Experts agree: armed conflicts in other countries will continue to determine Germany’s life next year, Deutsche Welle reports. Issues of war and peace will increasingly influence political decisions, because since 2022 since Russia staged a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, the possibility that it might attack NATO territory has become increasingly likely.
An example would be road construction. According to political scientist Christian Mölling, roads and bridges will need to be renovated in Germany, as many of the current roads and bridges are not designed to support the weight of tanks and other heavy military equipment.
Ch. Mölling, director of the Security and Defense Center of the German Council on Foreign Relations, recently presented a report that alarmed Berlin’s political elite, which showed that in the worst case scenario, NATO only has five years to rearm, otherwise the alliance will no longer have the military power to deter Russian aggression.
A new era
Germany is rapidly entering a new era. Three decades following the fall of the Iron Curtain, Germans believed that the end of the Cold War had eliminated the threat of major armed conflict. Those times are over, as Ukraine is now experiencing a war on its own soil, DW claims.
Political issues that Germany forgot following the fall of the Berlin Wall became relevant once more. “A comprehensive defense policy especially requires that the civil infrastructure and society itself be resilient enough to withstand war,” Ch. Mölling said. This might give a military significance to the new road bridge planned by the municipality, especially if this bridge would play a strategic role in the event of war.
Mr. Mölling says that Germany must “suspend the application of certain rules for some time” in order to restore its common defense.
“This is one of our most important policies: more investment, less regulation,” he said.
Germany’s problem with the Zeitenwende
However, people in Germany are facing the problem of how to come to terms with the new reality. Almost two years have passed since Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s historic speech to parliament in which he announced a “turn of the times”, or “Zeitenwende”, a term intended to emphasize that military policy and Germany’s defense capabilities have become a priority once more, as they were when Berlin was still standing. the wall
Most German security analysts and defense experts, including Ch. Mölling, say that Ukraine is defending the freedom of the rest of Europe, and even more. If Russia defeats Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin will continue to wage war and eventually attack NATO itself.
But when asked where Germany should cut spending in these times when the state coffers are almost empty, 54 percent. Germans who took part in the ARD-Deutschlandtrend survey answered – “help for Ukraine”. However, in another opinion poll conducted by the public broadcaster ZDF, more than 70 percent respondents said that Ukraine should continue to receive weapons or even a larger amount of military equipment.
Mr. Mölling notes that this contradiction is reflected in the government’s policy. “Many people, not only in Germany, don’t understand that in the field of defense, you can’t press a button and have tanks roll off the assembly lines the next day,” Ch. Mölling said.
“It will take a long time to build such production capacity. The German government and all European governments can rightly be accused of not seeing the signs of the times and not starting to produce much more, he added. “Not because Ukraine needs it, but because we need it too.”
Preparation for Trump
These realities become even more pressing when considering the possibility of the return of Donald Trump, who some fear might force the US out of NATO altogether. “We have to prepare now, not just when it happens,” Moritz Schularick, director of the Institute for the World Economy in Kiel (IfW), told DW.
The IfW publishes an overview of international military and financial aid to Ukraine, “Summary of Support to Ukraine”, the latest updates of which have shown that Germany is currently the second most important supplier of arms to Ukraine following the United States.
However, as Ch. Mölling pointed out, Germany’s military production capacity has not increased significantly: “We are only plugging the gaps. We have not yet begun to build the manufacturing capacity we will need to meet the deadlines set out in our document.”
A third of Germany’s record arms exports go to Ukraine
German government in 2023 exported weapons for a record – 11.71 billion amount of euros. This is indicated in the answer of the Ministry of Economy to one member of the Bundestag.
Compared to last year, arms exports increased by 40 percent. More than a third of approved exports, which amounted to 4.15 billion euros, fell to Ukraine.
It is reported that the period from 2023 is in question. January 1 until December 12, during which Germany approved 6.15 billion EUR worth of weapons and 5.57 billion export of other military equipment worth EUR.
Almost 90 percent of these exports go to the EU, NATO, Ukraine and NATO allies such as Japan, Australia and South Korea.
The biggest German arms importers following Ukraine were Norway (1.2 billion euros), Hungary (1.03 billion euros), the United Kingdom (654.9 million euros), the United States (545.4 million euros) and Poland (327.9 million euros).
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2024-07-21 00:05:06
