“Germany is a team player,” says Sudha David-Wilp, the director of the U.S.-based German Marshall Fund’s Berlin office. Officials are concerned that delivering Leopard 2 tanks could be perceived by Moscow as a marked acceleration of the military support that it has already provided Ukraine, including ammunition and armored military vehicles. German fears of Russian escalationĪnother factor influencing the German government’s angst is over fear of provoking some kind of Russian escalation. “In a democracy, you will need public support for this kind of policy when it comes to issues of war and peace,” says Schmid. Schmid says that this division hasn’t escaped Scholz, who wants to remain “in sync” with both the German electorate and his coalition on these matters. But it’s also reflected within the German governing coalition, the largest parties of which-Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats and the Greens-have their own pacifist factions. This concern is reflected in German public opinion: Just 46% of Germans are in favor of supplying Ukraine with the Leopard 2 tanks, according to a Jan. “There is a big belief that weapons are no solution you don’t solve conflicts with arms.” “There are a lot of people who really have trouble with the idea of seeing German tanks roll east of Germany and kill Russian soldiers because it really creates a kind of image that reminds ourselves of World War II,” says Ulrike Franke, an expert on German foreign and defense policy at the European Council on Foreign Relations. By sending weapons to Ukraine and ending its reliance on Russian energy, many Germans feel that they are turning their backs on both. They are also deeply influenced by the legacy of Ostpolitik, Germany’s policy of normalization with Russia in the 1970s that was seen as instrumental in bringing about the end of the Cold War. Many Germans feel a deep-seated aversion to military aggression and its uncomfortable associations with the country’s Nazi past. To understand Germany’s reluctance about supplying tanks to Ukraine, it helps to understand the ways in which its World War II-era history informs its government today. But if “something turns ugly and if, against all odds and all expectations, the war spreads, the responsibility will fall fully on the shoulders of Scholz and Biden and Macron.” Germany’s post-Nazi aversion to war
“There are very good purely military reasons to send these kinds of weapons to Ukraine, for sure,” says Nils Schmid, the foreign policy spokesperson for Scholz’s Social Democrats in the German Bundestag.
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