troops if Russia were to invade the rest of Ukraine,” up from 30 percent in 2014, just after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. This willingness to use force to defend Ukrainian borders seems driven more by distrust of Russia than a desire to protect a vulnerable country: a combined majority of Americans consider Russia a US adversary (39%) or a rival (26%), but only a third think that protecting weaker nations against foreign aggression is a very important US foreign policy goal (32%).

A plausible scenario locates the site on the Ukrainian border from which Russian troops might launch an incursion. But the risks for Putin are considerable – and the West’s goals should be to make them prohibitive. And Germany has yet to “join” significantly between the West. The distance between Kyiv and the Russian border is at least 400 km, but Ukrainian intelligence has moved sensitive files and equipment out of its headquarters in the capital to safe locations in the west of the country—and I don't think (one of option) is Berlin. . 

Putin is now fully indulging his imperial impulses, hoping to erase the humiliation of Russia’s historic decline. His ambition has far-reaching implications for Europe’s place in the world – regardless of whether Europeans are willing to admit it.

Merkel and Putin – who are less similar in their tactical than Mussolini and Lenin were – represent two paths forward: openness and defensiveness, respectively. In Europe, political leaders define themselves by their relationship to one or the other. Hungary and Turkey are both vulnerable to Russian geopolitical machinations; but their leaders, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seem to have joined the international Putin admiration society. But the behavior of Putin is…. of course very different compared with Merkel: (now) on transparent, we see the biggest ever deployment by Russia, even bigger tah “Crimea 2014”. 

Putin and Merkel are fixed compass points not only in Europe. Putin’s position is apparent in his effort to unify Eurasia around social conservatism, political authoritarianism, and orthodox religion as a nominal arm of the state. His is a barely updated version of nineteenth-century theoretician and czarist adviser Konstantin Pobedonostsev’s three-pronged political prescription: orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality.

Merkel emerged as Putin’s foil and a global icon, incidentally, during the eurozone debt crisis, when she was seen as a rather nationalistic defender of German economic interests, and again in the summer of 2015 when she countered objections to her migration policies by arguing that Germany is “a strong country” that “will manage.”

Merkel rarely used polarizing or dramatic language. “I avoid the term [refugee crisis] on principle,” she said in a farewell interview in November 2021, “because a refugee for me is not in themselves a crisis but a person.” She was rarely confrontational. In an academic study of one TV debate during the 2013 election, she was found to have spent only 112 seconds of the 90-minute show attacking her opponent. 

Time and again, strongmen – from Trump to Vladimir Putin – and domestic populists have tried to rile her, to jolt her into anger or impatience, and failed. “I understand why he has to do this: to prove he’s a man,” she said after one meeting with Putin. But today is Olaf, no more Merkel. And Germany should decide more to say no for Russia, not say no for Ukraine. For example, Ukraine actually asked 1 million helmet military-standard to anticipate the worst scenario, but Germany only sent 5,000. 

In place of conflict, she used humility as a tool of power: making it her business to pour the coffee when at meetings, taking the trouble to introduce herself to the staff of her international counterparts at summits, keeping her options open by declining to pick sides.

Democracy starts and ends, in other words, with the assumption of the basic decency and legitimacy of one’s opponents, on all sides. With each jibe at an “enemy of the people”, the “unpatriotic”, “deplorables”, “citizens of nowhere” or “scum”, a system takes another step towards a place where the incumbents can freely abuse power to hold on to it, where the playing field becomes irredeemably uneven, authority becomes arbitrary and a self-reinforcing dynamic of insecurity and overreach takes hold. Time and again in cases of democratic decline around the world, note Levitsky and Ziblatt, the collapse of tolerance and forbearance presaged a broader turn towards illiberalism. Civility is the dam holding back the surge.

Here we might credit Merkel with particular knowledge. Some have ascribed her studious inoffensiveness to her East German background, to spending the first 35 years of her life in a system where the less said, the better. But there is another explanation. Having lived in an autocratic, them-and-us system, where everyone’s motive was suspect if not proven otherwise, she might be said to understand the role of mutual toleration and forbearance in liberal democracy all the more, and how breakable it all is. In her farewell speech on 2 December, a typically low-key affair, Merkel reflected on this: “In particular the past two years of the pandemic have held a magnifying glass over the great importance of trust in politics, science and public discourse, but also how fragile it can be.” Maybe with 15 years of leadership, and feeling underestimated because (to be) ex East / Ost Germany, Merkel really transferred her patience to facing Russia, to a lot of bureaucracy staff and the German parliament (Bundestag). Not because of Schroeder influence very strong until today. 

Merkel bequeaths Germany a complex legacy – she was a capable crisis manager but a poor strategist, a canny tactician but also a source of complacency and stasis. That is all up for debate by commentators and historians over the coming years. Yet what seems certain is that she has left the way in which most of her country’s politics is conducted in a state that some other parts of the democratic world, including the UK and US, have reason to envy; a state that it is to be hoped her successors can preserve. Civility does not impede effectiveness, and arguably can improve it. Nor is it a superfluous nicety. 

Quite the contrary: it is in many ways the very foundation of a successful democracy, where rival perspectives and visions can stake their claim to power, and those who wield it can do so with legitimacy and maturity. Civility should not be taken for granted.

To remain polite, civil and decent, as Merkel did over 15 years as the leader of one of the world’s biggest economies in the heat of successive crises, is more than a footnote. It is something fundamental: a laudable commitment to the ethos that sustains democracy and with it free and prosperous societies. The German principle of not sending weaponry to "Ukraine-Russia border (for Ukraine side)” really highlights how much “underestimated complex-mind” in Merkel influenced a lot of people in Germany. Argues 1) that this principle has been inconsistently applied in the past (arms help to Kosovo, Afghanistan, Peshmerga-Kurdi fighter, etc) and 2) that arming open question whether sending Kyiv (example) Leopard and anti-tank missiles would do any of these things (other EU members, eg Poland, the Baltics, disagree); and there's explicitly a clause in both the coalition agreement and the underlying 1971 cabinet paper allowing "justified" exceptions.

Others used game theoretic and experimental work to explore whether a threat’s credibility could be enhanced by building “audience costs,” whereby a leader is punished by an audience, typically domestic, that is displeased with the leader’s failure to fulfill a stated foreign policy promise or threat. Relatedly, scholars developed the concepts of “tied hands” and “sunk costs.”A government ties its own hands by raising the costs of failing to follow through on a threat—and Germany tries to prevent costs like this. For example, it might create domestic “audience costs,” such as incurring domestic political consequences (example being voted out of office) for failing to abide by a deterrent commitment. A government sinks costs by taking costly actions to demonstrate how seriously it takes the threat it is making — such as taking pricey mobilizing or arming measures.

Helping Ukraine Without Germany: The Last Resort(?)

The lead American negotiator, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, stated: “We must give diplomacy and dialogue the time and space required to make progress on such complex issues.” 

Americans prefer a diplomatic solution to the conflict with Russia over military escalation. Another more muscular option is for the United States to provide weapons to Ukraine to help Kyiv defend itself in the event of a Russian invasion. But Americans are generally against this idea, with 56 percent opposing and only 41 percent in favor. 

Now that Russia and NATO countries are in a stalemate, failing to reach a compromise, public attitudes depend on what Russia does next, how NATO allies decide to respond, and how the respective governments explain their positions to their own citizens. 

Publics may put a higher value on consistency in policy, especially if consistency means staying out of conflict–and with Germany, at least only 49% (on latest poll). Emphasis on reputation and revenge is not strong across all populations. Studies have found that the willingness to demand revenge and defend the national reputation and honor varies interpersonally and across subnational cultures.

There is less work on how casualties affect the willingness of the American public to support intervening with force. Anecdotally, there are episodes of casualties failing to inspire demands for broader intervention. A few surveys have looked for tripwire effects by asking participants whether they would be more likely to support intervention if friendly forces suffered serious casualties. The results have been mixed. Some surveys have explored this question in the context of audience-cost theory, asking participants whether, if a leader were to make a threat and then back down, that leader would earn higher levels of disapproval if friendly forces had been killed.

What about international audience costs, like in the case Ukraine-Russia, “Western-side audience”? Might the prospect of damaging their countries’ international reputation push governments to rescue embattled friendly troops? Some of the reasons why the prospect of domestic audience costs fails to deter are also reasons why the prospects of international audience costs fail to deter. If aggressors believe that a defender’s public is highly sensitive to casualties and wishes to avoid them, then the aggressor may come to believe that the defender will not approve broader intervention even at the risk of damaging its international reputation.

Tripwire-force deployments are insufficient to bolster deterrence because deterrence is about more than signaling. One must instead deploy a force that is sufficiently capable — one that can itself fulfill a deterrent threat. Troop deployments must be able to shift the local balance of power so as to alter the potential attacker’s likelihood of succeeding, or its likelihood of succeeding quickly and/or at a low cost. When Russia already–and really fit, 160k troops in all side Ukraine borders, how the U.S. actually will be sent a troops, just 6 months after Afghanistan Falling. 

Pre-deployment of troops capable of shifting the local balance of power has clear limitations. Beyond the need to tailor any deployment to the local combat environment, increased troop deployments may raise financial costs that the public is unwilling to bear. Public opinion polls indicate Americans are hesitant about the prospect of raising defense spending–especially amid Biden spending on Covid and “Build Back”. The similar problem on another NATO members too.

If Moscow believes that the main security threat it faces is NATO military infrastructure moving closer to Russia’s western borders, it would make sense to focus on the infrastructure itself, rather than the theoretical possibility of NATO expansion. Let’s not forget that NATO institutional expansion eastward is not among Brussels’s short- or even medium-term goals. In any case, as France has shown, a country can be a NATO member for over forty years without participating in the organization’s military bodies.

Specific issues of NATO’s geographical expansion could be negotiated within the framework of a new Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE 2), which could become legally binding for Moscow and Brussels. CFE was once a historic breakthrough that made it possible to dramatically reduce the degree of confrontation in the center of Europe. Of course, CFE 2 cannot be a copy of the thirty-year-old treaty, as both the geopolitical situation and military technology have changed dramatically over time. Preparing a new treaty will require serious efforts from all of its signatories, but it can be done, provided the parties have the political will to do so.

Russia should also be working with other neighbors that have been eyeing NATO membership. It is often said in Russia that Ukraine and Georgia are “being drawn into NATO,” creating the impression that the countries in question would like to resist but are being forced to slowly yield under pressure from Brussels. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. It’s the former Soviet republics that have been desperately trying to join NATO security bodies for years, while the West has to somehow respond to that pressure while knowing full well that the new members would likely weaken the organization. Hence, Moscow should focus on finding alternative security mechanisms for those countries to reduce their interest in coveted NATO membership.

As for Ukraine, it is hard for Moscow to press Kyiv to fully comply with the Minsk agreements aimed at ending the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Without taking this issue off the table, it would be useful to concentrate on the first three points of the agreements, which call for stabilizing the situation along the line of contact in Donbas (complying with ceasefire agreements, withdrawing heavy weapons, and strengthening the OSCE mission). This would be an important factor in reducing tensions both in Donbas specifically and in Russian-Ukrainian relations as a whole. This approach would not exclude possible negotiations between Russia and the West on the scale and—most importantly—the specifics of Western military aid to Ukraine.

Some experts are of the opinion that Moscow’s hardline, radical, and inflexible demands of the United States and its NATO partners were a form of shock therapy. They believe the idea was to draw the West’s attention to legitimate Russian security interests that had been virtually ignored by the West for a long time. If that was Russia’s goal, it was accomplished: Moscow’s voice has been heard loud and clear.

But shock therapy alone won’t be enough to cure the numerous ailments plaguing relations between Moscow and the West. A long course of conservative treatment is in order here. In the medical field, conservative treatment primarily aims to stem the deterioration of a patient’s condition and anticipates full recovery or slowing the disease to a point where other intervention will no longer be necessary. The course of treatment generally calls for bed rest and minimal physical exertion.