The USA is more active in foreign policy and coordinating the Ukraine crisis than it has been for a long time. On Saturday, Biden called his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin again.
(Photo: AP)
History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. After winning the elections in 1998, the red-green government was confronted with the Kosovo crisis. 14 years later, the red-green-led traffic light government is again confronted with a foreign policy crisis: an impending war in Eastern Europe due to a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Just as Vladimir Putin coldly calculated, the crisis caught Berlin off guard. The traffic light coalition has yet to find itself. Foreign policy has not played a major role in recent years, and empirical values are scarce. Germany finds it difficult to formulate a strategic foreign policy towards autocratic great powers. And so Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit to Moscow on Tuesday will be a test in view of the acute escalation warnings.
The Ukraine conflict is also unpleasant for Germany because the Federal Republic traditionally focuses more on conflict avoidance than others. Now, in addition to the system rivalry with China, there is a risk of a conflict with another major power. The political scientist Ivan Krastev described the situation aptly: The world has changed, but Germany has not.
The US is at the center of the Western response to Putin
When Scholz travels to Moscow on Tuesday, in addition to the question of how he can make the unity and determination of the Western allies credible as a deterrent, the fundamental question is also on the table: How seriously will Putin take the chancellor? In any case, Macron didn’t really get through to the Kremlin during his visit.
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For Putin, NATO is still the United States. And at least here he is not fundamentally wrong. Germany and Europe can therefore count themselves lucky that the Americans, under Joe Biden, have put their unilateralism behind them and are once again assuming their role as a regulatory power.
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There is at least one piece of good news: not since September 11, 2001 has there been this level of multilateral coordination by the United States as there is today. And with multilateralism, NATO, which Macron fatally and erroneously declared “brain dead”, is celebrating a comeback. Biden apparently learned from the Afghanistan disaster.
You don’t even have to make a comparison with Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump. The reorientation of US foreign policy began under Barack Obama, when he declared that from now on the US would focus more on the Pacific region and less on the Atlantic, and who described Russia as a “regional power”.
The West has recognized again what it has in NATO
Against this background, the differences about Nord Stream 2 between the USA and Germany or the leaks from US intelligence circles about an imminent attack by Russia could not hide the fact that the transatlantic ties are tighter than they have been for a long time. However, it is unlikely that the renewed US interest in Europe, now that the conflict has hopefully been resolved peacefully, will last. Even in the Ukraine crisis, US Secretary of State Blinken is traveling through the Pacific region and Biden is presenting his new strategy for the “Indo-Pacific”, at the heart of which are “alliances” against China’s “aggressions”.
Nevertheless, NATO could emerge stronger from the conflict. Because the West has recognized what it has in NATO. Because Europe has recognized that it has to do more specifically for its own security instead of invoking abstract “European sovereignty”. And because after Putin’s actions, the countries of Eastern Europe will align themselves more closely with NATO.
Putin knows all this too. And that makes the danger of war so great. If the conflict is settled peacefully, the Kremlin may emerge victorious in the short term if the West promises, for example, that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO for the time being. But hardly in the medium term.
More: Russia puts a “pincer grip” on Ukraine – “Everything indicates that something is going to happen now”