Ukraine war and massive rearmament hidden from German elections

Michael von der Schulenburg

The war in Ukraine and its consequences will have a lasting negative impact on Germany's political, security, economic and social future. It is the biggest war on European soil since World War II; a war that has brought us dangerously close to a nuclear catastrophe in recent months. For the West, this war is already lost; Ukraine is their blood sacrifice and the EU countries, above all Germany, are the losers. Germany's leading parties, the SPD, CDU/CSU, Greens and FDP, as well as the country's established media, bear a large part of the blame for this.

Yet questions about their responsibilities in this war have been mysteriously muted during the current German election campaign. Similarly, there is hardly any talk about the German government’s massive rearmament efforts and its attempts to make Germany “war-ready.” Nothing is said about the dangers of deploying powerful American missile systems on German soil. The election posters of the established parties say nothing about this. The mainstream media are silent about the disastrous military and political situation in Ukraine and remain equally mute about the fundamental change in American policy on Ukraine since Donald Trump became US president. It is as if there is a deliberate effort to keep German voters in the dark about these highly controversial issues; issues that could have a major impact on their future ability and that of their children to live in peace.

The German Decline

All this is happening at a time when the war in Ukraine has reached its final, decisive – and probably also its bloodiest – phase. Militarily, the Ukrainian army is likely to be on the verge of collapse, and it is to be feared that this could also lead to a political collapse of the country. For three years, Germany has been fuelling this war as the second largest arms supplier. And yet, the major German parties continue their rigid war policy and pretend to believe in a victory over Russia. Apart from an ambiguous telephone conversation between the German chancellor and Putin, they have made no effort to find a negotiated solution. Now Germany will have to pay a heavy price for its pro-war and anti-negotiation strategies.

Neither the EU nor Germany, but an American and a Russian president will negotiate a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine. Negotiations have already begun, and Trump and Putin are expected to meet in person within weeks. This has been made possible by a significant shift in American foreign policy priorities under Trump. Unlike his predecessor, Biden, Trump no longer sees Ukraine as a geopolitical asset for the US; his attention seems to have shifted closer to home: to Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal. He will therefore seek a quick solution to the Ukraine war and will be willing to accommodate most Russian interests, largely ignoring those of Ukraine. We should be under no illusions: neither of these two presidents will have any sympathy for Zelensky, the EU and especially Germany. Why would they?

Zelensky is a spent force, while German and EU politics continue to be characterised by a refusal to face the reality of a lost war. And have not the German political elites treated Putin and Trump with a moral arrogance that is so typical of them? Thus, neither Germany nor the EU will have a say in these negotiations. This is bad for the EU and bad for Germany: this war is taking place on European soil, and the decisions taken by Trump and Putin will have serious consequences for the future of both Germany and Europe.
One of those consequences will be that the EU, and especially Germany, will have to foot the enormous costs of rebuilding Ukraine and keeping a shaky Ukrainian government afloat. If Ursula von der Leyen were to succeed in her misguided desire to speed up Ukraine’s EU entry, the total price tag could easily reach €1 trillion. Whether such astronomical sums would help a sinking and depopulating Ukraine remains questionable, but it would wreck Germany’s already weakened economy and could jeopardise the entire EU project. In addition, Germany would still be blocked from accessing raw materials and markets in the East and Asia that would be so important to its economic recovery.

Following a Russian-American peace agreement, Russia will control the entire border from the Barents Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. And the government would not even be in a position to cancel the self-destructive EU economic sanction. Germany's path to further economic decline, with all its political consequences, seems unstoppable.

Escaping to la fantasy ofl «preparations for war”

Faced with imminent defeat in the Ukraine war, the SPD, CDU/CSU, Greens and FDP, supported by much of the German media, seem to prefer to hide from the harsh realities and escape into the fantasy that Putin is going to attack NATO. If Germany does not massively and rapidly improve its defences, they say, it will soon be marching through Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Such claims, bordering on madness, are used to distract from a lost war and justify spending hundreds of billions of euros on a German rearmament that could turn Germany once again into Europe’s greatest military power, with conventional forces even greater than Russia. All of this will inevitably be financed in large part by a reduction in social services.

To justify all this, German political parties are clinging to their Russophobia and ideological-moralistic “narratives” of the need to defend democracy and freedom. But those justifications are starting to run out. While German politicians and their supporters in the media continue to blame Putin for an “unprovoked war of aggression,” Trump blames his predecessor Biden for the war and accuses Zelensky of having provoked the Russian attack. And while the German narrative remains that Putin is driven by imperialist desires, Trump is saying what we have always known: it was the push for NATO expansion in Ukraine, driven by American neoconservatives and continued by Biden, that led to this war. Trump has gone even further and declared that he can “even understand Putin.” In Germany, one would probably lose one’s job for saying that!
The new US administration does not share our fantasies about an imminent Russian war against NATO. Last year, all seven US intelligence services stated in a joint report that a Russian attack on a NATO country could be ruled out with a high probability.
And now what? Germany's mainstream politicians, most of them loyal to the transatlantic line to the core, have lost their lord and master - a worrying development on the eve of the federal elections.

That is why the lost war in Ukraine, along with Germany’s massive rearmament efforts, are kept out of the national election campaign. With all the money these established parties have, this will help ensure the re-election of a Merz and a Kiesewetter, a Scholz and a Pistorius, a Habeck and a Baerbock or even a Lindner and a Strack-Zimmerman – all politicians who hold an uncompromising stance in favour of war against Russia and who take an increasingly aggressive attitude towards China. According to opinion polls, this is what is going to happen. Germany is therefore likely to be governed again by politicians who supported a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and made Germany one of its biggest losers. In other words, Germany will continue to have a government unable to adapt to a changing world around it. It will now also be increasingly at odds with the new US administration. It will be unable to smooth things over with Russia and China or build relations with the increasingly important BRICS association of countries. Germany is therefore likely to sink further into global isolation – a dire prospect for a nation that relies on international trade for its economic well-being.

At the same time, the mainstream media’s uncritical support for established parties is pushing disappointed voters into the arms of the right-wing AfD. This could further divide German society and make Germany’s future even more unpredictable. Aside from concerns about its radical nationalist wing, the AfD wants to outdo the other parties by demanding that Germany allocate a staggering 5% of GDP to rearmament – ​​something that could only be financed by neoliberal economic policy, more gigantic debts and massive social cuts. And its flirtation with American oligarchs will certainly not help either.
The price for the ideological, moralistic and pro-war policies of German politicians, from Merz to Weidel and from Scholz to Habeck, will be paid above all by pensioners and low-income earners, workers and employees, families and children, as well as small and medium-sized industries. Large companies and the rich are simply moving their business abroad; the USA has already created the necessary incentives for them.

German politics must break with its past

If we want to save what can still be saved, Germany needs a decisive turnaround in all areas of its policy. It must find its way back to a policy of peace and finally formulate its own interests and act accordingly. To do this, it must regain understanding with its eastern neighbours; it must build a relationship of trust with Russia and China and establish trade relations with them. For the EU member states, the BRICS countries are increasingly important partners, not only structurally and economically, but also politically. There is an opportunity to create a new geopolitical constellation through which these two communities of states can work towards a more peaceful and multipolar world order, based on the UN Charter and without military alliances. At the same time, we must maintain internal peace by making social justice the most important goal of our policies. Rearmament and arms trading, military interventions or the deployment of US medium-range missiles on German soil will not help at all.

We urgently need a radical new beginning. To do this, we need politicians who have always stood for peace and social justice. The federal elections would be an opportunity to start. We should think very carefully about who we vote for on February 23.

Michael von der Schulenburg He was Assistant Secretary-General (ASG) of the United Nations. He worked for 34 years for the UN and the OSCE in senior positions in development and peacekeeping missions in many crisis regions of the world, including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Haiti, Somalia, Syria and Sierra Leone. He has published several works on war and peace, non-state armed actors and UN reform. He is currently a Member of the European Parliament for the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht.