The Russian Miscalculation and The New Old Germany
Putin loses even if he wins.
by Rod D. Martin
March 1, 2022
As I have been saying, it was absolutely crazy for Putin to actually invade Ukraine. Even if Russia wins, they lose.
Putin could have neutralized (“Finlandized”) Ukraine and split NATO diplomatically. Instead, he’s unified NATO — and against him — for the first time in 20 years; the Germans are rearming for the first time in 30, all of Europe (but especially Germany, which had resisted this) is forced to look to the US and UAE for natural gas, and worst of all, if Ukraine wins, it is almost certain to end up in NATO.
I would add that it’s perfectly possible that Sweden and Finland might now join NATO as well. Instead of Finlandizing Ukraine, Putin may have just un-Finlandized Finland.
This invasion is as staggering a miscalculation as Pearl Harbor.
George Friedman looks at the German part of the equation, below:
The New Old Germany
2022 isn’t 1914 or 1939, but an armed Germany is significant.
by George Friedman
March 1, 2022
It seems that Russia had two distinct but overlapping goals in invading Ukraine. The first was to take control of its western borderland, an area that gives it strategic depth and that Moscow believes to be in its sphere of influence. The second was to pit NATO members against each other, breaking off factions that opposed any form of intervention. Whatever anyone says about President Vladimir Putin’s character and temperament is irrelevant. For Russia, there’s a logic to the strategy. Defending one’s country is a ruthless task.
From Russia’s perspective, Ukraine shouldn’t matter to any country unless that country wants to strangle Russia – something that wouldn’t happen if NATO didn’t exist. If Europe wasn’t a base of operations for the United States, Russia’s primary adversary, the United States wouldn’t be a threat.
Central to all calculations on European power is Germany. It’s been a military nonentity for some time, and since 1991 its primary focus has been economic growth. It has a massive, export-oriented economy that requires a ton of energy, and much of that energy comes from Russia. (More will come if and when the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline comes online.) The Russians planned this crisis with this in mind.
Like virtually all countries, Germany was hurting from the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic when the war in Ukraine started. The loss of Russian energy would only make things worse. Since Germany and Russia tend to cooperate on economic matters, and Germany has avoided both military rearmament and confrontations with Russia, Moscow assumed that whatever it did in Ukraine was of no consequence to Berlin.
The first few days of the invasion seemed to validate Russia’s thinking. At first, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz emphatically said that he would not permit the supply of weapons to Ukraine from Germany. In another case, a British aircraft delivering anti-tank missiles to Ukraine routed itself around Germany rather than ask for overflight rights. Meanwhile, Putin met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to arrange a natural gas agreement, but Orban said he was not prepared to take a hostile stance toward Germany. This raised hopes in the Kremlin that the alliance could be split. If even a minor country like Hungary, a former Soviet satellite, was prepared to pull away from NATO, then the foundation of American power on the European Peninsula was dissolving, or so the thinking went.
But Putin failed to understand Germany’s own anxieties toward Russia. Russia and Germany could work closely under the NATO framework, but if that framework melted, and Ukraine fell, then the only thing standing between Germany and Russia would be Poland. This may sound paranoid, but the fact that Russia essentially took over Belarus last year in a bloodless coup and is trying to take over Ukraine now suggests the paranoia had some merit.
The German strategic position was collapsing. Berlin was at odds with its fellow EU and NATO members, France was emerging as the primary European interlocutor, and the United States, the foundation of German national security, was growing impatient if not hostile. The government hoped that for all the grumbling about Ukraine, business with Russia could continue unabated as the U.S. would handle any serious military confrontation.
But it was not to be. Washington hasn’t taken military action, of course, but it has placed massive economic burdens on Russia that will halt the flow of energy to Europe. The dream of having strong commercial ties with Russia while being part of NATO was over. Russia made that impossible. Berlin was forced to do what it didn’t want to do: choose. But then it really was no choice at all. Russian gas notwithstanding, Germany said it would arm Ukraine, and more significantly, it would rearm under a significantly enhanced defense budget.
Aside from the revitalization of NATO, this may well be the most important consequence of Russia’s invasion. Recall that a powerful, militarized Germany has historically been a destabilizing force in Europe. When Germany unified in 1871, it rapidly emerged as a major but insecure economic power, worried about simultaneous attacks from Russia and France. Things are different now, of course. 2022 is a different world from 1914 and 1939. But even so, the saving grace in the eyes of many European countries is current military weakness. In geopolitics, solutions to one problem can breed new ones.
Russia has put itself in a bad position. The fragmentation of Europe is no longer possible. Even if it defeats Ukraine, it will be that much closer to a hostile Europe, led by a newly remilitarized Germany.
— This article originally appeared at Geopolitical Futures.