Germany Must Rearm

"Germany has been periodically mature and powerful—but never together”, a German diplomat told me over a quick dinner in Washington, DC, which is hauntingly beautiful on an autumn Friday night, with most people leaving town after work. It is a bitter reflection, made with an implicit sigh of repressed anger. A Polish court ruled in the morning that the Ukrainian man allegedly responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline will not be extradited to Germany. As the noted scholar and sage of “rules-based order,” Thucydides, once wrote: The weak suffer what they must. 

“If Ukraine and its special forces, including the suspect, organised an armed mission to destroy enemy pipelines, these actions were not unlawful. On the contrary, they were justified, rational, and just,” the court ruled. The judge added, “The German nation was from our point of view hostile towards Ukraine as it was cofinancing the enemy—Russia.” One of course marvels at the pretzel logic, while also appreciating that, in a classic fashion, this is a sovereign judgement and ruling from a “court” in the original sense of the term. 

International law is anything but customary and is almost always inevitably subservient to the balance and distribution of power. If there’s anything that is a lesson from this sorry episode, it is that the Germans, failing to act in a mature way, have now lost all real power as well as respect in Europe. 

Consider, from Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk: “Polish court denied extradition to Germany of a Ukrainian national suspected of blowing up Nord Stream 2 and released him from custody. And rightly so. The case is closed.” The finality is palpable. Or from Vice Premier Radek Sikorski: “When a foreign aggressor is bombing your country you may legitimately strike back by sabotaging the aggressor’s ability to finance the war. It is called self-defence.”