¯:
discussion |
 Matthew Karnitschnig, Politico12 Germans who got played by PutinThere’s no
shortage of politicians, business leaders and intellectuals who have appeased
Moscow over the years. Here are a
few of them.
POLITICO photo illustration/Source images by Getty Images BERLIN — Russia’s war
against Ukraine has thrust Germany’s establishment into the throes of a
tortured process of introspection, self-doubt and recrimination. After years of lecturing the
West that a bit of Ostpolitik was all that was needed to keep
Russia in check, Germany’s political, media and academic elites are now
obsessing over a new question: How could we have been so wrong? Rarely has a country’s
confidence about itself and its place in the world
been so thoroughly pulverized overnight. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a
Social Democrat who took over from Angela Merkel in December, responded to the
repudiation of decades of German foreign policy by taking a page out of his
predecessor’s book and announcing a dramatic 180-degree turn. Dubbed the Zeitenwende (historic
shift), the plan included a pledge to spend an eye-popping €100 billion on
defense in the short term. Weeks later, however, panic in
the German establishment over misjudging Vladimir Putin has given way to a more
defiant attitude toward allies demanding Berlin step up and provide Ukraine
with more than encouragement and a few Soviet-era rockets. Such obdurance serves as a
reminder that Germany didn’t sell its soul to Russia overnight; It was a
process that took years, by the end of which the entire country was complicit. What follows is a partial list
of those most to blame for Germany’s misguided approach to Russia and its
leader. Angela
Merkel
Angela Merkel | Pool photo by Filip Singer/Getty Images No German is more responsible
for the crisis in Ukraine than Merkel. Her predecessor’s antics might have
overshadowed that reality in the public’s perception, but the facts speak for
themselves. As chancellor from 2005 until 2021, Merkel was the driving force
behind NATO’s refusal to grant Ukraine membership. Even after Moscow’s invasion
of Georgia, its brutal bombing of Syria, the annexation of Crimea, the war in
Donbas, the downing of MH-17, the gangland-style murder of a Chechen rebel in
central Berlin, and the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, Merkel insisted that Putin
could be reasoned with. She was so sure that engaging
with Russia was the path to peace that she gave the green light to the
controversial Nord Stream 2 project in 2015 despite Putin’s occupation of
Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine. Since the latest war started, Merkel has
effectively gone underground. Last month, she said through a spokeswoman that she stood by her 2008 decision to block
Ukraine’s NATO entry. She was last seen vacationing in Tuscany. Frank-Walter
Steinmeier
Frank-Walter Steinmeier | Pool photo by Christian Marquardt/Getty Images A longtime confidant of
disgraced former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (see below), Steinmeier was a
proponent of Germany’s energy alliance with Russia via the Nord Stream
pipelines from the outset. Like many Social Democrats, Steinmeier argued that the
project would guarantee peace by creating mutual dependence between Russia and
Germany. As foreign minister under Merkel, he continued to push that line in
the face of Moscow’s ever-more aggressive actions. He also played a key role in
trying to force diplomatic solutions on Ukraine, most notably the so-called
Steinmeier Formula, which would have cemented Russia’s influence in the
country. Now Germany’s president, Steinmeier recently acknowledged he was wrong
to support Nord Stream and had misjudged Putin. Even so, Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to receive him in Kyiv, forcing the German to cancel a planned visit. Gerhard
Schröder
Gerhard Schroeder | Sean Gallup/Getty Images After losing the chancellery
to Merkel in 2005, Schröder could have retired to Hannover for a quiet
life with his family. In terms of policy, his chancellorship was arguably the
most successful in a generation and he would have likely been revered as a sage
elder statesman. Alas, like so many former politicians, he followed the money
instead. Schröder’s decision just weeks after leaving office to serve as
chairman of the Nord Stream pipeline project, which he had approved in his last
days as chancellor, puts him in a class of his own on the chutzpah scale. About the only positive thing
one could say about Schröder is that he is eternally loyal. Unfortunately,
the object of his loyalty is Putin. The pair’s bromance — unmatched in the
global politics of recent decades — would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. One
might have forgiven Schröder for the first Nord Stream pipeline. After
all, many in the West were wrong about Putin. But instead of backing away,
Schröder tightened the embrace, becoming the Russian strongman’s biggest
defender in the West, a role he continues to play. Schröder made a
quixotic attempt to broker a peace deal by flying to Moscow in March, a visit
many saw as little more than an attempt to resurrect his own image. He recently
told the New York Times that Russia’s war was a “mistake” but was defiant about
his own actions. “I don’t do mea culpa,” he said. Joe Kaeser
Joe Kaeser | Johannes Simon-Pool/Getty Images While it’s true that Germany’s
political leaders bear most of the responsibility for the country’s credulous
policy toward Russia, it’s also true that they were pushed. And no one pushed
harder than Kaeser. As chief executive of engineering giant Siemens from 2013
until 2021, Kaeser was tireless in courting business in Russia. After the
annexation of Crimea in 2014, Kaeser famously refused to cancel a trip to
Moscow for a sitdown with Putin in his private residence. Kaeser admonished his
critics afterward, saying that he wouldn’t allow “temporary turbulence to have
too much influence on our long-term plans.” Kaeser recently apologized for the
remarks, saying that Putin had tricked him. “I was among those who believed in
the principle of Wandel durch Handel,” he said, referring to the German strategy of trying to transform authoritarian
countries by deepening trade ties. Wolfgang
Reitzle
Wolfgang Reitzle | Christof Stache/AFP via Getty Images As the driving force behind
industrial gas giant Linde for the past two decades, Reitzle pushed the company
ever deeper into Russia. Few, if any, German executives were as close to
Putin’s government over the years as Reitzle, a former BMW executive who served
first as Linde’s CEO and then its chairman, a position he gave up in March.
Last year, he oversaw what appeared to be Linde’s biggest coup of all,
a $6 billion deal with Russian energy giant Gazprom to build a massive gas processing
hub near Russia’s border with Estonia. So far, the company is sticking with the
project. While Reitzle has stayed mum on the situation in Ukraine, Linde
recently said in a statement that it was “deeply concerned about the resulting humanitarian
crisis.” Just not concerned enough to stop doing business with Putin. Munich
Security Conference
Chairs with the logo of the 58th Munich Security Conference MSC | Michaela
Rehle/AFP via Getty Images From the outside, the annual
conference might look like little more than a good excuse for global elites to
sample the pleasures of the Bavarian capital. But the gabfest is also a great
place to do business and network, which is why many attendees hail from the
business world. Both Horst Teltschik, who served as Helmut Kohl’s primary
adviser before taking over the conference in 1999, and Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German diplomat turned consultant who took the reins in 2008,
were at pains to court Russian officials and businessmen. The effect of the
outreach was to legitimize Russia as a partner for German business, despite the
sanctions the West had imposed on the country. Linde’s Reitzle, a former
chairman of the Munich Security Council’s advisory board, and Siemens’ Kaeser,
the current chairman, endorsed that push. Under Ischinger, Herman Gref, the
chief executive of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest bank, joined the board. This week
the European Commission proposed measures to further isolate the bank from the international financial
system. Another regular at the conference is Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign
minister many consider to be a war criminal. Ischinger greeted Lavrov on stage in 2018 as “dear Sergey.” Teltschik, who advocates a “give
and take” policy with Russia, described Putin in 2019 as “charming, outgoing and open.” Asked recently if
he’d like to revise that appraisal, he said he stood by it because “that’s how
he was at the time.” Ost-Ausschuss Germany Inc’s main platform
for tapping the Russian market is an organization known as the Ost-Ausschuss, or East Committee. Founded in the
1950s, the lobby group’s members include most of corporate Germany’s best-known
blue-chip firms, from BMW to VW to chemical giant BASF. Since Russia’s
annexation of Crimea, the group has also been Moscow’s best friend in Berlin,
as it agitated against tightening sanctions. It was largely successful on that
front as well as with its push to get Nord Stream 2 approved in 2015. The
Kremlin rewarded the group with unprecedented access. The highlight of the East
Committee’s annual calendar was a sitdown with Putin. This year’s edition was
canceled. On Tuesday, the head of
the Ost-Ausschuss, Oliver Hermes, announced he would step down to focus on helping his own company navigate the
new geopolitical landscape. He condemned the war “in the strongest terms” but
also maintained that “mutual economic dependencies … potentially contribute to
de-escalation.” Matthias
Platzeck
Matthias Platzeck | Sean Gallup/Getty Images A former premier of Germany’s
Brandenburg state and leader of the Social Democrats, Platzeck has been the
kinder, gentler face of Russian aggression in Berlin. Born and raised in
communist East Germany, Platzeck (who confesses to an enduring love of Soviet
cinema) tried to convince Germans that they had nothing to fear from Russia. A
frequent guest on Germany’s talkshow circuit, Platzeck often argued that Russia
was simply misunderstood and that the West should make overtures to Moscow to
build trust. In his 2020 book, “We Need a New Ostpolitik,” Platzeck said the
international community should recognize Crimea as part of Russian territory, a
demand he first made shortly after the Russian invasion in 2014. He has since
revised that stance. A day after Russia’s latest
invasion, Platzeck admitted he’d been wrong about Russia. “I kidded myself
because for me what has just happened was unthinkable,” he said. A few days
later he resigned as a chairman of the German-Russian Forum, a non-profit group
he led to promote ties between the two countries. Georg Restle
Georg Restle | Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons A well-known reporter on
German public television and anchor of a primetime news magazine called
“Monitor,” Restle has peddled the dubious narrative that NATO’s eastward
expansion is to blame for antagonizing Russia. Though critical of Putin and the
war, which he recently began covering from Kyiv, Restle has pushed an editorial
line at Germany’s dominant public broadcaster (the primary source of news for
most Germans) that portrays the West as being as much of a culprit in its
standoff with Russia as Putin. “Much trust has been destroyed
in recent years and Russia is by no means the only one to blame,” he told
viewers in 2018 as he introduced a segment lambasting NATO for holding a
military exercise on the alliance’s eastern flank. “Recent history shows that
it was above all the West, drunk on its victory in the Cold War, that ignored
Russian interests time and again, while seemingly learning nothing or refusing
to.” Two days before Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine, he lamented “the West’s ignorance of Russia’s security interests, the U.S. lies
in the Iraq war and NATO’s Kosovo mission” even as he said they could not be
used as justification for Putin’s “shocking breach of international law.” Friedrich
Merz
Friedrich Merz | Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images At first blush, Merz, the new
leader of Germany’s conservatives, would appear to have nothing to do with the
Russia morass. Yet at key moments in the debate over Russia policy in recent
years, Merz, who won the leadership of the Christian Democrats (CDU) on his
third try and after a busted general election, was reliably on the wrong side
of history. It took the poisoning of
Navalny in 2020 to convince Merz, a corporate lawyer who spent years in the
political wilderness after being bested by Merkel for the CDU leadership in the
early 2000s, that Nord Stream 2 might not be a good idea. Even then, Merz, a
longtime proponent of the project, only called for a moratorium on the
pipeline’s construction. More recently, he objected to blocking Russia from the
SWIFT payments system in the run-up to the February 24 invasion. Warning that
the move could be the equivalent of igniting an “atomic bomb,” in terms of the
potential impact on financial markets, Merz cautioned against shutting Russia
out. He later reversed course and is now pushing for a harder line. He visited
Kyiv this week. Jürgen
Habermas
Juergen Habermas | Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images For Germany’s
pseudo-intellectual Bobo set, no figure is more influential than Habermas, a
man many regard as the unofficial philosopher of the
German state. A pragmatist and one-time adherent of the Frankfurt School,
Habermas, 92, has served as an oracle for Germany’s mainstream left for
decades. His latest pearl of wisdom: Germany was right to not send weapons to
Ukraine. In a recent op-ed for the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, the daily briefing for
the country’s cosmopolitan elite, Habermas held a candle for Germany’s
“introspective and reserved federal government.” Germany’s feckless approach to
Ukraine in its hour of need is not the problem, it’s the answer, he argued,
urging readers not to heed the “shrill moral indictments of German restraint.” In the end, he reassured
Germans that all will be well, so long as they don’t heed the wind of change.
“This debate, which has produced numerous examples of the astonishing
conversion of erstwhile peaceniks, supposedly heralds the historic shift in the
German post-war mentality — a hard-won mentality that has repeatedly been
denounced from the right — and thus the end of the broad pro-dialogue,
peace-keeping focus of German policy,” he concluded. Manuela
Schwesig
Manuela Schwesig | Sean Gallup/Getty Images Schwesig was destined for
great things. A former minister for family affairs under Merkel, the Social
Democrat became the premier of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 2017. A
cancer survivor from the east, Schwesig was seen by many in the SPD as the
party’s future — until Nord Stream 2 got in the way. That the German end of the
pipeline ends in her home state might be chalked up to bad luck if it weren’t
for the fact that Schwesig is a true believer. Schwesig rarely missed an
opportunity in recent years to defend the project — and Russia — going as far
as to set up a non-profit foundation with money from Gazprom to complete the
project in the event it was hobbled by U.S. sanctions. Schwesig didn’t spend
much time discussing Ukraine or the challenges it faced in dealing with Russian
aggression. Yet she was very focused on the U.S., which she regularly accused
of unfairly attacking her hard-working constituents by threatening to sanction
firms involved in the project. “You have the choice between
Russian gas from the Baltic pipeline … or American fracking gas, which serves
the interests of the U.S,” Schwesig told MPs during a heated session in
2020. More recently, she changed her
tune, saying that the foundation was a mistake and that Putin needed to be held
accountable for attacking Ukraine. “We’re living in a new era,” she said this
week. may 5 2022 |
