The war in Ukraine has prompted Germany to abandon decades of policies of military containment and announce on Sunday that it will triple its defense budget this year to retool its armed forces.
According to Prime Minister Olaf Scholz, the country is expected to spend 100 billion euros (R$582 billion) more in 2022, theoretically all at once, from a special fund that will reallocate funds from the budget.
“We have to invest more in the security of our country to protect our freedom and our democracy,” he said in the Bundestag (Parliament), to a standing ovation. “There can be no other response to the aggression of [presidente russo Vladimir] Putin.
The German military budget this year was €50.9 billion. Last year, according to data from NATO (Western military alliance), the country had spent 53.2 billion euros in the sector. In relation to the Gross Domestic Product in 2021, it is a jump from 1.5% to 2.8%, the highest in recent history.
It’s not just numbers. There is a huge geopolitical implication in Scholz’s decision, which reverses Germany’s mostly pacifist policies after the national trauma of having played in and lost two world wars (1914-18 and 1939-45) — and dealing with the stigma of having been home to of Nazism, the most aberrant “mainstream” ideology of the 20th century.
According to Scholz, the increase in the fund applies only to this fiscal year. But the terms of the solution, if any, of the crisis with Russia could change that.
Vladimir Putin will then have accomplished what no American president has done since the postwar period — Donald Trump was especially critical of the lack of German defense investment.
On Saturday (26), the German had already broken another practice, that of not supplying lethal weapons to countries in open conflict, with the announcement of sending 1,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles and 500 Stinger portable anti-aircraft systems, both US models.
Several other European countries are making similar shipments to aid the Ukrainian war effort. Kiev’s willingness to join NATO and the European Union are central reasons for Putin’s action, who for months has concentrated troops and issued an ultimatum to the West to stop expanding his military club.
NATO, US at the forefront, will not fight for Ukraine, however. The reason is simple: the risk of a Third World War between nuclear powers. But the tension set in Europe is, as the Norwegian Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, said, the new normal.
The German decision is sure to cause dissension in Scholz’s own base, which views the left wings of his Social Democratic Party and its Green ally as pacifists. Today, in the ranking of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London, Germany has the seventh largest military budget in the world.
Barring similar measures from other countries at the top of the list, this year it will have the third, behind the undisputed leader USA (US$ 754 billion in 2021) and China (US$ 207 billion).
Russia last year was fifth, with $62.2 billion, behind the United Kingdom ($71.6 billion) and India ($65.1 billion). The institute itself estimates that, considering the criterion of military purchasing power parity, that is, how much Russians spend to have the same equipment as the rest of the world, the relative value rises to US$ 178 billion.
Today, the Germans are major exporters of important weapons systems, such as submarines and tanks, and are involved in projects such as the European Eurofighter fighter. But internally, it has always adopted pacifist policies, and participated in a post-war combat mission for the first time in the Kosovo war in 1999.
He played a major role in the US-led mission in Afghanistan, where he saw 150,000 troops come and go over the course of 20 years — 59 died there. But still, the topic is a national taboo.
The very construction of the European Union, a project aimed at ending wars on the continent, primarily by uniting Berlin with Paris, was based on the assumption that Germany would be the economic engine of the bloc — as it is.
France has a more incisive military muscle and defense industry, with only the United Kingdom as an internal rival, which is anyway a NATO partner but has left the EU. Both countries have nuclear weapons of their own, while Germany has perhaps 20 B-61 bombs under US guard and operation at the Büchel base.
The other consideration of the movement is the burial of the good relationship that Putin had with Berlin. He was friends with Gerhard Schröder, the chancellor who preceded the long-lived Angela Merkel, who left the chair to Scholz last year.
Merkel was not close to Putin, but she maintained a policy of accommodation and maintenance of energy deals with Russian natural gas, such as the now suspended Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. a more aggressive line.
The war buried it. Even Turkey, NATO’s most rebellious member, which maintains strong military and economic ties with Putin despite also having him as a rival, has been putting pressure on the Russian. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office on Sunday urged Moscow to stop the “war in Ukraine”, using terminology vetoed by the Kremlin.
Another ally, this one closer, had also criticized Putin: the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán.
The Kremlin is left with side countries such as Venezuela and the giant China, which has remained under the radar in this crisis. Putin’s ally, she avoided condemning Russia and gave a generic speech about guarantees of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
On Sunday, its ambassador in Moscow published a tweet criticizing the US for its sanctions and noting that 81% of the major wars after 1945 were started by Washington. But he didn’t go beyond that, keeping a low profile.
With the Western threat to restrict Moscow’s access to its international reserves by limiting transfers, Putin is very likely to turn to Xi Jinping, who has his own system of withdrawals.
