Part I: Germany in Crisis – The Lost Man of Europe
This is the first of four reports on the crises that now beset Germany — what they are, the history that produced them, and how Germans think about finding their way forward once again.
I thank Eva–Maria Föllmer–Müller and Karl–Jürgen Müller of Bazenheid, Switzerland, for their unsparing assistance as I reported and wrote this series.
Of the many things said — insightful things, wise things, some foolish things — as the results of Germany’s national elections arrived on Sunday evening, Feb. 23, the most remarkable to me was the exclamation of the Federal Republic’s new chancellor-to-be: “We have won it,” Friedrich Merz declared before his supporters in Berlin as the exit polls, which proved accurate, gave the conservative Christian Democratic Union the largest share of the vote.
Merz is one of those political figures given to speaking before he thinks, and nobody seems to have taken this outburst as anything more than the election-night utterance of an exuberant victor. I heard it differently. To me, Merz’s four words betrayed a nation in crisis: its politics and economy in disarray, its visionless leadership, its pervasive malaise, the deepening fractures among Germany’s 83 million people — Germany’s inability, let’s say, to talk to itself or understand, even, what it means to say, “We have won it.”
The low-minded Merz’s “we” means the CDU, which he leads, and its longtime partner, the Christian Social Union. But how narrow a notion of winning is this for someone who purports to be not merely a national leader but a leader of Europe? The CDU/CSU won not quite 29% of the vote, just enough to form a new governing coalition. That leaves 71% of German voters who didn’t win anything.
The next chancellor’s “we,” to go straight to the larger significance of the German elections, should alarm all of us across the West, not only in Germany, given where Merz and his coalition partners intend to lead the Federal Republic. They have made their radical intent clear even before Merz formally assumes office. It is to dismantle the most advanced social democracy in Europe in favor of a swift, radical rearmament — shocking all by itself given Germany’s history — and a return to the Cold War’s ever-perilous hostilities. The speed of this turn appears to be taking everyone by surprise: On Monday, April 1, the Bundeswehr began stationing an armored brigade in Lithuania, the first long-term deployment of German troops abroad since World War II.
History, which I invoke throughout this series, haunts this transformative moment like a ghost. Many are they who saw in the postwar republic a promise that the trans–Atlantic world could take a new direction, that the West might cultivate — I’ll go to shorthand here — a more humanist, or humanized, form of democracy. In the 1960s, Ludwig Erhard, economics minister under Konrad Adenauer, fashioned the soziale Marktwirtschaft, the social market economy, a model considerably at variance with the free-market fundamentalism the United States was by then imposing upon the world. It made unions powerful and gave workers seats on corporate boards, among much else, and in so doing prompted the thought that Europe’s social-democratic tradition might at last tame capitalism’s excesses.
In the late 1960s, Willy Brandt, the Social Democratic foreign minister and subsequently chancellor, developed his long-celebrated Ostpolitik, a policy that opened the Federal Republic to its East Bloc neighbors and the Soviet Union. This was a rejection not only of Washington’s Cold War binary; more than this, it was a decisive reply to the anti–Russian animus that has scarred German history for a century.
To know this history now is to recognize the February elections as a defeat of considerable magnitude that extends, again, well beyond what was so recently Europe’s most powerful nation. Friedrich Merz and his coalition partners — who will include a Social Democratic Party that has cravenly repudiated the very tradition it once championed — has abandoned more, much more than the Federal Republic’s past. Anyone who entertained hope that the Continent might serve as a guide to a more orderly world is in some way bereft now, left with one less reason to hope the wandering West will find its way beyond the cycle of decline into which it has fallen.
Merz is a man of contradictions, which admittedly does not distinguish him among centrist politicians in Germany or anywhere else in the West. He will be distinguished now as the German people’s hopelessly contradictory leader. His most pressing domestic responsibility is to revive an economy the coalition of neoliberals led by his hapless predecessor, Olaf Scholz, has driven very nearly into the ground. Take your seats as this disaster in the making unfolds.
Merz is a virulent Russophobe — he is as vigorous in this as any postwar political figure, I am told — and he is strongly committed to escalating Germany’s support for the war in Ukraine. But bringing the German economy back to life simply cannot be done unless Germany determines to restore its dense, altogether natural interdependence with Russia, notably but not only on the energy side. The resort to building a trillion-euro war machine is a beyond-words act of political desperation: The extent to which it succeeds as economic stimulus will be the extent to which it destroys German social democracy while — not to be missed — burdening the government with enormous debt. As to the folly of the U.S.–inspired proxy war in Ukraine, each commitment the new government makes to continued support of the corrupt, Nazified regime in Kiev — financial support, military support, political support, diplomatic support — will alienate a greater proportion of the German citizenry.
Germany’s predicament is the West’s, cast merely in higher relief: It must change, it must find a new direction — its voters demand these things — but Germany as its leadership is currently constituted cannot change. Germany is arguably singular among the Western powers in that treading water — the ceaseless see-saw of the centrists, if I may mix metaphors — is no longer a workable dodge. The nation simply does not have time for that if it is to avoid an ever-increasing rate of decline.
A remarkable number of German voters switched in February from one party to another — voter migration, this phenomenon is called — in what looks to the naked eye like a perverse game of hopscotch. Most of the voters who abandoned the Social Democrats — and there were very many, as a collapse in the SPD’s support indicates — went to either the CDU/ CSU (the latter rooted in conservative and Catholic Bavaria) or — believe it or not — to the Alternativ für Deutschland, the populist, right-wing nemesis of the long-reigning Social Democrats.
It gets yet more odd, according to an analysis cited by an election-night commentator named Florian Rötzer. “Many from the CDU/CSU did indeed switch to the AfD,” Rötzer remarked as the results tallied, “but strangely enough also to The Left [Die Linke] and the BSW [the left-populist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht]. The Left gained massively, but former [Die Linke] voters switched to the AfD to a lesser extent and to the BSW to a greater extent.” As to Die Grünen, the now-ridiculous Greens — along with the Social Democrats the big losers Feb. 23 — they surrendered voters to Die Linke, a predictable-enough move, but also to the AfD.
I do not see that this impossible-to-read pattern can be marked down as anything other than a shared desperation. And now look. The coalition Merz is about to form with the Social Democrats betrays what appears to be a preposterous indifference to what German voters have just spoken. But in my read, it is better understood as a measure of fear among Germany’s governing elites. The SPD fell to third place in the German political constellation, with 30 fewer seats in the Bundestag than the AfD. But the latter, now Germany’s No. 2 party, will be blocked from the government by means of the antidemocratic “firewall” Germany’s neoliberal centrists show no sign of removing.
In net terms: The government that collapsed last autumn, a nominally left-of-center coalition of neoliberal parties led by Social Democrats, will now be succeeded by a coalition of neoliberal parties led by the right-of-center Christian Democrats almost certain to include the Social Democrats. This will be a straight reproduction of the hugely unpopular alliance that governed until 2021. The European version of Tweedle–Dee and Tweedle–Dum has never looked neater.
Long before the February elections, when it was already clear inept neoliberal leadership had recklessly damaged the economy out of sheer ideological fervor, commentators of various stripes took to calling the Federal Republic the sick man of Europe. We can do better than that tired cliché now: Germany is more usefully considered the lost man of Europe.
Here is Patrik Baab, a prominent German journalist and author — and a man of demonstrated integrity in his judgments, I will add — on election night:
The Germans did not choose stagnation this evening, but decline. A people is leading itself to its own downfall. We will now get more of the same. The war policy of the European elites is to be continued. The economic decline will continue because cheap energy and therefore a good relationship with Russia are needed to revive the economy. There will be no change in that at the moment….
I would add to Patrik’s succinct take only that, however much Germans are marching toward their downfall, I see the nation’s immovable neoliberal centrists at the head of the column.
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Postwar Germany was arguably, and I would make this argument without hesitation, the very epitome of Europe’s profound commitment to a social-democratic ethos, inflected with Christian social doctrine in the German case, that has its roots in the ferment of 19th century Continental politics. France and Germany stood, each differently, as the clearest expressions of the distance the Europeans kept from Anglo–American liberalism, neoliberalism as we call its descendant. The place of the individual was different one side or the other of the English Channel. Liberty was achieved by way of the polity, not by way of freedom from it. Limits were imposed on the operations of capital. The Europeans’ political economy was, altogether, of a more humane order.
Now Germany demonstrates the Continent’s abandonment of its honorable social-democratic traditions and its embrace, with the zealotry of the convert, of the neoliberalism with which the Anglosphere has burdened the Western world. When, why, and how did neoliberal ideology cross the Channel — or, more likely, the Atlantic? I am not an economic historian, but I recall detecting this ideological migration during the first post–Cold War decade, when America’s triumphalism was running wild. The financial crises of our century, needless to say, have consolidated the place of the Continent’s neoliberal elites — those we call austerians when their ideology is transposed into policy.
Courtesy of close friends and colleagues, I spent time in Germany in the months leading up to the February elections. I posed a thousand questions to people from whose insights I benefited greatly. And the question that pressed itself upon me so insistently was: How was it that Germany has come so far from what it once was?
I will turn this insistent question this way and that in the reports that follow.
Part II: Germany in Crisis – A Short History of Exploding Gas Pipelines
This is the second of four reports on Germany’s various crises, the history that produced them and how Germans, other than the neoliberal elites who now hold power, think about their way forward. Part 1 of this series is here.
POTSDAM—A single, brief phrase always comes to mind when I think of Germany. Whatever may be the specific matter to hand, sooner or later my thoughts go to three words that seem to me — and to many others, given they have survived so long in the discourse — to capture some essence of the nation and its place in the world.
“Germany is Hamlet.” For a long time I attributed this pithy observation to Gordon Craig, among Germany’s great 20th century historians. Craig (Germany, 1866–1945; The Germans) was noted for succinct observations of this kind. He saw Germany as a nation divided in history between its humanist achievements (Goethe et al., Kant et al., Thomas Mann et al.) and its regrettable givenness to varieties of absolute power.
Over time I discovered the true author of this exquisite mot was Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–1876), a poet and a political radical who dedicated himself and his work to the democracy movement that led to the (failed) Revolution of 1848. Freiligrath compared Germany with Shakespeare’s famously divided character in 1844—this out of frustration with a native conservatism that held Germany back from the great change he saw as the pressing need of his time.
I don’t see that what Freiligrath meant cancels out what Craig meant more than a century later. And I don’t think either characterization of Germany as… what?… as a profoundly ambivalent nation cancels out the meaning the notion acquired, almost inevitably, in the second half of the last century.
Geography proves destiny in Germany’s case, as it does in various others. It faces Westward to the Atlantic world but also Eastward to the Eurasian landmass. Ambiguity has consequently marked the history of its relations in both directions. Otto von Bismarck cultivated sound relations with Russia during his years as chancellor, 1871 to 1890. That was when Germany first became Germany and the celebrated prince was showing the world what Realpolitik was all about. Then came the two world wars and Germany’s disastrous military campaigns, Eastward and Westward alike.
In the postwar era this ambiguity, this state of “in between,” is best understood not as Germany’s burden but its great gift, and it is with this gift it could have given another to the rest of us—the gift of a bridge between East and West. How different would our world be had post–1945 Germany been left to its fate and, by being truly itself, offered the world what it was singularly able to give.
It is in this context we should understand the arrival of the postwar order in Germany and what befalls the Federal Republic as we speak. Germans were not made for the Cold War and its West–East binaries, destructive as these were to the remarkable release of human aspiration that followed the 1945 victories. Defeated Germany was among Washington’s pivotal clients as it turned against Moscow, so recently its ally, and set out to establish America’s global primacy. This has served Germany and Germans very badly.
The Germany of the immediate postwar years, Konrad Adenauer’s Germany, was a reconstruction project. The new Federal Republic’s first chancellor counted restoring the German economy among his highest priorities. Germany under Adenauer—an anti–Communist, a Europeanist, an early supporter of NATO—was a well-behaved American dependency. But by the early 1960s, the Kennedy years, there was renewed concern in Washington as to West Germany’s eventual place in the Cold War order. And where Germany went the Continent was likely to follow, as the reasoning of the time had it.
This anxiety was not unfounded. A decade after the Iron Curtain divided Germany, in 1949, the Federal Republic was beginning to prosper by way of its Wirtschaftswunder, its “economic miracle” (which was no more a miracle than the postwar Japanese “miracle”). Germans began to look outward. In due course they would gaze eastward to the Soviet Union: It was a nation of manufacturers with a resource economy next door. Europe was looking in the same direction. This was precisely what Washington’s policy cliques had begun to worry about. By this time it was a given among these people that America’s national security interests and the global supply-and-demand of energy were more or less inseparable. We can take the case of Enrico Mattei as a measure of America’s concern.
Mattei was a senior bureaucrat in Rome who, after the defeat in 1945, reorganized the Fascist regime’s petroleum holdings into Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, the oil company commonly known as ENI. Mattei was ambitious for ENI. And going by the many agreements he negotiated, he seems to have had interesting politics. Among other things, ENI’s contracts awarded three-quarters of profits to the nations that owned reserves—an unprecedented percentage at the time. In 1960 Mattei concluded a large, very significant oil accord with the Soviet Union—again, on terms well beyond the exploitative contracts common among Western oil companies.
This was a daring move, as Mattei plainly understood. He thereupon declared that he had broken, or helped to break, the petroleum monopoly the U.S. had long enjoyed via the famous “Seven Sisters.” Eisenhower’s National Security Council had been attacking Mattei as antithetical to American interests since the late 1950s. And the Soviet agreement appears to have landed as an especially hard blow. Two years after signing it Mattei was killed when his plane crashed during a flight from Sicily to Milan. Subsequent investigations, of which there have been many, have continued for decades. In 1997 La Stampa, the Turin daily, reported that judicial authorities in Rome had concluded that a bomb planted onboard had exploded Mattei’s plane in midair.
Although the Mattei case remains officially unresolved, there is now a plentitude of evidence that he was the victim of an assassination conducted by the CIA in its not-unfamiliar collaboration with the Mafia, possibly with the connivance of French intelligence. “Common knowledge among Europeans,” a German friend told me recently. “We know what happened to Mattei the way you Americans know what happened to Kennedy.”
Stopping just short of absolute certainties, as we must, we can read the Mattei affair as a measure of how sensitive energy ties between Europe and the Soviets were by the mid–Cold War years. The point of trans–Atlantic conflict was clear from the first: Europeans viewed contracts with the Soviet Union simply as business—sound, logical economics; for the Americans they were instruments bearing dangerous geopolitical consequences. And it is on this question the Germans and the Americans have found themselves repeatedly at odds for many decades.
Soviet and post–Soviet Russia as a market for German products and services was until recently important, certainly. Russia’s imports of German manufactured goods—a vast range of them—kept the trade balance in Germany’s favor for many years. But the main event for the Germans came to run in the other direction, as the trade account eventually indicated. Russia needed German manufactures because it was weak on the industrial side; Germany needed Russian resources more pressingly because it is not well-endowed by way of raw materials.
Volumes of inexpensive energy imported from Russia, oil and natural gas, and exports of high-end, excellently engineered manufactured goods sold into world markets: Germans often speak of this as the economic model that drove their nation’s success for so many years—speaking wistfully, I should add, because this model was in ruins by the time I traveled in Germany a few months ago.
And so we come to the infrastructure of interdependence, as we may as well call it. We come to the matter of gas pipelines.
This is a story that runs from the 1980s through to Sept. 26, 2022, when the Biden regime destroyed, in broad daylight, the natural gas pipeline that, just completed, ran under the Baltic Sea between Russian and German ports. The explosions of Nord Stream I and II have a long history. Were I an investigator or an attorney working on this case, this history would figure prominently in my files of evidence. Let us consider it briefly.
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In early 1982, state-operated Russian companies began work on the Trans–Siberia pipeline, one of the grand projects of the late Soviet period. This was a 3,700–mile pipeline—a network of pipelines, actually—that would carry natural gas westward via various routes from Siberia all the way to European markets. Trans–Siberia was not the first pipeline serving this purpose, but, as the most ambitious, it would go some way to consolidating Soviet–European relations.
The European powers had a vital interest in this undertaking, naturally, but this was only partly because of the imminent availability of inexpensive energy supplies. The Soviets had signed contracts with dozens of European companies for the components and equipment needed to build and operate the pipeline. These contracts were worth roughly $15 billion, just short of $50 billion today. There were other agreements covering financing and what we used to call technology transfers.
Go back to 1982, just briefly. Europe was in a severe recession. Remember “stagflation,” sluggish growth, high inflation? Western Europe had a critical case. Unemployment among the major European powers—Germany, France, Britain, Italy—was running at nearly 9%. The Europeans needed jobs; their corporations needed profitable work. Contracts with the Soviets for steel pipe, turbines, and other such gear—and the Sovs honored their contracts, as the Europeans knew—stood to get Europe out of its malaise; cheap energy would then drive it forward.
President Reagan, arch–Cold Warrior, was all talk of the “evil empire” by the spring of 1982. The previous December, less than a year in office, Reagan had barred American companies from supplying pipeline equipment to the Soviets. Six months later, the Sovs having begun construction, he expanded this ban to include any Western producer of steel pipelines that operated under a license granted by a U.S. company.
Do you hear history’s echo in this, as I do? Sanctions and atop them secondary sanctions, then as now.
There was a moment during this fraught time when Helmut Schmidt had a private encounter with Reagan in Bonn. The American president, already resentful of what he took to be the German chancellor’s contempt, gave Schmidt—a Social Democrat, an Ostpolitik man—the sort of dressing down one would expect from a not-very-smart man prone to Manichean simplicities. It has to stop, Reagan ordered Schmidt in so many words. You’ll add to the Russians G.D.P. and then they can build more weapons. You’ll help the Soviets while we’re trying to destroy them.
Schmidt said nothing as Reagan spoke. Instead, he retreated to a window and gazed out of it, concluding he would mollify the American Cold Warrior by offering to allow the U.S. to station Pershing II missiles (mobile, intermediate-range, ballistic) on German soil. The first Pershing II’s were in place in Germany by the end of 1983; the full deployment was completed two years later.
I have this account from Dirk Pohlmann, a prominent journalist, author, and documentarian and a dedicated student of Germany’s postwar history. He related this and various historical incidents like it during a long morning we spent talking at my Potsdam hotel and later during various telephone calls and email exchanges. And as Pohlmann told me, there was a lot more to the Reagan administration’s resistance to the Siberia-to–Europe project than informal encounters with European leaders. There were the exertions the public could not see. Reagan’s people put immense pressure on German banks, for instance—Deutsche Bank, Dresdner, Commerzbank—to refuse the Soviets the financing to which they, the banks, had committed.
Reagan eventually relented, griping all the way. He lifted the two layers of sanctions by the end of 1982, apparently recognizing, amid concerted, at this point embarrassing European pressure, he simply could not enforce them. Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister and already a soulmate of sorts to Reagan, had a considerable influence on this policy reversal. There was also the risk of a trans–Atlantic rift just when Reagan wanted everyone on side as he took his run at the evil empire. In November 1982 NATO members reached an informal understanding on the pipeline’s fate, and the first gas deliveries from it arrived, in France, on New Year’s Day 1984.
The Trans–Siberia pipeline, as a curious aside, continued operating until the end of last year, when Kiev declined to renew the pass-through contracts covering the line that transited gas through Ukraine on the way to European markets.
There is one addendum to this tale that must not be missed. By the time of the Trans–Siberia kerfuffle, the Central Intelligence Agency was running a covert sabotage program through which it arranged for American companies to send the Soviets shipments of faulty computer chips. These were engineered to function properly for a brief time and then fail. A consequential quantity of these arrived at some point in 1982—during the period Reagan’s sanctions were in effect and as construction of Trans–Siberia was well along.
The result appears to have been as the agency expected: Turbines installed at the pipeline’s pumping stations blew up in something apparently close to unison. Pohlmann told me it was equivalent to a three-kiloton detonation—an explosion large enough for satellites to detect. Trans–Siberia went operational on schedule, as noted, but—more echoes here, the past and the present in resonance—this stands today as a dress rehearsal for events with which we are now more familiar.
Records of the CIA’s sabotage operation against the Trans–Siberia project are extremely rare. Pohlmann, a close student of this affair, told me references to it have been “almost completely expunged from the internet,” and my experience while researching this report bears this out. But some of those involved in the operation provided contemporaneous testimonies. One of these was Thomas Reed, who was a senior member of Reagan’s National Security Council at the time. His account was published in 2004 as At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War (Presidio Press). Here is a brief passage from the book:
The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space.
While there have been various efforts to discredit Reed’s account—all predictable, none more than unpersuasive obfuscation—his case seems to me incontrovertible. By the time he published At the Abyss, indeed, the CIA had already acknowledged the Trans–Siberia operation in a passing reference in The Farewell Dossier, a gathering of documents concerning other agency matters. After Reed published, Dirk Pohlmann, ever diligent, traveled to Washington to interview Reed and others, including Herb Meyer, who served under William Casey as vice-chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council during the Reagan years. Pohlmann reviewed those interviews when we met here and subsequently for a second time; they all confirm the 1982 operation.
Reagan’s stated concern, above all his others—and this will be familiar—is that Europeans risked the vulnerability attaching to a structural, long-term dependence on Russian energy supplies. As I hope this pencil-sketch of the 1982 incident makes clear, the Americans cynically leave out two syllables when they say such things. Their true fear, then as now, was not dependence but the natural interdependence between Germany (and by extension the rest of Europe) and the great Eurasian landmass of which it effectively forms the westernmost flank.
A couple of years after the Siberian pipeline went into operation, a scholar named Patrick DeSouza published an essay in the Yale Journal of International Law titled, a mouthful here, “The Soviet Gas Pipeline Incident: Extension of Collective Security Responsibilities to Peacetime Commercial Trade.” Among DeSouza’s interesting observations is this one:
Some analysts have concluded that attempts by the United States to wield economic power through trade restrictions have had limited success in the postwar period. Efforts by the United States to get its allies to act in concert for the purpose of denying political adversaries economic power have met with even less success. In fact, attempts to restrict economic activity with such adversaries as the Soviet Union have often resulted in heavy costs, including foregone gains from trade, intra-alliance friction, increased solidarity within the opposing alliance …
There are some true things in this passage, as readers are likely to agree. I read in it the inevitable tension in trans–Atlantic relations once America began to assert its post–1945 hegemonic power. While this tension ebbed and flowed, one period to the next, it was always there and remains so. But DeSouza’s essay is also to be read as a period piece: There are things in it that, true once, no longer obtain. The Europeans successfully resisted the American imperium’s impositions during the late–Cold War years. They would not dream of any such effort now. Forty years separate the events of 1982 from the Nord Stream explosions. How times have changed, and how they have remained the same.
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And how very handy history so often proves to be.
Readers will surely recall with me the shock when the news came three years ago this coming September that the Nord Stream pipelines — both, I and II — had been sabotaged. But where, with a little history in mind, lay the cause for shock? Dramatic as the Nord Stream explosions seemed, were they anything more than a quite unimaginative continuation of Washington’s trans–Atlantic foreign and security policies down through the decades? The shock of the nothing-new, we can call it.
It was just as shocking to me to go back, soon after the news broke, and watch the video footage of President Biden stating, with that stunning indiscretion for which he was known the whole of his political career, that the U.S. would never allow Nord Stream II to go operational and was perfectly prepared to destroy it. This was not long before the event. And another shock: Biden offered these diabolic assurances while Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor at the time, stood like a quiescent schoolboy next to him. The two had just finished private talks in the Oval Office. In hindsight it is not hard to imagine what was said.
With a history running back nearly 30 years—from planning to construction to operation to destruction—the Nord Stream pipelines were at least as significant as the earlier Siberia-to–Europe project, and I am being cautious: While the Trans–Siberia network advanced Russian–European relations, Nord Stream I and II would have consolidated Germany’s economic ties with the Russian Federation, and by extension Europe’s, beyond the point these could be easily disrupted. The first feasibility study for NS I was contracted in 1997. As with NS II later on, the route under the Baltic Sea was to lead from Siberian gas fields to Lubmin, a port on Germany’s northern coast. Berlin and Moscow signed a joint declaration of intent in 2005; NS I went operational six years later.
It was with the planning of NS II—and German companies were again Gazprom’s lead European partners—that matters between Germany and the United States once again got heavy. Gazprom and the Europeans signed contracts in 2015. This was a year after Washington cultivated the coup in Ukraine, a year after Moscow re-annexed Crimea, a year after the Obama administration began to impose the sanctions regime that never seems to cease elaborating. Immediately, it was a straight rerun of the 1982 story.
The Germans understood Nord Stream just as they had Trans–Siberia—an economic project, sensible and valuable. European investments ran to €9.5 billion. NS II would double Nord Stream I’s capacity. Together, the four pipes (two lines each, NS I and II) would deliver 110 billion cubic meters (1.9 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas annually to Germany and European markets—enough to meet, by the estimates I have seen, 40% to 50% of Germany’s yearly needs and not much less of Europe’s. Angela Merkel, chancellor at this time, was unyielding in her defense of the project’s advantages, even while the Americans grew ever shriller (and more threatening) in their attacks on Nord Stream II as a mistake with grave geopolitical consequences.
Merkel was a dedicated Atlanticist but she persisted. Remember, by this time (post–Fukushima) she had committed Germany to decommissioning all its nuclear power plants. The Americans persisted, too. During Donald Trump’s first term they tried every which way to stop NS II’s progress, not least via the usual threats of sanctions and secondary sanctions against European industrial suppliers and participating banks. Richard Grenell, by 2019 Trump’s all-elbows ambassador to Berlin, at one point sent menacing letters to German companies involved in the pipeline. I recall well how some European banks and industrial firms began to balk; rattled nerves were easily detected in the Bundestag.
To her credit Merkel gave no ground and appeared to prevail. Construction on NS II, which had begun in 2018, was completed by the summer of 2021. But by this time Trump and his people were out of power and the Biden regime was in. This marked the beginning of the end of the Nord Stream project—all of it.
As soon as Joe Biden assumed office in January 2021, he and his national-security people began floundering. This was predictable: U.S. foreign policy during the Biden years was one flub after another across both oceans. In May 2021, a couple of months before NS II was finished, Washington lifted all the sanctions Trump had imposed on Nord Stream AG, which comprises Gazprom and four European companies.
This appeared to be a stunning repudiation of the years of pressure — decades, depending on how you count—Washington had exerted on the Germans. At last the Americans seemed to have concluded that trying to prevent the interdependence of Europe and its eastward neighbor was like trying to keep water from running downhill. So it seemed to me. A victory for the Germans, I remember thinking — a triumph for Germany, for Europe, for the cause of constructive engagement with the Russian Federation.
But in short order it was evident that those Biden had drawn around him were in fact obsessed with preventing NS II from bonding Russia and Western Europe in a mutually beneficial symbiosis. Prominent among these officials were Jake Sullivan, Biden’s freakishly ideological national security adviser, and Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state.
Blinken, indeed, had devoted his graduate thesis years earlier to a study of the contentious Siberian project of the Reagan years. This was later published as Ally Versus Ally: America, Europe, and the Siberian Pipeline Crisis, wherein Blinken argued vigorously that preventing Germany and Russia from building any more pipelines like the Trans–Siberia network was a geopolitical imperative. Blinken’s publisher, it is worth a brief note, was Frederick A. Praeger, which, if it was no longer a CIA front by 1987, when Blinken’s book came out, had long served as one during the earlier Cold War decades.
So it was that the Biden regime, stumbling with every step, soon found its way to doing what Americans can be relied upon to do when they prove unable to project power in a fashion that gives the appearance of civility and respectable statecraft —when all the legal or marginally legal or actually illegal but apparently legal coercions fail: With NS II ready to begin pumping, they began to plan an altogether illegal covert operation.
December 2021 was a fraught month in matters to do with the Atlantic alliance’s relations with Russia. As readers will recall, Moscow sent two draft treaties Westward, one to Washington and the other to NATO headquarters in Brussels, as the proposed basis of talks to lead to a mutually beneficial new security framework in Europe. While instantly dismissing these draft documents as frivolous, the Biden White House was, via heavy arms shipments to the Kiev regime, purposely pushing Moscow to the point it would have no choice but to move militarily into Ukraine. Farcically enough, Biden later credited the CIA with a grand intelligence coup when, on cue, it predicted the inevitable Russian operation.
Something else occurred that month. As Biden’s people were confident they were about to provoke Russia’s military advance into Ukraine, they knew they would create an opportunity for themselves: They would be licensed to respond in newly adventurous terms once Moscow made its move. To this end, Jake Sullivan gathered a range of reliably hawkish officials from across the government for a series of top secret meetings in a secure room on a high floor of the Old Executive Office Building, the EOB, a late–19th century edifice in wedding-cake style set next to the White House.
There is no need to go long on what arose from the Sullivan meetings: Seymour Hersh’s account of those sessions and all that followed is properly long, persuasive in its extensive detail, and unassailably authoritative. Hersh published his 5,300–word account of the planning, preparation, training, and execution of the sabotage operation that destroyed the Nord Stream I and II pipelines in his Substack newsletter on Feb. 8, 2023, under the headline, “How America Took Out the Nord Stream Pipeline.” I rank it among the two or three most accomplished pieces of reportage American journalism has produced in my lifetime.
All manner of silliness followed the Nord Stream explosions and, some months later, the publication of Hersh’s piece. The New York Times called the explosions “a mystery.” The Germans, Danes and Swedes purported to conduct official investigations but swiftly closed them, claiming either they found no evidence assigning responsibility or they could not release their findings. Biden regime officials suggested the Russians may have destroyed their own industrial asset—the ne plus ultra, this would be, of false-flag operations.
The American disinformation brigades later reported that their investigations led to rogue Ukrainians — the six-people-in-a-rented-sailboat thesis. Last August the Germans, taking the cake somewhat, issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian identified only as Volodymyr Z., on suspicions he was involved in the explosions. Be not suspenseful: We will never hear another word of Volodymyr Z.
There is no need to bother with any of this. None of it makes the slightest dent in Hersh’s work. Effectively hiding the truth in plain sight, various Biden officials expressed, with remarkable candor, their satisfaction for a job well done. Among these was Antony Blinken. When we bear in mind the secretary’s previously cited thesis, his remarks after the events of Sept. 26, 2022, take on a weight and resonance we might not otherwise find in them:
It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant, and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…
Again, history’s wonderful habit of explaining our present to us.
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In the early 1980s the European powers repelled the Reagan administration’s forceful insistence that they abandon the Trans–Siberia project, and the conflict developed into what historians count one of the most serious political crises among the Western powers during the whole of the Cold War. There was a suggestion in those events that Europe still knew how to act in its own interests as it understood them. It had stood for the cause of interdependence and had been heard. I think of Helmut Schmidt standing at a window in Bonn. He spoke of this, I have no trouble imagining, in his silence—the cause of interdependence amid an attenuated independence within the trans–Atlantic alliance.
Europe’s capacity to think for itself had shown signs of fading soon after the 1945 victories. The generations of leaders that came up after Churchill’s and de Gaulle’s had little experience of independence; they had lived and come of age politically in the shelter of the U.S. security umbrella and, knowing no other condition, were unpracticed in matters to do with sovereignty. There was a restlessness within the Cold War’s confines by the 1960s and 1970s—the Trans–Siberia affair was an expression of this—but in the course of time this faded, too. The difference was evident by the time German citizens dismantled the Berlin Wall in November 1989, if not sooner.
It was when our conversation turned to the events of 1989 that Dirk Pohlmann and I began to speak of Germany as “a land of lost opportunity.” That was my phrase. Pohlmann’s was “the tragedy of lost opportunity.” As Dirk put it, “Germany, Europe, could have had a new influence in the world after 1989.” He meant the Germans had a chance then to serve as that “in-between” nation that bridged West and East. Havel thought precisely of these things during the early post–Cold War years, and he had Europe as well as Germany in mind. “A new task now presents itself,” he said in a speech delivered in Aachen in May 1996, “and with it a new meaning to Europe’s very existence.”
Dirk Pohlmann saw another lost opportunity for the Germans, very like the first, at the start of Russian military intervention in Ukraine three years ago. Germany was in a position to prevent the conflict or mediate it once it began, he suggested, instead of signing on for the Biden regime’s proxy war. “Why are we so obedient? Why do we have our Scholz?” he exclaimed more than asked. “Another world was possible even a few years ago, just as it was after 1989.”
The destruction of Nord Stream stands now as a major break for the Germans. The old model — Russian energy in, sophisticated German products out — seems decisively asunder, and many Germans tell me this will prove beyond repair. But to take the long view, I question whether Germany’s natural givenness to the cause of interdependence can ever be fully extinguished. Talking to Germans gives the strong impression this story is not over. Hamlet, it seems to me, still lurks among them.
Part III: Germany in Crisis: A Culture of Submission
BERLIN— I return briefly to those singular moments when Olaf Scholz stood next to President Joe Biden at a press conference on Feb. 7, 2022, after concluding private talks in the Oval Office. This was the occasion when Biden declared that if Russian forces entered Ukrainian territory—as he was by this time confident they would have no choice but to do—“then there will no longer be a Nord Stream II. We will bring an end to it.”
Take a moment to view the video record of this event. What do we see in those two men? Let us consider their demeanor, their gestures, their facial expressions, what each said and left unsaid, and read what we can into them. I read a 77–year history.
In Biden we have a man calmly matter-of-fact as he states his intention to destroy the expensive industrial assets of the country represented by the man next to him. We note his perfect aplomb, the dismissive wave of his hand, as he puts on full display his indifference to a close ally’s interests and, indeed, sovereignty.
I have until recently attributed Biden’s astounding coarseness as he stands with Scholz to the gracelessness that has marked the whole of his, Biden’s, political career. But I reflect now, as I think of this occasion in the light of all that preceded it, there is another way to judge it: After decades of overweening dominance within the Atlantic alliance, Biden saw no need any longer to disguise America’s hegemonic prerogative. Indeed, in the C–SPAN recording linked above we see the face of a man who takes malign pride in this exercise of raw power.
For his part, Scholz stood at a separate lectern, per protocol, and said nothing in response to Biden’s remark. His demeanor, Scholz’s, indicates he was neither surprised nor angry. He seems, rather, resigned, apprehensive, faintly regretful, faintly submissive. In his face we read the apprehension of a soldier who has just accepted his commanding officer’s baleful battle plan. My guess is he was also wondering what in hell he would say to his government and to Germans on his return to Berlin.
The best way to understand this very pregnant occasion, which has to count as unique or very nearly in the annals of trans–Atlantic diplomacy, is to look backward and then forward from it.
What a long span of time lay between the Germany of the early 1980s, Helmut Schmidt’s Germany, and Olaf Scholz’s Germany, the Germany that fairly cowered as it stood on a dais with America 40 years later. Schmidt, a Social Democrat given to Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, had stood with other Europeans to defend Germany’s interests against President Ronald Reagan’s blunt attempts to impose America’s Cold War disciplines. Scholz, a Social Democrat of a very different kind, was not inclined to defend Germany against Joe Biden even when its very sovereignty was at issue.
How did Germany come to this? I grew convinced, after some days’ reporting here, a city the Iron Curtain long divided, and more time elsewhere in Germany, that Cold War and post–Cold War politics do not of themselves give an answer to this question. No, as I found often during my decades as a correspondent, one must resort to psychology and culture fully to understand politics and history, the latter being in some measure expressions of the former.
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The Allies’ plans for the nations they vanquished in 1945, which in a brief time amounted to America’s plans, were never short of ambition. At the Potsdam Conference, a few months after the fall of the Reich, Churchill, Truman, and Stalin divided Germany into four occupation zones: Britain, France, the U.S., and the Soviet Union would administer one each. Berlin was in the Soviet zone but was similarly divided. Millions of German settlers had to be repatriated from lands the Nazis had conquered—a messy undertaking marked by never-now-mentioned suffering. A de–Nazification program began immediately, and the German military was to be dismantled, although both of these objectives were complicated, to put the point mildly, as the wartime alliance with Moscow gave way to the Cold War the Truman administration insisted on provoking.
But it was in the matter of German hearts and minds that the remaking of the Reich into another kind of country tilted from ambition in the direction of hubris. This was a psychological operation the sweep and magnitude of which may never since have been matched. Only the post–1945 Japanese have undergone anything similar to it. This project was at first shaped and executed by Rooseveltian New Dealers. It was a year or two before Cold War ideologues dispensed with the high ideals in favor of the rigors of late–1940s, early–1950s anti–Communism. The Japanese, not without a subdued bitterness, call this “the reverse course.”
I do not know what the Germans call it, but the postwar volte-face amounted to the same thing. The project was the same across both oceans. It was not to engender authentic experiments in democracy, bottom-up attempts, as the orthodox historians advertise this period. It was to enlist Germany and Japan as Cold War soldiers. Democratization became mere pretext, inasmuch as democracy by its very definition can be neither exported by any country nor imported by any other. In this way, I may as well add, these two nations were the templates Washington applied in many other places during the Cold War. Pretend to democratize, cultivate submission: This was the true postwar project.
To put this point another way, to the extent Germany and Japan made themselves democracies in the postwar decades, this was not because of America’s influence so much as in spite of it.
In the U.S. zone, administrators in and out of uniform assumed control of all forms of information. All newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasters were shut down. American journalists (some of whom went on to illustrious careers) were assigned to reinvent German media to suit what was to be a new democracy. The propaganda programs accompanying this reinvention of mass media, in time heavy with anti–Soviet messaging, were immense, extending from reeducation projects and radio talk shows down to mass-distributed leaflets. The literature about this period gives the impression of an undertaking that excluded no uttered or written word and no image from official scrutiny.
A brief digression.
One of the memorable television programs of my early childhood was a popular law-and-order serial called Highway Patrol. I remember it well even after many years. There was something charismatic about the weekly episodes and their star. Broderick Crawford was the jowly, gruff, sloppily dressed chief of police in a never-named California town. He would sweep into crime scenes and fling open his patrol car’s door amid sirens and clouds of dust, barking orders into his hand-held radio—famously responding to his officers with the unforgettable “10–4.”
Highway Patrol ran for 156 episodes, 1955 to 1959. On the face of it the series was a glorification of official authority. It was about the need to maintain order amid constant threats to it. But, text and subtext, Highway Patrol was about postwar America; each installment was a reiteration of what it meant to be American during those years. The Cold War was never once mentioned, but the Cold War seemed to hover in every one of those episodes. Among the programs running themes were the ever-presence of fear and the necessity of allegiance.
I mention this because of something I learned many years later. It is amusing and highly instructive all at once. Highway Patrol was developed by an ambitious production company called Ziv Television Programs. Frederick Ziv, founder and principal, more or less invented TV syndications (The Cisco Kid, Bat Masterson, etc.). Ziv’s productions, implicitly and occasionally explicitly, were given to anti–Communist atmospherics in Highway Patrol fashion. And after Ziv signed Broderick Crawford, in 1955, Highway Patrol was the first American series to be broadcast on Germany’s new commercial television network.
To finish my point, how odd now to think that German families sitting in front of their televisions a decade after their terrible defeat in a world-historical war could watch the same cops-and-criminals drama that resonated with a young boy before his screen in a leafy suburb of New York.
Highway Patrol is a small example of another dimension of the postwar project in Germany: It was an early case of what we now call soft power. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this assertion of American influence in postwar Germany or its consequences ever since. If occupation administrators controlled what Germans thought by way of their information and propaganda operations, importations of American cultural artifacts—films, music, food, social mores, and so on—came to control how Germans thought: how they thought about the world and about themselves.
The power of soft power, if I can put the point awkwardly, was more obvious in Japan at this time because the Occupation amounted to a confrontation between two different civilizations. From the Americans the Japanese learned billiards, ballroom dancing, big band jazz, Walt Disney movies, how to mix Martinis, how to carry themselves with the nonchalance of Americans. It was just this way in Germany but in a less abrupt fashion. Postwar Germans discovered blue jeans, hamburgers, Bill Haley and His Comets, John Wayne, how to drink Coca–Cola, and who can count how many other things.
If I were to capture the essence of the postwar project in Germany, I would say its enduring outcome has been a remade consciousness. As a German-speaking Swiss friend put it the other day, “Germans, more than any other Europeans and first among them, learned to speak the language of the victor.” This brings me to a fateful error meriting brief explication.
To take one step back, among the prevailing orthodoxies of the Cold War decades was called in the academy “modernization theory.” In a single phrase this held that modernization required Westernization. They came to the same thing, supposedly. For all those newly independent nations in what we call the Global South, if they wanted to make themselves modern they would have to follow the Westerners. In view of its countless consequences, all of them destructive, I consider this among the worst mistakes of the past eight decades. Only now are non–Western nations learning that becoming truly modern begins with becoming truly themselves.
Germany made a roughly parallel mistake after its defeat in 1945. To advance beyond the disaster of the First World War and the barbarities that led to the Second meant becoming thoroughly modern at last. It meant to democratize. And to democratize meant to Americanize. You can count on the Americans to foist this harmful fallacy on the world: They have been doing so, I would say, since the Wilsonians of the early 20thcentury. I do not wish to simplify the case, but this is at least approximately the trap into which postwar Germany fell.
As various German friends have remarked in conversation these past months, setting out to change the consciousness of a nation is, beyond the implicit hubris, a profoundly fraught endeavor. It is to tamper with a people’s very identity, their most basic understanding of who they are. The danger of a collective psychological unmooring of this kind—especially among people burdened with guilt due to their prewar and wartime conduct—is to me obvious. In the cases of Germany and Japan alike, the circumstances of the postwar world seem to me to have defined the results. To go from defeat to the imperatives of the victor’s Cold War ideology was bound to produce, across both oceans, what I have for a long time called cultures of submission.
When the Iron Curtain bisected Germany in 1949 and as Americans directed the nation’s reconstruction, I mean to suggest, it was a kind of mutilation—on maps, but also in psyches. And neither Germany nor its people has yet recovered from this disturbance, as I think of it. This is to state what is bound to be evident to anyone who pays attention while walking to and fro in it. Germany has not been itself this past three-quarters of a century; Germans are, in psychological terms, in some measure separated from themselves, untethered. It is a peculiar condition for a people who have always seemed to me of strong character.
Something Oscar Wilde observed long ago comes to mind—oddly, but not so oddly as all that. “Most people are other people,” Wilde wrote in De Profundis, the famous tract he composed while serving time in Reading Gaol. Wilde had very different matters on his mind, to put it too mildly, but this remarkable pensée seems to me perfectly to the point as we think of postwar Germans. “Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions,” the passage continues, “their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
I think of this passage when I think back to Olaf Scholz as he stood in dull silence three years ago while the American president announced to the world he was about to abuse and humiliate Scholz all at once, giving not a thought to either. Who was Scholz in those moments? It is odd to consider the most persuasive answer may be, “Nobody.” There on the dais, nominally an equal but obviously otherwise, Scholz was the post–1945 culture of submission made flesh. To me he called to mind every Japanese premier who has paid a state visit to Washington since the Occupation ended in 1952: Like Scholz, they have all come to submit, leaving who they truly are at home.
Among the few bright spots one detects in Germany today—here in Berlin, but more pronouncedly, I would say, in the villages and towns east of here in the former German German Republic—is the faint but detectable prospect that Germany and its people may in time find their way back to themselves. “We’re all looking for our country,” Dirk Pohlmann, the journalist and documentarian, said as we concluded our morning together in Potsdam late last autumn. It seemed the thing he wanted me most to see.
By Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
Originally published by ScheerPost
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com