I think you might find this analysis of Germany’s views of the Ukraine situation by Marcel Dirsus at War on the Rocks informative. After observing that rhetorically Germany has been supportive of the Ukrainians while pragmatically they’ve been supportive of the Russians. Mr. Dirsus observes:
Germans’ world is one in which their country has “moved beyond power politics, the national interest and militarism.†It’s a parallel reality in which trade beats force and every conflict between states can be solved through more dialogue or more multilateralism. Germany’s allies can be exasperated by this view or take comfort in the fact it may slowly be beginning to change. But at the very least they would do well to understand it.
Germany, of course, is not a monolith, but there are some deeply held views in large parts of German society that have a huge influence on foreign policy.
The most significant of these is the way in which many Germans view the role of military power in international politics. Seen from Lower Saxony or Bavaria, military force is not just evil, it’s also useless. It has caused the greatest tragedies of the 20th century and a whole lot of needless suffering during the Cold War. Since then, it has only created more chaos and death in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Libya. In her excellent essay on the topic, Ulrike Franke outlines how millennial Germans, who are now moving into positions of power, came to think the way they do. If you were born in (western) Germany in the middle of the 1980s or thereafter, you grew up “in a world of exceptional stability and peace.†That doesn’t mean that nothing happened, but Germany was so safe and protected that Germans “never had to think about the military,†and their education further emphasized the futility of force. As Franke notes, that has had an important impact on the way in which young Germans see the world and on what they consider to be normal.
Read the whole thing. I think he’s being very charitable. I would say rather than a) Germany has been so swaddled for so long in an American security blanket the Germans see it as just part of the natural order of things and b) the Germans are highly reluctant to do anything that would bear costs for Germany. As long as we’re willing to underwrite German foreign policy goals, why should they think any other way?
