Between Rumsfeld and France

Tragedies in history, an old German once said, have the tendency to repeat themselves as farce. That, of course, was Karl Marx, sweating away over the economic riddles of the 19th century. Donald Rumsfeld is another great thinker of German origin; his forefathers emigrated from Lower Saxony, which has had a centuries-old privilege of having produced, never major writers, composers, musicians or officers, but many great hog-farmers. Now, he has achieved a historic feat by combining tragedy with farce – and doing so in a single sentence.

In testimony before the US Congress on Thursday 6 February, the American Defense Secretary lumped Germany together with Libya and Cuba in one neat parcel. According to him, these rogue states have ruled out ‘any role in a US-led attack or post-war reconstruction of Iraq […] I believe these are the countries that won’t help in any respect.’

Billions, patriots – oh, and Kabul

It is always a danger when the defence minister of any state mixes up countries or, for that matter, cities (during the Second World War the city of Oschersleben in East Germany was heavily bombarded instead of Aschersleben, whose citizens were saved by a typo). Someone should remind Donald Rumsfeld that at the moment Germany is paying an annual two billion euros into the coffers of operation Enduring Freedom – more than any other country in the western Alliance – excepting, of course, the United States.

Thus, Germany is presently carrying much of the ‘white man’s burden’ in Afghanistan, fulfilling the somewhat dubious role of ‘lead nation’ for the foreign troops stationed there. Germany is also willing to provide Patriot missiles to Turkey and Israel in the current crisis and it has clearly indicated to the White House that – if the necessity arises – it will do its share in post-war reconstruction of the region.

Twelve years ago, when the United States asked for German assistance in the Gulf War, Helmut Kohl simply sent a check for 15 billion Deutschmarks, thereby adding to the enormous state deficit inherited by the present government. Private ‘thank yous’ were uttered. Those days are over. Indeed, today Germany cannot come up with similar sums without being punished by the European Union for breaking the Maastricht Agreement’s stability pact. Nor, and here’s the rub, is it willing to participate militarily in the new Gulf War.

The truth is, it has never been asked to do so. The United States actually seems happy to go it alone. The involvement of British troops in the case of war will mainly serve a political purpose, indicating to the American public that there is, after all, some sort of worldwide support for its government’s actions.

Do you really want our soldiers?

The US armed forces have reached a level of technological superiority beyond the financial and political reach of any other nation, putting them into a class of their own. With more than 3,000 cruise missiles or precision-guided bombs already deployed around Iraq, the US appears able to knock out a kennel of Saddam Hussein’s without destroying his garden shed. This perception of their military superiority has changed the US’s geo-strategic outlook.

President Bush has made it abundantly clear in his National Security Council paper of last winter that he will not allow any other nation to catch up. Furthermore, because he is confident that, using their technology, the US can now complete wars swiftly and with few casualties, his idea of pre-emptive, preventive war is also founded on a conviction that such war can be won without lasting political repercussions in the US itself. No more Vietnams!

Meanwhile in Rumsfeld’s ‘old Europe’, the war-weary citizens of Germany have just gone through approximately 20 hours of TV programmes revisiting Stalingrad – that epitome of strategic hubris, where over 1.2 million died in the epic battle of 1942–43 and a whole German army vanished like the children’s crusade in the Middle Ages.

These citizens stand by their chancellor, who won the last election by rejecting any German participation in forcible regime change in Iraq. Perhaps this attitude is an unexpected success of the post-1945 re-education. The trauma of a lost war was deepened by the knowledge of the profoundest moral defeat any nation has ever suffered in European history.

Whatever the sources of the pacifist mood in Germany may be, it is a fact, and should be welcomed by its neighbours. But it is not. A possible pre-emptive death knoll of another kind, threatening the arrival of a Europe united in matters of war and peace, rang last week – when the heads of eight European states, with secret guidance from Spain and Britain and without the knowledge of France and Germany, signed a letter affirming the righteousness of the US war plans.

Schröder and Chirac took this as a betrayal – in particular on the part of Poland, which had just been accepted into the Union at great expense to their two nations.

Schröder under siege

To make matters worse for the Schröder government, the Social Democrats suffered devastating defeats in two state elections in the Länder of Hesse and Lower Saxony (Rumsfeld country!).

Schröder, who has always been at his best as a politician with his back to the wall, now has one wall behind and another one in front of him. Voters who followed his peace path last summer and re-elected him to national office have now turned to local politics and looked into their wallets. What they saw, they did not like.

Even cigarettes, let alone gasoline, have become more expensive in this nation of passionate smokers and car drivers. Unemployment has risen above ten per cent, and economic growth expectations have fallen to less than one per cent. The economy is, without doubt, in a slump. If a war in Iraq should last longer than four weeks, rising energy prices will flatten any hope for recovery like daisy cutters (the fearful new explosive devices in the American arsenal which destroy anything beneath them in a radius of half a mile).

In Germany it is the second chamber, the Bundesrat, which now in part defines domestic policy. Composed of representatives from the Länder, it is now under the complete control of the conservative opposition, the CDU/CSU. This power brings with it a responsibility, however, as it puts them under the obligation to put aside strident opposition to each and every Schröder move. If the conservatives are genuinely interested in reforming Germany’s fossilised economic, social and regulatory structures, as well as in office, they will have to cooperate with the government, weakened though it is.

For the next weeks, in a curious twist of history, the political futures of Chancellor Schröder and his Green party foreign minister Joschka Fischer depend on political calculations in France. If France, which has always pretended to suffer from Germany’s unwavering alliance to the United States, decides to go forward and join the US and British war against Iraq, it will leave Germany alone with Syria in abstaining in the Security Council of the United Nations. In that case, Schröder’s international isolation would be complete.

In that event, he might decide to hand over power to the rising star of his Cabinet, the minister of labour and economics, Wolfgang Clement. Fischer, who became a firm Atlanticist under the loving guidance of Madeleine Albright, could stay on as a foreign minister.

But then again, Schröder is, like Donald Rumsfeld’s forefathers, a man born in the countryside of Lower Saxony. This region may indeed have never generated great artists. But its people certainly are stubborn as hell.

Part Two: It takes two to divorce

Two thousand years ago, the truly hegemonic emperor of Mesopotamia, Assurbanipal, boasted that he had eight kings running next to his chariot. A sad spectacle, obviously, on the banks of the Euphrates.

These days it is enough for most European leaders, with the exception of Schröder and Chirac, to publicly acknowledge that President George W. Bush owns the chariot. Nor does he even require their ambassadors to pull his coach, as was the wont of Caligula on sunny days in Rome.

The humiliating power symbolisms of yore have been replaced by ‘robust diplomacy’. The future of a pax americana rests on persuasive military threats accompanied by friendly arm-twisting amongst the allies.

Donald Rumsfeld – he of the unforgettable meetings with Saddam Hussein 20 years ago, in which he provided him with the means to lead his war against Iran – has already announced that the US forces will relocate some of the 70,000 soldiers stationed in Germany to other regions in Europe.

France is accused by Washington of intriguing in the United Nations (UN) to try to avoid a final war-resolution of the Security Council. Putin, throwing his lot in with the ‘weaklings’ of European appeasement, has led Washington to the correct conclusion that Nato has reached the end of its raison d’être.

Of course, this was already a fait accompli once the Berlin Wall came down – as was more than confirmed by its dismal failure to stop the murderous gangs of Milosevic, Tudjman, Mladic et al. before 250,000 people were killed in Yugoslavia. And it will die many other deaths yet, since such institutions are almost immortal once more than a thousand officials are employed. As the inscriptions on Roman gravestones used to say: noli me tangere, don’t touch me.

In hindsight, the Balkan crisis must have been the turning point in America’s strategic thinking. As England, France and Germany fell back into 19th century patterns of diplomacy (Germany supporting Croatia, England backing Serbia and France behind Bosnia and against everybody else), it became clear to Washington’s geo-strategists that it is far better ‘to go it alone’. The short war in Kosovo gave them a partial endorsement – but only as long as the bickering allies of the Old World were willing to pick up the pieces after the battle, as they did both there and later in Afghanistan.

These rather futile exercises in ‘nation building’ are expensive, dangerous, unheroic, and have no sex appeal for American voters. Presently, Karzai’s Afghan nation is Kabul plus a secured circle around it with a radius of approximately 30 miles. When Germany’s Minister of Defence visited his outpost in the Hindu Kush last Monday, he was forced to take cover in a bunker when two missiles from nowhere missed him – by about half a mile.

Today, more than 35,000 German soldiers are involved in far-flung places, either reporting to the UN or the US. That is more than any other American ally is willing to deploy. The German Navy securing the shipping lanes off the Horn of Africa, tiny as it is, recalls a ridiculous incident in the same region in 1888.

The Kaiser sent a number of frigates and cruisers there, to stop slave trading and anti-colonial rebellions along the East African shores. It was to no avail, despite their being joined by the British and the Italian navies. Some of those dhows inspected certainly did have slaves on board. But they were indistinguishable from their captors, and since none of them spoke German, no one could tell who was who.

The poor sailors caught tropical diseases and brought back their heavily corroded ships to the boatyards of the Reich after ten months. German Admiral Karl Deinhard died of malaria. Meanwhile the Italian Navy, of course, excelled at harbour parties, as their German friends bitterly complained. Today’s Germans, based in Djibouti, have yet to catch a terrorist. And there are no parties, no pasta at all.

American national strategy, outlined in numerous presidential speeches and documents after 11 September 2001 has laid bare the heart of Germany’s ‘American dilemma’: its need to map its course between eternal gratefulness to America for its life-saving role during the cold war, for its unwavering support for reunification on the one hand, while at the same time wishing to develop a larger ‘Spielraum’, independence in economic and foreign policy decisions.

In the words of the ‘National Security Strategy’ document of last fall, ‘the US national strategy will be based on a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests.’ In short, the compactness of America’s modern self-image, which elides the values of democracy with the necessities of Realpolitik, or coalesces ‘American national interests’ into ‘American internationalism’, is hard to swallow for mid-sized nations, democracies included. They have international interests of their own. In questions of war and peace, Germany, like France, would like to be consulted and – if necessary – excluded.

Last August, when Vice President Cheney announced unilaterally that America will go to war against Iraq with or without a UN mandate, it became clear to the Germans that the hegemonic power meant business. It was not Germany’s business. Nor, in fact, was Germany asked. As in a marriage, it takes two to divorce.