Germany, Apart

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/26/briefing/russia-ukraine-trump-nato.html

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Donald Trump has made a habit of deriding the U.S. alliance with Western Europe. He described NATO — the American-led alliance with Europe that dates to the 1940s — as “obsolete” and said that Americans were “schmucks” for financing it. He mused about withdrawing the U.S. from NATO and often spoke more positively about Russia than about longtime American allies like Germany and France.

These comments were a radical departure from the policies of every U.S. president, Republican and Democrat, for 75 years. Still, because Trump did not make good on his biggest threats, the tangible effects were not always clear.

Now they are becoming clearer.

Russia has massed about 125,000 troops on its border with Ukraine, threatening an invasion that would be the most substantial ground war in Europe since the end of World War II. To prevent that, President Biden, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain and several other leaders are trying to present a unified front and tell Russia that it would suffer severe economic consequences. But one crucial country is missing from that united front: Germany.

As Katrin Bennhold, The Times’s Berlin bureau chief, writes:

Germany’s government, under its new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has ruled out any arms exports to Ukraine. It is also delaying a shipment of howitzers from Estonia to Ukraine. It may have kept British planes from using German airspace when sending military supplies to Ukraine last week.

Most significantly, the Scholz government has been vague about whether a Russian invasion would lead to the shutdown of an undersea gas pipeline between Germany and Russia. The pipeline, the Nord Stream 2, will become a major source of energy for Germany and a major source of revenue for Russia once it begins operating, likely in the next year. Scholz recently described Nord Stream 2 as a “private-sector project.”

The pipeline’s history highlights the long-term consequences of Trump’s hostility to Europe. For years, many U.S. officials opposed Nord Stream 2, understanding that it would solidify ties between Germany and Russia. It is also likely to damage Ukraine’s economy; much of Russia’s natural gas has flowed through Ukraine, which receives fees in exchange.

But Trump showed little interest in building a good relationship with Germany as a way to persuade it to abandon the pipeline. He instead criticized America’s longtime allies in Europe — and treated Russian President Vladimir Putin warmly.

Trump’s hostility to Western Europe, in turn, encouraged Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor at the time, to ponder a future in which the U.S. might be pulling back from NATO. In that scenario, friendly relations with Russia (and China, too) would have advantages, especially because of its importance to European energy supplies.

“By the time Biden took office, the pipeline was nearly complete,” said my colleague Michael Crowley, who covered Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Germany last week. “Biden calculated that restoring relations with Berlin after the Trump era was far too important to risk with a last-ditch and potentially futile effort to stop the project.”

Instead, Biden waived sanctions — which Congress established starting in 2017 — on companies that worked on the pipeline. It was too late to prevent completion, he decided.

Trump’s European policy is hardly the only reason that the pipeline exists. Discussions about it began before he was president, reflecting decades of close ties between Germany and Russia, as Katrin notes. But Trump’s foreign policy diminished American influence in Europe — and, if anything, sent signals that the U.S. favored closer ties between Russia and Western Europe.

Leaders across much of Eastern Europe are not happy about these developments. Ukraine’s foreign minister has accused Berlin of effectively “encouraging” Russian aggression. A senior Lithuanian official said that Germany was “making a big strategic mistake and putting its reputation at risk.”

Putin, on the other hand, seems thrilled. He has embarked on a campaign to weaken democracies and strengthen autocracies, both in his own region (as in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus) and elsewhere (through election misinformation campaigns in the U.S. and Western Europe). Despite this aggression, NATO is not unified in confronting him, giving Putin more leeway to act as he chooses.

“He well recognizes that Europe’s main power base is France, Germany and Britain,” Tobias Ellwood, a member of Britain’s Parliament who helps set military policy, told The Washington Post. “If these three countries are united, the rest of Europe follows. If you can sow divisions among these three, then there’s no leadership, there’s no coordination and there’s no unity.”

The divisions even extend to internal U.S. politics. This week, Tom Malinowski, a Democrat who represents New Jersey in the House, tweeted: “My office is now getting calls from folks who say they watch Tucker Carlson and are upset that we’re not siding with Russia in its threats to invade Ukraine, and who want me to support Russia’s ‘reasonable’ positions.”

It’s still possible that Germany will do more to discourage an invasion than it has so far. Scholz said recently that Russia would suffer “high costs” if it invades. Yet Putin is savvy enough to understand the difference between a unified, clear European effort to prevent an invasion and a muddled one. Germany has chosen a muddle so far.

It’s a sign that Trump has succeeded at one of his foreign-policy goals: creating distance between the U.S. and at least some parts of NATO.