The bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines — which had up until then supplied Germany with cheap Russian gas — revealed an aspect of Ukraine’s military defense strategy that had previously been hidden. It became clear that the Ukrainians were seeking to break up the Russian-German relationship, which they saw as a direct threat to their own security.

The first of the Nord Stream criminal trials will start on 26 October in Hamburg. It will expose many unsavory details. The prosecutors might ask questions such as: who ordered the attacks? What did President Volodymyr Zelensky know? When did he know it? The attack left Germany in a perma-energy crisis. And while I don’t think the trial will affect Germany’s support for Ukraine in the short run, it could — depending on what is revealed — make Germany more reluctant to support Ukraine’s membership of the EU and Nato in the future.

The pipeline explosions have a long pre-history. Germany’s energy relationship with Russia dates back to the Seventies. Gerhard Schröder, a former German chancellor and personal friend of Vladimir Putin, supercharged this relationship when he proposed the Baltic Sea pipeline projects in the early 2000s. The project later became known as Nord Stream. The first pipeline, which became operational in 2011, ran from near St Petersburg in Russia to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in eastern Germany. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Nord Stream 1 provided Germany with 55% of its gas supplies. Nord Stream 2, which was only completed in 2021, had the capacity to increase the gas flows substantially.

The Germans treated their business dealings with Russia as separate from geopolitics. The standard answer you got from German officials before the war was that the best way to foster democracy in Russia was through trade. They called it Wandel durch Handel — change through trade. If it rhymes, it must be true.

Eastern European countries, notably Poland, treated the Nord Stream pipelines as a security threat. If Germany made itself dependent on Russia for its gas, Poland would once again be surrounded by a hostile alliance. Later, France joined the group of critics. More importantly, the US Congress passed successive acts, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, to impose sanctions on Germans involved in the pipeline project. They did not go after Schröder personally. He was the supervisory board chairman of the project. But they went after Matthias Warnig, the Nord Stream CEO. Warnig was a former East German Stasi officer and another close friend of Putin. The pipeline diplomacy became particularly heated in the two years leading up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022. I myself criticized the pipelines on the grounds that they made Germany dependent on Russian gas and undermined European solidarity. At that time, virtually nobody in Germany thought about energy in geopolitical terms — but everybody else did.

A few days before Putin invaded Ukraine, the German government agreed to suspend the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which by then had been constructed but not yet used. It still needed certification. When Putin invaded, the project died. But Nord Stream 1, the older pipeline, was still operational. Even the Green Party, the only big German party that opposed the construction of Nord Stream 2, favored the continued operation of Nord Stream 1. By that time, the Greens were responsible for energy policy in the German government. As Germany was phasing out nuclear energy and coal, the country had no alternative to gas. Even when most of their energy was coming from renewable sources, they still needed gas to cover periods when there would be no wind and no sun.

There were alternative gas suppliers back then. The US and Qatar, for instance, sold gas in liquefied form (LNG) — but during this period, Germany did not have the infrastructure in place to process it. Russia’s gas, meanwhile, was pumped directly into the gas grid.

Each of the pipelines, the old Nord Stream 1 and the new Nord Stream 2, consisted of two big tubes. On 26 September 2022, three of the four tubes exploded near the Danish island of Bornholm, including the two that made up Nord Stream 1. Initially, everybody suspected the Russians. Then the US journalist Seymour Hersh wrote an article claiming that the explosion came at the behest of the CIA.

The German prosecutor eventually established that the attack was launched from a sailing yacht chartered in Germany by a group of Ukrainian citizens, with links to the Ukrainian army and secret service. Initially, the Ukrainian government tried to deflect attention from this evidence, arguing that the plot was funded by a wealthy private individual. But that story has since been debunked.

The operatives were highly trained explosives experts and deep-sea divers. The pipelines were located 80 meters below sea level. Diving that deep is not something you learn at your local scuba-diving club. The German prosecutor established that this was a military operation through and through. The estimated physical weight of the C4 explosives used to detonate the pipelines was in the order of 50-100 kilograms. Only governments have explosives on this scale.

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The German prosecutor issued a European Arrest Warrant for the operatives. The first successful arrest came in August last year, when Italian police detained Serhiy Kuznetsov, the suspected ringleader of the operation, who carelessly went on holiday to Italy. He was extradited to Germany and placed in a high-security prison. His trial is due to start this autumn.

What confuses me is why Kuznetsov thought it safe to go on holiday in the EU. Even more astonishing is the fact that the second suspect, Volodymyr Zhuravlev, whom the Polish authorities previously refused to extradite, also thought it safe to go on holiday abroad. Last week, the Croatian police arrested him. He is now awaiting extradition to Germany. This is one aspect of the story that I find puzzling. These are highly trained operatives with fake passports. Why would they go on holiday in unsafe locations?

So far, this all makes for a gripping spy story. But it may soon become a political one. Details will matter. The Wall Street Journal journalist Bojan Pancevski claims in his book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, that the attack was orchestrated by the Ukrainian military and intelligence network, and that Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces and now Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, was the most senior officer involved. We don’t know whether Zelensky gave the order or was informed. I don’t think it really matters. As president, he is responsible for the actions of his military and his intelligence service. What matters is that a Ukrainian commando sabotaged the critical energy infrastructure of a friendly country.

The media covered the pipeline explosions and the immediate aftermath half-heartedly. I suspect editors did not want to be accused of disseminating anti-Ukraine propaganda. The media supported Ukraine — and the pipeline story did not sit well with the hero worship of Zelensky. The German government also did not comment on the prosecutor’s action. But it’s worth remembering that both Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz could have stopped the investigation if they had wanted to. The Poles are outraged that they did not. Last week, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, said that the bigger crime was the construction of the pipelines, not their destruction. I recall a tweet by the current Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who was an MEP in Brussels at the time of the explosions. “Thank you, USA,” he wrote.

So, was it really a conspiracy? Over the course of my journalistic life, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are many fewer real conspiracies than most people think. What looks like a conspiracy is usually just a series of blunders. I think this was the case here too. A giant miscalculation by the Ukrainians. Back in the summer of 2022, they had pushed back the Russians. The war was going their way. Everybody wanted a photo with Zelensky. The Ukrainians thought it within their power to ensure that the Germans would not revert to their previously cozy relationship with the Russians. But after the Trump administration ended financial and most military support for Ukraine, Germany became Ukraine’s biggest supporter. What were the Ukrainians thinking?

However this story ends, I don’t expect Germany to revert to its old, naive pro-Russian reflexes. Germany will not make itself dependent on Russian gas once again. But I cannot exclude the possibility that Germany may, after the war has ended, reopen at least one of the pipelines. Germany has become reliant on natural gas — and Russia could become one of its several suppliers. We are one cold winter away from an energy crisis in Germany. And when that happens, we’ll remember who bombed the pipelines. Even without a winter crisis, I suspect that Germany’s future support for Ukraine will be less enthusiastic than it might otherwise have been.

The upcoming trial is going to release a lot of juicy information into the public domain. The media will cover it. The Alternative for Germany, the party of the far-Right, is already making a big deal out of the Nord Stream explosions. They are asking: why support a country that bombs our infrastructure? It is a hard question to answer. The German government, for sure, has not answered it.

The building’s scope and ambition echo the Victorian grandeur that can be found in Liverpool and London, and the epic public buildings of Paris, Antwerp and Amsterdam. It’s a building that marks a golden age. Its foundation stone was laid in 2007, when Germany was still Exportweltmeister (world’s top exporter) and before the convulsions of Brexit, Donald Trump’s trade wars, and Vladimir Putin’s efforts to carve up and control Ukraine. The opulent venue was finally finished in 2017, the same year Angela Merkel secured her final term as chancellor and the far-Right AfD showed signs of its political potential. Less than a decade later, it looks like a totem to a bygone era.

Few countries profited from the postwar order as much as Germany. It was well protected from the tumult of power politics thanks to America’s protective shield which allowed the country’s leaders to pursue a mercantilist agenda. But the world has turned more volatile. The re-election of Donald Trump effectively killed off the post-Cold War vision of ever greater global integration. That’s a particularly acute problem for the world’s most trade-dependent major economy and creates a dilemma about where and how Germany will sell its goods.

Just how unprepared Germany is for the crumbling world order emerged in spring 2022, when a diplomatic scandal unfolded. It involved Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the President of Germany — a ceremonial role, which is supposed to be apolitical, even though it is often filled by a former politician. So it’s unusual for a German president to get embroiled in an international spat. But that’s what happened.

A few weeks after the war in Ukraine broke out, Steinmeier was getting ready for a journey to Kyiv in a show of support that was a tantalizing opportunity for him. But the ensuing fiasco served as a prime example of why Europe’s largest economy struggles to take a leading role in global affairs.

Just days before Steinmeier’s planned departure, a train station in the hard-fought Donetsk Oblast was hit by a Russian rocket, killing dozens of people who were trying to flee. In the midst of that carnage, Steinmeier was still hoping to make an appearance, but Ukraine balked. It was a shock given Germany’s critical role in the country’s support network.

A brief note arrived via diplomatic channels stating that Steinmeier’s visit would be “more substantial and more acceptable” if he traveled independently. That’s diplomatic language for “stay away”. It was a clear affront, and Steinmeier’s ego was bruised. For weeks he stewed. Chancellor Olaf Scholz rallied to his side, vowing not to travel to Kyiv until the issue was sorted out. So while Ukraine was fighting for its survival and clamoring for artillery, air-defense systems and ammunition, it had to deal with the vanities of a man who played a key role in emboldening Russia’s aggression.

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Before being appointed as president in 2017, Steinmeier helped deepen Germany’s dependence on the Kremlin. He was foreign minister under Angela Merkel and before that the chief of staff for Gerhard Schröder. After leaving power, the former chancellor was quickly and controversially hired as a well-paid adviser to Russian firms.

Under Steinmeier’s watch, Germany started mainlining Russian gas via the first Nord Stream pipeline in 2005. Steinmeier extended those ties while serving as Germany’s top diplomat twice. In his first stint (2005–9) he refused to let the murders of opposition figures Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko or the invasion of Georgia get in the way of good vibes between the countries. During his second term as foreign minister (2013–17), Russia illegally annexed Crimea, which Steinmeier and many other leading German figures quickly normalized.

Shortly before the land grab in early 2014, Steinmeier was in Moscow and set an accommodating tone, urging a new “positive agenda” in relations with Russia. He underscored that message, which was the mainstream view in Berlin, in an interview with the Russian newspaper Kommersant during the visit: “It is important to me to offer a trusting and constructive cooperation with Moscow.” He even suggested that the Kremlin had a role to play in resolving political tensions in Ukraine — a dangerous signal for pro-democracy demonstrators at a time when the Maidan uprising was in full swing. The message from Berlin was that Germany’s relations with Russia were a higher priority than whatever else was going on in the region.

That approach didn’t change following Crimea’s annexation or after Russia-backed forces took control of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. Instead, Steinmeier sought to continue negotiations with Moscow and lobbied for reining in sanctions, citing concerns that Russia could be destabilized. He then went a step further and proposed a formula as part of the Minsk talks to freeze the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

It was clear what the priority was: Germany needed its fix of cheap Russian energy. And like any addict, it wanted more. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline was supposed to be another direct injection from Russian gas fields to Germany’s industrial infrastructure. The project was given the green light in 2015, just one year after the annexation of Crimea — so much for punishing the aggressor and standing strong for liberal values.

For years, Steinmeier and the rest of the German establishment continued to back Nord Stream despite warnings by the United States and other European allies that it posed a security risk for Germany and in turn NATO. Merkel defended Nord Stream, as did Olaf Scholz, as did the entire political mainstream in Berlin, collectively dodging political culpability by disingenuously labeling the pipeline as a mere commercial project. The attitudes towards Nord Stream and Russian gas stand out, but aren’t unique. German politics is largely an extension of the country’s business interests. Commerce regularly outweighs broader concerns of politics, security, or much less moral values, because of the central role that economics and affluence plays in the identity of postwar Germany. So when Germany’s elite saw how much money could be made in tapping Russia’s vast resources, the political establishment fell into line by not poking the bear in Moscow, regardless of its actions. It didn’t end there.

The head of Siemens went to meet with Putin less than two weeks after Crimea’s annexation, facilitating Moscow’s plans to decouple the peninsula from Ukraine’s power grid Siemens also got deeply involved with the Russian rail network. A veritable conga line of executives gave their seal of approval to the Kremlin’s aggression. BASF, Uniper, Volkswagen and Daimler were active as well. So while the postwar order was under attack in Germany’s own backyard, the country was actively profiteering.

Ahead of the planned trip to Kyiv, Steinmeier did offer a mea culpa after being accused of having a “spider’s web” of contacts in Russia, connecting his stance with a broad-based shift towards detente starting with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. But given his efforts to engage with the Kremlin, it’s hardly surprising that Kyiv wasn’t thrilled about serving as a backdrop for his rehabilitation.

A thaw only started with a telephone call between Steinmeier and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in May 2022. Finally in October (more than seven months after the war started), the German president visited Ukraine. “My message to the people in Ukraine is: You can rely on Germany!” he said during the visit. The boast rang hollow then and the emptiness echoed long after.

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To be fair, there are historical reasons why Germany has a soft spot for Russia. Berlin is dotted with a dozen Soviet monuments, including an imposing memorial and a cemetery with the remains of more than 13,000 Red Army soldiers. Unlike in former Eastern European countries, no cranes or bulldozers have come to topple them. That’s part of Germany’s post-Nazi memory culture: Soviet troops were the first to enter Berlin. In addition to that historical debt, the people in former communist East Germany have a certain affinity towards Moscow that was nurtured during years of hardship following reunification. Having said that, standing up to Russia doesn’t come as naturally to Germany as it does to America and Great Britain. And it’s especially hard to do when cheap Russian energy is fueling the economy.

Germany’s policy of appeasement with Russia dates back at least to Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik in the Seventies when the fate of the East Germans was at stake and reaching out to the Kremlin opened up the prospect of creating holes in the Iron Curtain. After reunification, Germany didn’t have the same noble aims. Instead, the focus was on money.

On top of the Russia question, Germany struggled to get its mind around a military conflict. For Berlin’s mercantilist mindset, the economic risks of an invasion of Ukraine were too high even for Putin. That stems from a post-military perspective. After spending decades under America’s shield, the country’s leadership had embraced Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” idea after the Berlin Wall fell. The great ideological battles were over and liberal democracy had won. Rather than brinkmanship and bloodshed, conflicts could be resolved through diplomacy and international institutions. That made a robust military unnecessary. It was an appealing (and indeed self-serving) approach for Germany in its reconstituted form, straddling the former Iron Curtain and striving for affluence above all else.

There was also solid public support for leaving militarism behind. For most Germans, military spending was a waste of money and an uncomfortable reminder of the country’s Nazi past. Every mission was hotly contested by the public, and hardly any politician was going to stick their neck out and demand more money for weapons and soldiers. Before the invasion of Ukraine, German news coverage underscored doubts about the military, focusing on the Bundeswehr’s scandals and dysfunction. The outcome was feeble spending, with Germany regularly missing NATO’s guidelines to spend at least 2% of GDP on defense. You would have to go back to 1991 to find that level of investment.

In that context, Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech a few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was indeed historic. He took advantage of the moment by announcing a special €100 billion fund to upgrade the military and broke with postwar tradition by promising to deliver lethal weapons to a conflict zone. Germany did become one of Kyiv’s chief suppliers of military equipment, behind only the United States. But the momentum was choppy and every new step was accompanied by hand-wringing over fears of escalation.

The slow walk of support, with Scholz hemming and hawing over weapons, gave the impression that Germany doubted that a Ukraine victory was possible and preferred normalization sooner rather than later.

At the end of the day, Germany’s motivations are rather straightforward. Although the country moralizes about freedom, democracy and human rights, its chief aim is protecting German affluence. Even after the invasion, the country continued filling up Russian coffers. In 2022 it transferred €97 million every single day for energy and other imports, a 6.5% increase. The following year, trade with Russia still totalled nearly €12.6 billion despite sanctions and the end of most energy purchases, making the country more important to the German economy than EU partners Greece, Bulgaria and Lithuania — and of course more important than Ukraine. Also, exports suddenly shot up to Central Asian countries like Kyrgyzstan, indicating former Soviet republics were serving as a way station for goods heading to Russia.

Aside from the blow to Germany’s credibility, Scholzing hampered progress towards a military capable of deterring or containing conflicts in the future. “Decades of counting pennies” left the country’s defense forces with a stockpile of ammunition that would only last days in the event of an attack. Radio equipment, armored vehicles, ships and planes were all dated. The total price tag for modernizing the German military has been pegged at some €300 billion, or three times the Zeitenwende budget, and that’s looking optimistic given the proliferation of crises.

In the wake of February’s federal election, the incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz has moved to secure more funding for Germany’s military. After a fiery speech from US Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference just before the vote, it has become increasingly clear even in Berlin that action is needed. Taking advantage of the still-serving parliament, which is friendlier to military outlays than the one just voted in, Merz plans to amend Germany’s constitution to exempt defense spending from fiscal limits and pledged to do “whatever it takes” to protect the country.

But Germany’s military impotence isn’t just about money and hardware. There are also severe structural issues that are very common across the economy. Navigating the labyrinth of approvals and procedures means upgrading the Bundeswehr’s infrastructure alone would take half a century and getting approval for a commercially available flight helmet took 10 years — a negative highlight of German inefficiency. And on top of hard-power failings, Germany’s intelligence network has displayed alarming gaps throughout the years, downplaying threats and being unable to keep Russian and Chinese espionage in check.

February’s election also exposed how fragile support for strengthening the Bundeswehr could be. The far-Left Linke and far-Right AfD — both opposed to increased military spending and supportive of closer ties with Russia — surged in the polls. Young Germans, who would be called on to fight in the event of a conflict, disproportionately backed these fringes, raising the spectre of deep societal fractures if Germany is forced to reinstate some form of conscription to rebuild its armed forces. Cuts to welfare to free up defense spending could further inflame divisions.

Immediately after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, General Alfons Mais, head of the German Army, lamented that the Bundeswehr was “more or less bare”. It was a collective failing. The political establishment had turned a blind eye to dangers, even if they were clear and present. That points to an issue of mentality, a more vexing problem than money or structure. Does Germany really want to lead? “We all saw it coming” after the annexation of Crimea but failed to act, General Mais said. “That doesn’t feel good! I am angry!”

Germany has a tendency to drift back to a reassuring status quo and avoid change. The uncomfortable reality is that it doesn’t have that luxury anymore. Business is no longer just business, and security is no longer a spectator sport, especially after the first Trump administration raised doubts about American commitment to its pampered European allies. The German Council on Foreign Relations warned in 2023 that it’s a question of when and not if the country has to fight in a war, predicting a window of less than a decade.

Despite the shock over its missteps, the country has struggled to shift gears. It took two years following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine for Rheinmetall (the maker of Leopard tanks) to break ground on a new munitions factory. Despite all of its lauded manufacturing prowess, Germany hasn’t come close to gearing up for the security challenges it faces, raising questions over the political will.

The war in Ukraine has exposed the country’s naiveté, even to Germans. Tanks rolling towards Kyiv showed how foolhardy it was to tie Germany’s energy system to a former KGB agent nostalgic for the dark days of the Soviet Union. The war also ended Germany’s soothing illusion that hard power is passé. There’s at least one positive thing to come out of Germany’s foreign-policy reality check: the country’s diplomats will almost certainly never justify deals with autocrats with the smug Wandel durch Handel (Change through trade) policy. Post-Ukraine pacts with Qatar and Saudi Arabia will instead be sealed in the name of energy security. But at least that requires a more active, case-by-case justification. The risk is that the interest in a fundamental reorientation of defense and foreign policy fades as soon as pressure eases. That’s often been the case in Germany, which is good at mobilizing in a crisis, but equally adept at reverting to regular routines as soon as the heat is off. Germany’s leaders need a long-term strategy. Simply repeating the word Zeitenwende isn’t enough.

***

A version of this essay appears in Broken Republik: The Inside Story of Germany’s Descent into Crisis by Chris Reiter & Will Wilkes, out now with Bloomsbury.

From the start, the investigation was a textbook cover-up. The Swedish government rushed to secure evidence, citing their putative rights under international law, consciously boxing out any sort of independent, UN-backed inspection. Of course, after gathering all the evidence, the Swedish authorities studiously did exactly nothing, only to then belatedly admit that it actually had no legal right to monopolise the information in the first place.

The Germans, for their part, were also supremely uninterested in figuring out who pulled off the worst act of industrial sabotage in living memory against their country. In fact, over the course of a year-long non-investigation, we’ve mostly been treated to leaks and off-the-record statements indicating that nobody really wants to know who blew up the pipeline. The rationale here is bluntly obvious: it would be awfully inconvenient if Germany, and the West, learned the true answer.

Thus, the recent revelation that the true mastermind behind the ongoing deindustrialisation of Germany was none other than a Ukrainian by the name of “Volodymyr Z.” must have come as an unwelcome surprise. For not only is the idea that the authorities have suddenly cracked open the Nord Stream case not credible in the slightest, but the sloppy way in which the entire country of Ukraine is now being fingered is likely not an accident. Indeed, at the same time as the ghost of Nord Stream has risen from the grave, the German government announced its plans to halve its budget for Ukraine aid: whatever is already in the pipeline will be sent over, but no new grants of equipment are forthcoming. The German government is hunkering down for increased austerity, and so it is cutting Ukraine loose.

Germany, of course, is hardly alone. Even if there were enough money to go around, Europe is increasingly not just deindustrialising but demilitarising. Its stores of ammunition and vehicles are increasingly empty, and the idea of military rearmament — that is, creating entirely new military factories and supply chains — at a time when factories are closing down across the continent due to energy shortages and lack of funding is a non-starter. Neither France, the United Kingdom nor even the United States are in a position to maintain the flow of arms to Ukraine. This is a particular concern inside Washington DC, where planners are now trying to juggle the prospect of managing three theatres of war at the same time — in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Pacific — even though US military production is arguably insufficient to comfortably handle one.

And so, in an effort to save face in this impossible situation, Ukraine is now being held solely responsible for doing something it either did not do at all, or only did with the permission, knowledge, and/or support of the broader West. This speaks to the adolescent dynamic that now governs Western foreign policy in a multipolar world: when our impotence is revealed, find someone to blame.

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The war in Ukraine, after all, was already supposed to be won, and Russia was supposed to be a rickety gas station incapable of matching the West either economically or militarily. Yet here we are: our own economies are deindustrialising, our military factories have proven completely incapable of handling the strain of a real conflict, and the Americans themselves are now openly admitting that the Russian military remains in a significantly stronger position. Meanwhile, Germany’s economic model is broken, and as its economy falls, it will drag many countries such as Sweden with it, given how dependent they are on exporting to German industrial firms.

10 years ago, during the 2014 Maidan protests, the realist John Mearsheimer caused a lot of controversy when he began warning that the collective West was leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and that our actions would lead to the destruction of the country. Well, here we are. At present, our only saving grace is the continuing offensive in Kursk — a bold offensive that will surely be remembered as a symptom of Ukraine’s increasing desperation.

Indeed, a far better guide of things to come can be found in the fingering of “Volodymyr Z.” as the true culprit behind the Nord Stream sabotage. Here, rather than accept responsibility for the fact that Ukraine was goaded into a war it could not win — mainly because the West vastly overestimated its own ability to fight a real war over the long haul — European geopolitical discourse will take a sharp turn towards a peculiar sort of victim-blaming. No doubt it will be “discovered” that parts of Ukraine’s military consisted of very unsavoury characters waving around Nazi Germany-style emblems, just as it will be “discovered” that journalists have been persecuted by oligarchs and criminals in Kyiv, or that money given by the West has been stolen, and that arms sent have been sold for profit to criminal cartels around the world.

All of these developments will duly be “discovered” by a Western political class that will completely refuse to accept any responsibility for them. Far easier, it seems, to calm one’s nerves with a distorting myth: it’s the Ukrainians’ fault that their country is destroyed; our choices had nothing to do with it; and besides, they were bad people who tricked us!

***

Now watch UnHerd‘s interview with the journalist behind this month’s revelations:

At its most extreme, this focus descends into a postmodern oblivion: a world where everything is narrative and there is no difference between Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Yet this does not mean that narrative analysis is useless. Quite the opposite, in fact.

For more than a decade, our ability to form a coherent narrative about ourselves has been degrading. By “our”, I mean the West, which emerged in its current form in 1945 after three decades of war, desolation, and economic upheaval. The narrative that it told itself was crystalised during the Cold War: that the West would stand for liberty and freedom against the very live totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.

But this framework crumbled together with the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism. Overnight, a new narrative was needed, and it didn’t take long for one to emerge. The post-Cold War narrative formed in response to the Gulf War in 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq aggressively attacked Kuwait, principally with an eye to seizing its oil reserves. The United States and a 42-country coalition intervened, the Iraqis were soon pushed back, and Kuwait was allowed to govern itself. Here was the seed of the new narrative: the West, having won the Cold War, would keep the peace in the new status quo.

This updated founding myth required a domestic component — something tangible at home — and it found it in the ideology of the New Economy, which emphasised the transition of Western developed nations from highly industrialised economies to more technologically driven ones. This idea grew organically with the computer revolution, a loosening of financial and trade regulations, and the feelgood vibes of the Nineties’ economic boom. This was a world where Bill Clinton played the saxophone as the stock market rocketed.

By the early 2000s, however, this post-Cold War narrative started to fracture. The first blow was the collapse of the New Economy ideology as a massive bubble in the stock market unwound at the turn of the millennium. And then, three years later, came the invasion of Iraq. This intervention was very unlike the first Gulf War in which Hussein had clearly acted as the aggressor. This time, the conflict was instigated by Britain and the United States, opposed by many European countries, and was justified based on false, made-to-order intelligence — the now infamous “dodgy dossier”.

Still, even with these tremors, our narrative broadly held together: economic growth continued apace, and the war gave rise to an anti-war movement that would eventually produce future President Barack Obama. But then came the next hit — a real hammer blow. In 2008, as housing markets collapsed across the world, much of the growth of the 2000s turned out to be fake, fuelled as it was by housing debt. More debilitatingly, the impressive financial architecture that had sprung up as the sector was liberalised turned out to be rotten.

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But all was not yet lost, as two movements emerged out of the ashes of the 2008 collapse: the Right-wing populist movement and the Left-wing populist movement. The former, associated mostly with the Tea Party movement in the United States, saw the government and corporations as corrupt interlopers. Its Left-wing cousin, associated with the rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, saw things the same way. The two movements only differed on preferred solutions, with the Left wanting a more interventionist approach and the Right wanting to cut down on the state and promote market competition.

In the subsequent years, its Left-wing incarnation has mostly disappeared. In the US, it was absorbed back into the mainstream of the Democratic Party, won over with promises of radical social and cultural agendas that did not interfere with the economic bottom line. In the UK, the Corbyn movement collapsed in a wave of scandal, and a slightly confused group of Blairites seized the reins.

Meanwhile, the Right-populist movement mutated. Driven largely by the Brexit movement and the rise of Donald Trump, it dropped many of its more libertarian-leaning firebrands and became more pragmatic. It no longer wanted, say, tax cuts for the sake of tax cuts. Rather, it wanted cultural and economic rejuvenation. Taking place against a backdrop of severe and ever-increasing social and economic problems, this evolution was far from a surprise.

Today, however, there is reason to believe that the Right-populist movement has also failed. Donald Trump won the presidency, but he did not produce much in the way of constructive change. What happened instead is that the American political system became highly unstable, and many of the previously existing norms that held it together started to dissolve. This reached its crescendo in recent weeks with the arrest and indictment of Trump, an anarchic blip from which the country is unlikely to ever recover.

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In Britain, the Brexit movement got its way and, after years of bickering, the Conservative Party eventually managed to pull the country out of the European Union. Once again, though, nothing changed. The economy did not take off like a rocket. Mass immigration increased rather than decreased. Right-populist cultural and institutional concerns remain as they had before Brexit. At the same time, nothing catastrophic happened either. The Remainers who promised economic collapse and a sharp fall in trade with Europe were wrong. None of this happened. Indeed, nothing happened.

In both the UK and US, then, there is reason to think that we have no real coherent narrative. No one is sure where to go next or what to believe. And as three recent events have demonstrated, this noxious position is already causing serious dysfunction in our political culture.

The first was the Covid-19 outbreak and the responses in the form of the lockdowns and the vaccines. Compare this traumatic incident with, say, the Iraq War. Today, most people in the West agree that the Iraq War was a mistake; it was tragic and produced a terrible aftermath, and we have managed to come to terms with it. If you were to sit down at a dinner table full of strangers, you would all broadly know what the narrative is on the Iraq War — and so you can discuss it. Yet this is not the case with Covid-19 and the government’s response to it. There is no accepted narrative. Did we beat the virus with our prudent and rational response? Or did we overreact and create havoc? There is no settled answer, so it festers.

The second of these events was the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline last year. Once again, we have no official or widely accepted narrative of what happened. Most people appreciate that it was an enormous development that will have tremendous economic and geopolitical ramifications in the coming years. Yet we do not have a coherent narrative of why the pipeline was destroyed, who destroyed it, and what this means. Instead, conspiratorial thinking permeates and, as with Covid-19, it festers.

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Why Ukraine's offensive has stalled

By Edward Luttwak

Then, at the start of summer, there was the march of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner private military company, on Moscow. As it happened, the media went into overdrive. We were told that a world-changing coup was unfolding; a major historic event, possibly of the magnitude of the collapse of the Soviet Union, was taking place before our eyes. But then, once again, nothing happened. Prigozhin stopped, apologised, and went to Belarus with some of his troops. The conclusion was inconclusive; there is no coherent narrative about what happened. We cannot digest it, and so it festers.

In turn, each of these world-changing moments confirmed that narrative breaks are becoming more frequent as time marches forward. The recent coup in Niger demonstrates this once again, exposing uncomfortable truths about French-African relations that we would prefer to ignore. And yet, as we try to ignore it, our global influence ebbs. Increasingly, major events — or pseudo-events — are taking place in the world and provoking impassioned reactions, but then seem to lead into a ditch of unmeaning.

And then what happens? After the initial passion or even hysteria, people are forced to move on without processing what has just happened. In other words, we, as a society, advance without forming a coherent, broadly accepted narrative. We drift on, allowing doubt to fester, paralysed by a sneaking suspicion that the West is losing the plot.

And one can’t blame London liberals for looking longingly to Berlin. Germany is a land where Blairism, Cleggism and Cameronism never went away. German ‘conservatives’ are solidly centrist and staunchly pro-EU; British Tories ever less so. Furthermore, German social democrats are compliant coalition partners to the above; the radically Left-wing Labour Party would never be so docile.

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It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

Mutti Merkel is due to bow out at the next election, but whoever replaces her is bound to be equally dependable. According to Nick Cohen in The Spectator, there could never be a “German Boris Johnson”. Like so many UK liberals, he believes the Germans are sound of mind, while Brexity Britons have lost theirs:

“I do not see how the conservative myth that the English are a pragmatic people, with no time for the wild, utopian ideologies that have stirred continental Europeans, can survive this descent into make-believe.”

Cohen is not alone in this view. For instance, consider the following from AN Wilson in The Telegraph:

“A Europe in which Germany, assisted by Britain, is dominant is one in which we are all better off… Surely to stand alongside this unfolding, benign success story should be Britain’s deepest wish. But no. We apparently prefer to vote Ukip and demonstrate to the world not merely our insularity, but also our stupidity.”

Jeremy Cliffe of the New Statesman, formally Berlin bureau chief for The Economist, also believes that the British need rescuing from themselves:

“Britain’s tragedy is that its public services and civic spaces are horribly run-down but the resulting misery has flowed not into support for German/ Nordic-style Christian- or social-democracy but into support for authoritarian hucksters of left (Corbyn) and right (Brexiteers).”

When British liberals describe themselves as ‘pro-European’, what do they actually mean? Clearly, there’s an awful lot about the nation that they don’t like, but what part of Europe do they want Britain to be more like? Presumably not the struggling South of the Continent nor the somewhat scary East. Probably not riotous France or fissiparous Belgium either. The Nordic countries are widely admired, but you don’t get Scandinavian levels of welfare provision without Scandinavian levels of middle class taxation. That basically leaves Germany and its wingmen, Austria and the Netherlands. When it comes down to it, British Europhilia is basically Germanophilia. Indeed, polling shows that Britain in general is a Germanophile nation.

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What if Germany's economy toppled?

By Peter Franklin

But the liberal myth of Grown-up Germany needs to be challenged. Yes, there’s a great deal to admire in our neighbour’s post-war history, but the notion that there’s something especially virtuous about the country’s politics or the part it plays in Europe and the wider world does not stand up to scrutiny.

What follows is a top ten of German irresponsibility — proof that Germany is every bit as capable of selfishness and irrationality as any other democratic nation.

1. Who lost Britain?

Brexit need never have happened. If David Cameron had come back from the pre-referendum renegotiation with more than a slap-in-the-face, Remain would have won.

An ’emergency brake’ on immigration would have been entirely reasonable — a recognition of the UK’s situation as a English-speaking nation with an open, flexible labour market and a non-contributory social security system. The UK was always going to be a magnet for migrants — and the political consequences of a rapid escalation in the level of EU immigration should have been predictable. It’s not that the UK would have used a brake to close its borders, but it would have restored a much needed sense of control and agency.

However, even the already watered-down British proposal was rejected. That wasn’t Germany’s decision alone, but Angela Merkel, on whom Cameron’s hopes were pinned, could have made all the difference.

Was the problem that the EU establishment, like the UK establishment, simply assumed that Leave would not win? Perhaps, but the deeper issue is an inflexibility at the heart of the European project that fails to see that what suits Germany can become an unbearable imposition on other members.

It is a rigidity that fragilises instead of stabilising Europe.

2. The refugee crisis

It may be that the Germans are such sticklers for the rules because they don’t trust their own instincts.

We may think of modern German governance as reassuringly dull, but that overlooks a tendency towards impulsive, but highly consequential, gesture politics. Angela Merkel’s response to the refugee crisis of 2014-15 was a case in point.

To offer desperate people a new home is in many ways an admirable thing to do, but there are good and bad ways of going about it. Resettling more than a million people required a carefully organised process of transporting incomers safely from refugee camps and targeting help to those in greatest need. That would have been better than encouraging hazardous and illegal journeys across multiple borders.

To unilaterally open (and then just as suddenly close) Germany’s borders to so many migrants in such a short space of time — and with a plan summed up by Mutti’s infamous “Wir schaffen das” (we will manage) — helped to de-stabilise politics and a fuel a populist backlash across the Continent. This includes the backlash within Germany itself. The results of elections in Thuringia and other eastern regions show a worrying level of discontent.

3. Germany’s nuclear shutdown

Another example of the weird spasms that suddenly seize German policy-makers was the decision to shutdown the country’s existing nuclear reactors. This came in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan — when the 2011 tsunami seriously damaged a nuclear power plant.

Half-a-world away, Germany is not a country known for earthquakes, let alone tsunamis. Nevertheless, the German government decided that it would shut down all of its existing nuclear power capacity by 2022.

While deciding not to build new nuclear power stations is entirely rational, prematurely closing the ones you’ve got already makes no economic or environmental sense — and especially not when your generating system is still burning coal.

4. A thousand points of lignite

While Germany’s nuclear phase-out is set for 2022, its coal phase-out is set for 2038 — a completely screwed-up sense of priorities.

Germany is Europe’s biggest producer and burner of coal. And, what’s worse, the greater part of it is lignite or brown coal — just about the filthiest fossil fuel there is. Whole swathes of ancient forest are still being sacrificed to allow the opencast mining of this environmental nightmare. Unsurprisingly, the country is the EU’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, which has the knock-on effect of undermining attempts to get Germany’s eastern neighbours, especially Poland, to clean-up their smokestack industries.

Of course none of these inconvenient truths have stopped outsiders from lavishing praise on the Energiewende (Germany’s unnecessarily expensive subsidy programme for renewable energy) or Angela Merkel from being honoured as as the “Climate Chancellor”.

Meanwhile in Bonkers Britain, the last coal-fired power station should be gone in the next few years and renewables, including offshore wind, have become cost competitive.

5. Dieselgate

One might have thought that Germany’s nasty coal-habit would have prompted compensatory behaviour elsewhere. But no other country is more responsible for Europe’s great diesel disaster.

With the support of the German government, German industry pushed dirty diesel engine technology on the rest of Europe. In 2015 the news broke that Volkswagen had falsified emissions tests. Given the deadly consequences of air pollution, the dieselgate scandal is arguably the worst case of corporate malpractice anywhere in the West this century.

Quite rightly, we’re angry about the tax-dodging, data-hoarding activities of big American tech companies. But we’ve been weirdly unmoved by what Germany’s economic giants have done to fill our lungs with particulates.

6. A tottering economic model

Still, what goes around comes around. The strategic bet on diesel which served the big German car companies so well for so long is now unravelling.

Despite state support for crop-derived biodiesel (yet another environmental disaster), it is clear that the best way to de-carbonise transport and combat vehicular air pollution is a comprehensive switchover to electric vehicles.

This is the mother of all technological disruptions, placing the densely interlinked supply chains that make up German industry under intense threat from foreign competitors (especially the Chinese). The highly collaborative and specialised nature of German industry, which made it so good at what it did best, is leaving it vulnerable at a time when what is required is adaptability.

Despite Brexit, it is the spluttering German economy that is now the greatest cause for concern in Europe. Who saw that coming?

7. Ordo-mercantilism

Ordoliberalism is Germany’s post-war economic philosophy — basically, it means state intervention in the service of an efficient marketplace. In 1999, it took on a new dimension with the creation of the single currency, which is managed from Frankfurt by the European Central Bank.

Replacing the Deutschmark with the Euro locked-in a permanent and unfair price advantage for German exporters, enabling the country to run up huge trade surpluses. This has destabilised other economies, not least because deficits in Germany’s trading partners have been financed by excessive borrowing (as enabled by the distorting effects of the shared currency). The result was the Eurozone crisis which devastated the ‘peripheral’ economies, and especially the Greek economy.

Despite benefiting from enormous and artificial trade advantages, Germany has resisted the fiscal integration that is necessary to offset the imbalances created by monetary integration.

8. Germany’s economic backyard

The EU does facilitate some degree of fiscal integration — thanks to its pooled system of farm subsidies (the Common Agricultural Policy) and ‘cohesion’ spending on transport and other infrastructure in the poorer member states. It’s a system that left the UK making a hefty net contribution to the EU budget — a key driver of British euro-scepticism.

Europhiles point out that Germany makes an even bigger net contribution and you don’t hear them complaining. But that’s not surprising — EU spending has disproportionately benefited German industry by improving its links to export markets and suppliers in Eastern Europe (which for geographical and historical reasons is massively more important to the German economy than the British economy).

Indeed, Poland, Hungary and Czechia have been described by Thomas Piketty and colleagues as “foreign owned countries” because of the extent of (especially) German ownership of local industry.

Thus what looks like a big net contribution from Germany is in fact a subsidy for its own direct economic interests, helpfully topped-up by other net contributors like the UK.

9. An indefensible defence policy

With such a big economic and political interest in its eastern neighbours, Germany ought to make a significant contribution to their defence. It doesn’t. In fact, Germany with its ramshackle navy and airforce is in poor position to defend itself, let alone anyone else.

Despite having the biggest economy in Europe, comparatively low levels of public debt and regular budgetary surpluses, Germany’s defence spending is persistently and significantly lower than that of the British and French (who are by far the most significant European contributors to NATO).

Also worth noting is that the supposedly insular Brits devote a higher percentage of their GDP to overseas aid than do the supposedly internationalist Germans.

10. A pipeline of selfishness

Given their reluctance to contribute positively to Europe’s security, it would be nice if the Germans didn’t go out of their way to undermine it.

But that’s exactly what they did with the Nord Stream project — a gas pipeline that runs from Russia to Germany via the Baltic seabed.

As such, it bypasses the territory of the countries sandwiched between Russia and Germany. This makes it easier for Russia to exert pressure on the likes of Poland and Ukraine, because it can threaten their gas supplies without interrupting deliveries to lucrative markets in Germany and the rest of western Europe.

Germany and Russia are now close to completing a second Nord Stream pipeline. America, Poland and Ukraine are bitterly opposed, but it’s good for Germany so that’s alright then.

As if extending Russia’s grip isn’t enough, Angela Merkel is also helping the Chinese reach out by refusing to exclude Huawei from Germany’s 5G network. Again, this is in the face of objections from other EU countries and the US.

*

Sometimes you have to wonder whose side Germany is on. Or, rather, you don’t, it’s on its own side and acting in its own immediate interests.

Same as every other country you might say — and you’d be right. It would be easy enough to compile a top ten of British irresponsibility, for example.

But, that’s just my point: the Germans may be no worse than we are, but they’re certainly no better.