German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier may not be interested in the war with Iran, but that war is certainly interested in Germany. The oil and gas it desperately needs flows through the Straits of Hormuz, which can be secured only by the US Navy. The ballistic missile attack on Diego Garcia shows Iran’s strategic reach now encompasses Berlin, Rome and Warsaw. The nightmare scenario under which an economically weak Iran could blackmail the mighty European Union is forestalled only by the layered ballistic missile defense constructed at great cost by the United States, which includes satellites, ground based radars, and interceptors both ashore and on US ships based in Rota, Spain (hello Pedro Sanchez, and welcome to the party!). The two-stage rockets fired by Iran are clearly sized for use with an atomic weapon, should the current campaign fail to end the nuclear ambitions of the Islamic Republic.
Rather than express gratitude for American defence against this alarming new Iranian capability, Steinmeier parroted Germany’s traditional faith in international law and the moribund Joint Consultative Plan of Action negotiated by President Obama. That this deal would have ended all restrictions on uranium enrichment a full year ago, and never placed any limits on Iran’s ballistic missile programmes troubles Steinmeier not at all. Apparently words on paper have a magical power far superior to the tawdry complexities of missile defence. The possibility that the inadequacies of the JCPOA encouraged rather than hindered the covert development of hostile capabilities is a notion beyond the sentimental yearnings of the German President.
Steinmeier could have limited himself to the standard German preference for rules rather than power, but he then chose to launch into a spurious equivalence between the US assault on Iran and Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Iran has been in a self-declared war with the West since 1979, has broken or circumvented every agreement designed to corral its nuclear program, and has used violent militant groups to pursue terror and assassination in and around Europe. Yet the mere fact that the US might finally take these threats seriously, and after 47 years move to end them somehow consigns the American President to the same circle of hell as the butchers of Bucha. Steinmeier states “…there will be no going back to the way things were before February 24, 2022 in our relationship with Russia, so I believe there will be no going back to the way things were before January 20, 2025 in transatlantic relations.”
Steinmeier’s fatuous equivalence between Europe’s leading predator and its foremost protector derives not from a reasoned understanding of Germany’s objective interests, but from a political trauma buried deep in the psyche of the Social Democratic Party. Steinmeier was a rising member of the SPD youth wing, the “Jusos” just as it was torn between the old Atlanticist establishment led by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the young peace activists opposed to the deployment of American Pershing missiles as a counter to Soviet SS-20’s. The Jusos haemorrhaged members to the anti-nuclear Greens, and various hard-left groups that haunted universities across the country. After Schmidt was unceremoniously deposed in late 1982, rising young Social Democrats like Steinmeier triangulated away from Atlanticism toward a political neutrality between East and West, leavened by war guilt and a cultural Mitgefühl toward the Russians.
The blunt spoken Ronald Reagan became a foil for an SPD desperate to claw back support from the upstart Greens. Reagan served the same useful role for the German Left in the 1980’s as Trump does today: The embodiment of a reckless American leader who (astonishingly) believes conflicts can be won, not just managed. German universities were roiled by performative outrage when Reagan called the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire.” To the German Left, characterising a regime responsible for the Great Terror, the Ukrainian famine, the show trials and the Gulag as “evil” was evidence not of moral clarity, but of dangerous American naiveté.
This reflexive suspicion of the US animated Steinmeier’s career as he rose to the heights of SPD leadership as the architect of Gerhard Schroeder’s near-carnal relationship with Vladimir Putin. The intricate web of political and industrial relations Steinmeier helped weave between Berlin and Moscow reified the German Left’s fondest hope: That the Russians might forgive them for the sins of their fathers. Like a good Chekist, Putin was quick to spot the power this desperate neediness granted him over the German Chancellor. Steinmeier’s subsequent service as foreign minister under Angela Merkel cemented sympathy toward Russia and suspicion of American power across coalition politics.
One might think that a German leader contemplating the dire industrial catastrophe that ensued after the rupture with his primary energy provider would be a bit more circumspect about condemning his country’s primary security provider. Germany cannot simultaneously afford its social welfare programs, spot market rates for liquified natural gas, and a replacement of America’s security shield. Pick two: If there is indeed “no going back” in relations with Russia and its cheap energy, then there is no way to preserve German pensions without continued dependence on the Pentagon and its fiendishly complex and hideously expensive missile defense systems.
As a figurehead without policy obligations, President Steinmeier can engage in political peacockery. But if he really believes his country can divorce itself from American security much as it has divorced itself from Russian gas, his people have the right to ask who will pay for yet another separation from the material bases of German security. Moral vanity doesn’t elevate Germany above the tawdry necessities of power politics, it only obscures them. Steinmeier owes his citizens a frank appraisal of Germany’s fragile dependence. Instead he offers them a comforting fable: Fog descends over the Atlantic; America cut off
The EU sees a world that isn’t there