If German president had any influence, he would be a menace to the stability of Europe

German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s statement last week that the Iran war is a ”disastrous mistake” and a violation of international law is an outrage. He said that the second Trump term marked a rupture in German-American relations as profound as that caused in Germany’s relations with Russia by that country’s invasion of Ukraine. All of this is unutterable nonsense and reminds us of the hypocrisy of the left-wing of the German SPD that was a constant nightmare for the responsible Social Democratic German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

Readers will recall the theory of Egon Bahr and Horst Emke and even Willy Brandt, who essentially favoured the reunification of Germany in exchange for the Finlandization of the whole country as a neutral state between the Soviet and NATO blocs. It was regularly implied that the United States was using Germany as the frontline in its contest for world leadership with the Soviet Union to assure that any conflict between them would be conducted in Germany and perhaps adjoining states and not directed at the homelands of the two great protagonists.

Although it was almost never put in quite these terms, the theory of these people, who never ceased to represent themselves as authentic German nationalists, was that if the Soviet Union and the United States ever came to violent confrontation, they should conduct it between themselves and not on the territory of Western Europe which lay between them. I have long felt that the greatest act of statesmanship of anyone in the post-war period was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s decline of Stalin’s offer of reunification in exchange for the disarmed neutrality of all Germany, and his persuasion of the majority of his countrymen to support him. Adenauer believed the Germany had never had the allies that it should have had and needed and that it should be in close alliance with the United States, the United Kingdom and France and thus would eventually achieve reunification without the political emasculation of the country. Of course, he was posthumously vindicated.

Even in the 70s and 80s there was a good deal of discussion about burden-sharing and the United States remonstrated that it was paying an excessive share of Western defence given that it was under no direct land threat from the Soviet bloc. The response from the Steinmeiers of the time was the spurious counterargument of risk-sharing: The Americans should pay a greater share of the burden of defending the West precisely because they had the advantage of not being so proximate to the potential Soviet threat. The apportionment of NATO defence expenditures would be in large measure, on this theory, a taxation on the United States and to a small degree on Canada also for the fortuitous benefits of having the Atlantic Ocean separate them from European wars.

Sensible and courageous statesmen overcame all this piffle and initially under Churchill, Adenauer, de Gasperi, Eisenhower and de Gaulle, and later Thatcher, Kohl, Reagan, Mitterrand, and Mulroney, the containment policy was enforced and when the United States announced its intention to develop comprehensive antimissile defences, the Soviet Union recognised that it might not be able to maintain its nuclear deterrent equivalence and abruptly and bloodlessly disintegrated. The collapse of the USSR like a soufflé completely debunked the policy of socialist appeasement that the left-wing of the SPD had been pursuing.

It had long been a truism that Germany was too late unified, was unable to determine if it was a western or eastern-facing country, and that whenever it sought to strengthen its own security it did so at the expense of its neighbours. The belief of Adenauer and Kohl and Schmidt and the steady majority in the Federal Republic of Germany that Germany must be rooted in the West and closely allied with its former enemies, the principal western democracies and in close military and economic association with them, prevailed and this alliance achieved the greatest and most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the world with the collapse of international Communism.

Steinmeier is inexcusably using the toothless sinecure of the German presidency, a pale substitute for the long-rejected Hohenzollern monarchy, to revive failed Cold War arguments. Pretending that there is the slightest comparison between Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine, in violation of past guarantees and unjustifiable notions of re-creating the Empire of Peter the Great and Stalin against the wishes of the populations involved, with the action of the United States and Israel to prevent the attainment of a full deliverable nuclear military capacity by the world’s greatest terrorism-sponsoring state whose government has pledged destruction or expulsion of the Jewish population of Israel, is monstrous.

Implicitly stating that there is moral equivalence between the thuggee of Putin in the Kremlin and the American-Israeli response to 47 years of the terrorist provocations of Iran and its direct nuclear threat to all of the Mideast, Central and much of Western Europe, and South Asia, is delusional and dangerous. German Chancellor Merz stated last summer that Israel and the United States were “doing the world’s dirty work for it”. They still are. Germany gets a great deal more out of its alliance with the United States than the Americans do and their bumbling president should be sent packing. If he had any influence, he would be a menace to the German national interest and the stability of Europe.