NOURNEWS- Germany has a national security strategy for the first time after several months of discussions. In this document, the German government says how it plans to respond to external and internal threats. According to the Germans, the biggest threat for the foreseeable future is Russia. Although the ruling Social Democratic Party, along with the two Green and Free Democratic parties as coalition partners of the government, have given a lot of publicity on this strategic document, the main question here is what problems and miscalculations the Germans Have or will they face while designing and implementing this documents strategies in the future. Could the principle of compiling this strategic document guarantee Germany's strategic success in facing short-term and long-term threats in Europe and the international system?
The federal government has released the more than 40-page document that the coalition government had struggled to secure for months. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said: "Without security, there is no freedom, no stability and prosperity."
The centrality of the concept titled "integrated security" is seen more than anything else in the German national security strategy document, and the main idea of this strategic document is that for the first time, all internal and external threats to Germany's security have been considered. In other words; In addition to the military threat, cyber-attacks and possible attacks on critical infrastructure or climate change have also been considered. During Trump's presidency, Former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel claimed that it is basically impossible to form a single European army, and that Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington should adopt the structure and system that arose from World War II (that is, the NATO structure) and keep it together. Even Angela Merkel went so far as to warn his rival factions about ending Berlin's security and military dependence on Washington.
Now the German authorities have presented their strategic document in such a way that they seem to have become a "mediator" on both sides of the Atlantic, while Berlin is one of the senior members of NATO, and finally, they should be involved in fundamental conflicts between options such as "absolute security dependence on America" or "enhancing Europe's ability to form a single army" and they must choose only one option.
This strategic document shows that the Germans still intend to continue with the same strategic ambiguity and duality regarding the most important security and political cases facing Berlin. An example of this issue can be seen in the Ukraine war, where the German authorities send the Leopard tank to the battlefield as an action synonymous with military participation in the war, and on the other hand, they emphasize on the impossibility of Ukraine becoming a member of NATO in the near future.
Beyond that, on the one hand, they are beating the drum of sanctions against Russia and its escalation, and on the other hand, in their unofficial positions, even sometimes semi-officially, they are negotiating peace with Moscow and solving some fundamental security-strategic conflicts with the Kremlin that are bound to happen in the not-so-distant future.
German officials even insist that relations with Beijing, as a growing economic power in the world, must be maintained at all costs. Here we see the convergence of Germany's and America's calculating-tactical approach towards the Chinese, which will definitely show itself at important junctures and critical time points in the future.
Frankly, the main Achilles heel of this strategic document is the predominance of the tactical view over the strategic view in the principle of its formulation, where there is no border between constants and variables in the political-security field of the Germans.
BY: Pooya Mirzaei
NOURNEWS