Germany's historical guilt and NATO
Plus, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping call on NATO to stop expansion
Nǐ hǎo! I hope you had a great week. In this edition we’re looking at how Germany’s historical guilt associated with the Second World War is hampering NATO’s unity against Russia.
We’re also looking at why Sergio Mattarella was made the Italian president again even though he didn’t want the job anymore, and Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin’s mutual show of support in Beijing.
Thank you for reading Untwined.
This day that year
2004: Mark Zuckerberg, one of the co-founders of Meta Platforms (then Facebook), took the popular social networking website live for the first time. The website was then (18 years ago) called “TheFacebook”. During the third quarter of 2021, Facebook had nearly two billion daily active users. With WhatsApp and Instagram, among other platforms, as its subsidiaries, Facebook’s parent organisation Meta Platforms is one of the largest companies in the world by market capitalisation.
1945: Beginning of the Yalta Conference. United Kingdom’s prime minister Winston Churchill, United States’ president Franklin D Roosevelt and Soviet Union’s premier Joseph Stalin met in Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula, to plan the post-World War II reorganisation of Europe and particularly Germany.
Germany-sized hole in NATO’s unity?
The United States has announced it is deploying 3,000 additional troops to member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in eastern Europe amid concerns of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is meant to reassure NATO members such as Poland and Romania about their security in an increasingly unstable region. Additionally, the US has reportedly provided more than $400 million worth of security assistance to Ukraine since last year alone and another $200 million worth of equipment was approved in December 2021.
The United Kingdom has sent a group of 30 elite troops and 2,000 anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. Canada has reportedly sent a special operations unit to help train the Ukrainian troops and Turkey has provided Bayraktar TB2 drones to Kiev.
Even the smaller Baltic states of Estonia, and Latvia and Lithuania have sent Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger missiles to Ukraine, respectively, in recent weeks.
All of these nations are NATO members, pitching in to help defend Ukraine, a non-NATO member (but an aspiring member), against possible external aggression. Ukraine has sought more weapons for its defence. However, despite being the world’s fourth-largest weapons exporter, Germany has avoided making any such commitments. Berlin has, of course, expressed solidarity with Kiev and called for a dialogue with Moscow to ease tensions, suggesting that diplomacy is the correct path. The German government will instead co-finance a field hospital and has offered 5,000 helmets. The helmet offer has been described as a “joke” by Kiev’s mayor.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government has rejected Ukraine’s request for weapons supply citing a self-imposed ban on such exports to areas of conflict.
Why? Germany’s policy of not exporting weapons to conflict zones, especially to a non-NATO nation like Ukraine, is rooted in its own belligerent history. Many German leaders since the end of the Second World War have held the view that an armed response must always be the last option.
That’s because politicians in Berlin see the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union, Russia’s predecessor state, with a sense of historical guilt. As recently as last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, speaking in the presence of her Russian counterpart, acknowledged the “suffering and destruction” that Germans “brought upon the peoples of the Soviet Union” during the Second World War.
However, the Ukrainian government considers Germany’s refusal to supply weapons counterproductive to its calls for peace. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has urged Germany to stop “undermining unity”, which he said was “encouraging [Russian President] Vladimir Putin”.
Talking to news agency DPA — as cited by German state-owned broadcaster Deutsche Welle — Andrij Melnyk, the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, suggested that “this [German] responsibility [of not hurting the Russian people] should apply to the Ukrainian people, who lost at least 8 million lives during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.”
The Guardian's Philip Oltermann has written more about this: Ghosts of Germany’s past rise as Olaf Scholz seeks strategy for Ukraine
There’s another angle to this. Germany also doesn’t want supply of weapons to Ukraine to infuriate Russia — which is a major energy provider.
The leftist faction within Germany’s governing Social Democratic Party (deliberately shortened as ‘SPD’ instead of ‘SDP’ because of its German name Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) have for long sought a pacifying approach towards Russia. In fact, it was the SPD government in the late 1960s and early 1970s that adopted the “Neue Ostpolitik” policy for rapprochement between West Germany and the Soviet Union (and its republics in eastern Europe). They have supported and called for a quick approval for the Nord Stream 2 sub-sea pipeline that will bring additional Russian natural gas into Germany. Some claim that the possibility of Nord Stream 2 being used as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Russia is a bad idea, suggesting that the commercial project should not be mixed with tensions around the Russian military build-up.
Read more: German SPD official calls for end to Nord Stream 2 dispute
Consider this: Shortly after his tenure as the German chancellor concluded in 2005 (as he lost the federal election to Angela Merkel), SPD leader Gerhard Schröder himself started as the chairman of the shareholders’ committee for Nord Stream AG – the consortium responsible for the construction and operation of the first Nord Stream sub-sea pipeline. Schröder had approved the Nord Stream (1) pipeline in the final leg of his tenure as the chancellor just before Merkel took over. Nord Stream AG, like Nord Stream 2 AG, is controlled by Gazprom — a massive Russian state-owned energy corporation. Later, Schröder also joined Russia’s other state-owned energy company Rosneft as an independent director. He has faced criticism for this.
Germany is an integral part of NATO and the European Union. Thus, its reluctance to provide weapons to Ukraine — amid the largest Russian troop build-up since the Cold War — undermines coherence of the West’s response to a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. European nations and NATO members are visibly upset about this. As Edward Lucas describes in this Foreign Policy piece, Germany remains a “black hole in the region’s security”.
Pin it on the map
Time for some head scratching: This satellite image shows the aerial view of the heart of a city. It’s a famous seat of power. Look at the shadows closely. The area is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The ‘Mos’ in the portmanteau ‘BrahMos’ (missiles) is derived from the name of the river seen at the bottom of the image. The city in turn derives its name from the name of the river. What place is this?
The answer is at the bottom.
What else?
Ukraine crisis updates
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has offered to hold a Russia-Ukraine summit meeting to help defuse tensions. Erdogan was visiting Ukraine’s capital Kiev. Turkey is a NATO member, but has also purchased Russian defence equipment such as the S-400 missile defence systems in recent years. While Ankara is walking a tight rope on the matter because of its close relations with both Russia as well as Ukraine, it has so far refused to stop the sale of arms (such as drones) to Kiev. Turkey has an interest in maintaining peace in the Black Sea region that it’s a part of.
The US has accused Russia of a plot to fabricate an attack by Ukrainian forces — using a faked video — which Moscow would use as a pretext for invading its western neighbour. Moscow was to use the outrage, triggered by the faked video, to justify its military action or use separatists in Ukraine’s contested Donbas region to invite an intervention by Russia.
Prime ministers of Poland and Ukraine said this week that they were working with Britain to enhance cooperation amid tensions in eastern Europe. During a press conference, Ukrainian PM Denys Shmygal said: “I hope that, in the near future, we will be able to officially launch a new regional format of cooperation Ukraine-Poland-UK. In the context of ongoing Russian aggression, we should sign a trilateral document on cooperation to strengthen regional security.”
President Joe Biden has elevated Qatar to the level of a “major non-NATO ally” of the US. This comes at a time when the Biden administration is hoping to secure natural gas supplies from Qatar as an alternative to the Russian gas that European nations are dependent on. There are fears that Russia may turn off the gas tap if a conflict were to break out in eastern Europe — leading to a major energy crisis in countries like Germany. Supply of natural gas from Qatar in such an event would ensure no shortages on the continent. About 17 other nations are placed at the ‘major non-NATO ally’ level of partnership with the US — which does not include a mutual defence commitment.
Beijing summit
Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Beijing on February 4 just ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in the Chinese capital. The summit is crucial for Putin to highlight that Russia isn’t isolated internationally in the context of the crisis in eastern Europe. For Xi, it’s an opportunity to negate some of the negative impact of the West’s diplomatic boycott of the quadrennial sports event over China’s human rights record.
In a joint statement, Putin and Xi called on the West to “abandon the ideologised approaches of the Cold War” and urged NATO to stop expansion into eastern Europe. The two leaders also criticised AUKUS — the new trilateral security pact between Australia, the UK and the US.
On the question of diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics, Putin backed Xi, saying that “attempts by a number of countries to politicise sports for their selfish interests” had “intensified” and that such attempts were “fundamentally wrong”.
Mattarella ‘re-elected’
Italian President Sergio Mattarella was sworn in to a second term in office on February 3. This happened after the 80-year-old who had announced that he was not seeking a re-election, agreed to retain the titular role after lawmakers were unable to form consensus on his successor. Mattarella said that it was a “call to responsibility that [he] cannot and don’t expect to escape”.
The arrangement will allow the incumbent government led by Prime Minister Mario Draghi to complete its tenure next year. Draghi wanted to give up his executive role and wanted the presidential position instead. But had Draghi become the president, the Italian government would have collapsed and an election would have been triggered a year ahead of schedule — something that most politicians were trying to avoid. Thus, they were not willing to let Draghi become the president.
ISIS leader killed
Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the leader of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), was killed in a counterterrorism operation by US forces on February 2 in northwest Syria. The announcement was made by President Biden. al-Qurayshi had taken over the terrorist organisation’s command after the US killed then ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a similar operation in 2019.
US officials said that al-Qurayshi blew himself up when American forces approached his compound. The explosion led to civilian casualties. According to the US, al-Qurayshi oversaw ISIS’ overseas units and played an important part in the genocide against the Yazidi community. Read more here.
Sue Gray report
British civil servant Sue Gray released a redacted version of her inquiry report into parties that happened at 10, Downing Street — the official residence of the prime minister of the UK — during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. The report suggested that these social gatherings were difficult to justify and pointed at “failures of leadership”. However, parts of the report were held back because the Metropolitan police is still investigating the matter. The full version of the report will be published once the Met police investigation concludes.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson apologised for what had happened but asserted that no conclusions should be drawn as the police are still investigating the matter. Yet, Johnson promised to “fix” problems at the official residence by creating an Office of the Prime Minister with a permanent secretary.
The Opposition attacked the prime minister for not resigning even though the published report had questioned his leadership. Opposition leader Keir Starmer said Johnson won’t resign because “he [Johnson] is a man without shame”.
Though Johnson might have just gotten some breathing space as the Met police’s investigation continues, more members of parliament from his own party are now asking him to resign.
The published version of the Sue Gray report can be read here.
PM Johnson’s response to the report can be read here.
Interesting stuff
Many areas in Japan — a country with a sizable older population — are deploying electronic tracking as they face an “epidemic of dementia”. The solution promises to protect senior citizens “in cognitive decline” while giving them their freedom of movement. But the project has led to concerns over an “Orwellian overreach”, write The New York Times' Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno.
Read the full story here.
‘Pin it on the map’ answer: Kremlin and the Red Square, Moscow. Overlooking the Moskva River, this sprawling complex includes palaces, museums and cathedrals that are fortified by iconic red-coloured walls and towers. It’s the Russian seat of power because the complex also houses the official residence of the country’s president (Grand Kremlin Palace). The general area comprising the Kremlin complex, the Red Square and the famous Saint Basil’s Cathedral are together a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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