Germany remains reluctant to pull its weight in the world

By J.C. | MUNICH

THIS year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) began gloomy—under the slogan ‘To the brink—and back?’—and got gloomier. As the annual gathering of international leaders, politicians and defence experts drew to a close yesterday its chairman, Wolfgang Ischinger, confessed: “When I opened the conference on Friday, I hoped we could delete the question mark from the motto, but now I am not fully sure we can do that.” Participants had identified “what the new challenges are”, he explained, but not “concrete steps” towards confronting them. Others were left similarly downbeat. The West is “looking pretty wan and exhausted”, tweeted Constanze Stelzenmüller of the Brookings Institution, while Tobias Bunde, the MSC’s head of policy, observed: “To many in Munich, the US increasingly looks like a rudderless ship, and the Europeans mostly offer analyses rather than strategies.”

Nothing illustrates that gap between rhetoric and action as well as Germany itself. The representatives of Europe’s largest economy made all the right noises in Munich. In a grand speech roaming from America and Ukraine to Syria and North Korea, Sigmar Gabriel, the foreign minister, warned that Europe needed to do more for its own security: “it’s going to be damned hard for us as the only vegetarians in a world of carnivores”. Ursula von der Leyen, the German defence minister tipped to be the next head of NATO, issued a similar overture: “Europe must now begin to finally build up momentum… We will increase the Bundeswehr’s personnel strength. We will continue to invest and modernise.”

But what of Mr Ischinger’s wished-for “concrete steps”? Mr Gabriel—concretely—skipped a meeting of the so-called Normandy group on Ukraine (France, Germany, Ukraine, Russia) so he could return to Berlin and share the credit for the release in Turkey of the imprisoned German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel. To be sure, this was a happy moment, but one requiring his presence decidedly less than the rare chance to address the ongoing bloodshed in eastern Ukraine that he canned to be there. The foreign minister’s rhetoric at the MSC also contrasted starkly with his proudly “vegetarian” message to German voters during the election campaign last year, when he toured the country portraying Angela Merkel as a poodle of Donald Trump for backing NATO’s target for defence spending of 2% of GDP, which he declared tantamount to an “arms race”.

Not that Germany is in much danger of hitting the target. Under the freshly negotiated coalition deal between Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats and Mr Gabriel’s Social Democrats (SPD) the percentage will not exceed 1.5%. The document’s language on defence is intensely vague. And four years into Mrs von der Leyen’s modernisation programme, Germany’s armed forces remain in a pitiful state, depleted after decades of post-Cold War neglect. The country is struggling to marshal enough working Leopard tanks (pictured above) for its modest—albeit welcome and historically unprecedented—NATO deployment in Lithuania. Its entire submarine fleet is out of service. The Luftwaffe’s planes and helicopters are available, on average, for around four months of the year. Earlier last week André Wüstner, the chairman of the German Bundeswehr Association, said the country might as well dissolve its armed forces if it was not prepared to make them deployable.

So Mrs von der Leyen also talked about aid spending, where Germans are more comfortable. She asked: what is the point of liberating a citizen of Mosel only for them to die of starvation later? A reasonable point, but one which came across as special pleading for Germany’s distaste for hard military intervention, particularly when contrasted with speeches by France’s prime minister and defence minister. The former diplomatically declined to comment on Germany’s coalition deal, but both pointed to significant increases in the French defence budget and, as Judy Dempsey of Carnegie Europe notes, emphasised action where Germany’s defence minister preferred to talk about institutions. Given such differences in philosophy, she advises those waiting for a more strategic Europe: “don’t hold your breath”.

The potential costs of the gulf between a foot-dragging Germany and a pro-active but lonely France became clear in other speeches, reminders of the carnivorous world beyond the comfortable EU. Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, said Moscow is waging a “world hybrid war”; Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, accused Kiev of “openly sabotaging” the peace process; Benjamin Netanyahu brandished a chunk of metal from an Iranian drone shot down over Israel. It says something about the tone of exchanges that the latter two men both referred to Chamberlain’s 1938 deal with Hitler in Munich in their speeches. Yet as others used and abused Germany's history at the podium, the country's representatives offered merely learned observations, not hard proposals. When Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s right-populist prime minister, said Europe needed more “steel tanks” rather than just “think tanks”, it actually seemed a fair dig at his country’s western neighbour.

It does not help that there is no new government in Berlin. Almost five months of post-election coalition wrangling have turned the attentions of Germany’s political class inwards. Mr Gabriel’s wayward foreign policies, for example, are substantially explained by power struggles in the SPD. But the introversion hardly began on September 24th—in the German election campaign, for example, neither the state of the Bundeswehr nor the growing defence demands on Berlin were significant issues, the SPD’s disingenuous peacenikkery and occasional references to “uncertain times” from Mrs Merkel aside. As far as the harsh realities of those “uncertain times” go, Germany is a country anaesthetised. Until its leaders start to confront their voters with some of the well-judged words they brought to Munich last week, those words will remain empty.