What just happened
- A 72 year-old gunman named Huu Can Tran shot himself after killing 10 people at a Lunar New Year celebration in California.
- New Zealand’s next prime minister, Chris Hipkins, promised to focus on the cost-of-living crisis.
- Dubai’s newest luxury hotel paid Beyoncé a reported $24 million for a one-off concert.
Germany’s chancellor missed yet another chance yesterday to promise Ukraine the Leopard 2 tanks that could help reverse Russia’s invasion. But a few hours later his foreign minister spoke from a different script. She said Germany “would not stand in the way” if Poland asked to send its Leopards while Berlin continued to make up its mind.
So what? This brings closer the spectacle of German battle tanks rolling across Eastern Europe in a major land war for the first time since 1945. Annalena Baerbock’s remark last night on French TV is significant on three levels:
- Diplomacy. It’s the clearest indication yet that Germany will lift the re-export ban it attaches to consignments of tanks when selling them to other countries – a ban that has so far prevented any of the 2,000 Leopard 2s in Europe being sent to Ukraine.
- Strategy. Those 2,000 include 250 operated by Poland, which alone could satisfy Kyiv’s urgent request for an initial brigade’s worth of Western tanks (usually around 100), to be used as the speartip of a spring offensive in the south or to repel the next big Russian attack, or both.
- History. 22 January may yet be seen as Germany’s true Zeitenwende – the turning point first announced by Chancellor Scholz 11 long months ago, when his country’s foreign and defence policies finally adapted to the new reality created when Putinism went to war.
The caveats. Baerbock says Berlin hasn’t yet received a formal request from Poland to export its tanks. Germany is still wrestling with its conscience, its collective memory and deep political and generational divides.
- Half of Germany’s people don’t want to send tanks because of a deep-rooted conviction that their country can never again be seen to resort to force, even in pursuit of peace.
- Scholz is trying to hold together a coalition of three parties whose two largest members – the Greens and the Social Democrats – have powerful pacifist wings he can’t ignore.
- He also has a divided cabinet. Baerbock, from the Greens, is unlikely to have been freelancing last night but she said what Scholz conspicuously hasn’t. Boris Pistorius, the new defence minister, has so far fallen into line with Scholz but has no experience of defence policy and little clout. The centre-right Free Democrats, like Kyiv and its other allies, are losing patience. “History is watching us and Germany has unfortunately failed,” says Agnes-Marie Strack-Zimmermann, a Free Democrat MP.
Ostpolitik. An eastward-facing foreign policy has defined the Social Democrats’ worldview since before the Soviet collapse. As their leader, Scholz is steeped in the politics of reunification and the economics of mutual dependence on the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe. That in turn has depended on cheap Russian energy.
But Realpolitik has forced a fundamental rethink. The Zelensky government and its supporters in Washington and elsewhere are publicly infuriated by Scholz’s hesitation on the Leopard 2 question but Germany is the second biggest supplier of military aid to Ukraine after the US and has bought no Russian gas since September last year.
It is wary of provoking an escalation and fearful, because of history, of being seen to lead on the military front. But incrementalism may get Ukraine the tanks it needs in the end. It is probably no coincidence that Baerbock’s promise not to object if Poland sent its Leopards followed swiftly on a hint from Emmanuel Macron that France might send battle tanks too.
