Latest news with #Rulesofengagement
NZ Herald
20-05-2025
- Politics
- NZ Herald
Europe now: Rearming Germany
Friedrich Merz, Germany's chancellor, left, and Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister, have been discussing Germany tightening its borders. Photos / Getty Images The Trump administration has thrown European security and the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine into disarray. In Part III of Rules of engagement, Cathrin Schaer considers what this means for Germany where, in many ways, a whole country based its national and cultural identity on the post-war, international rules-based order. To read Part I, with Andrew Gunn reporting from Kyiv go here. To Read Part II, with Andrew Anthony reporting from London, go here. There's a war going on about a day's drive from where I live in Berlin, historic alliances are being torn asunder, Germany's far-right is rapidly rising and the 'international rules-based order' isn't really following the rules any more. But heck, you wouldn't really know it. It's been one of the warmest springs on record so far and, as usual after a long, grey winter, local bars and restaurants have moved tables and chairs back onto Berlin's streets. Cycling back from a canal-side beer garden as the sun goes down, you wonder (as you always do at the end of winter) where all these delightful, laughing, beer-quaffing people were hibernating up until now. In other words, it's pretty much life as normal here in the crowded, dirty, always-entertaining capital of Europe's biggest economy. But of course, as anyone who reads the news is well aware, it's not. Although Berliners are doing all the usual things – working, booking summer holidays, buying groceries, walking the dog – there's an uneasiness running through daily life. At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, it feels a bit like a crack has opened up somewhere below us. We can't quite see it, but the earth is shifting beneath those café tables. And we're not sure if the crack is going to close again quietly or whether it will widen into a deep, dark chasm that we'll all eventually be sucked into. Is that overly dramatic, I ask at our table in a Turkish restaurant on the weekend, or do other people feel that way, too? 'There's definitely a lot of uncertainty about the future at the moment,' one German diner agrees. When Spain and Portugal went through a nationwide power blackout in late April, she says, she immediately thought a war was starting. Previously, she might have thought someone had damaged a wire or driven into a power pole. 'You're right, the existing world order is being broken down,' one of the older guests, an Englishman, said, somewhat resignedly. 'Back in the 60s, we were scared of one thing really: the atomic bomb. But in some ways that was easier to deal with. This is much more diffuse. It's hard to know exactly what's going on, or what China or Russia or Trump or the markets will do next.' Over her hummus, another German at the table added: 'I used to be quite proud of the way Germany worked through its war-time history and the Holocaust. But now, I just feel like it was all fake. We learnt nothing. And I really don't know if I can trust the government ever again.' It's unclear whether she is referring to the government's support for the far-right Israeli regime – support that has upset a lot of people because of the way it flounts the system of international justice that actually arose after World War II, and which Germany allegedly supports – or whether she's upset about the government's current drive to spend more on guns and bombs. Defence spending surge Militarisation has been anathema to many ordinary Germans for decades, precisely because of the country's wartime history. Since then the Germans have been the good guys, the pacifists with the money for foreign and development aid, not tanks. But now, thanks to the Trump administration's comments about the Nato defence alliance and 'European freeloading', its wobbly support for Ukraine and ongoing threats to pull American soldiers out of the country, Germany has become the fourth largest spender on defence in the world. According to a March report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Germany's expenditure of $88.5 billion on its military in 2024 amount to an 89% increase in such spending over the past decade. The country hasn't spent this much on its army since the Cold War ended 26 years ago, the institute said. The newly elected government is even said to be considering bringing conscription back. None of that really fits with Germans' post-war, pacifist self-image. 'How times have changed,' Joerg Lau, international affairs correspondent for local newspaper Die Zeit, wrote in Berlin-based foreign affairs magazine Internationale Politik Quarterly late last year. 'The idea that we are still living in a 'post-war era' is overshadowed by the premonition that it could also be a pre-war era.' Europeans may have thought they had it all figured out, but for various reasons – including the Trump administration, the economic and social hangover from the Covid pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine – they are being forced to ask themselves who their enemies are, who their friends are, and even who they are. That reassessment is particularly challenging in Germany where, in many ways, a whole country based its national and cultural identity on the post-war, international rules-based order. The script, with the dull-but-happy 'end of history' finale, seems to have been torn up. Cathrin Schaer is the Listener's Berlin correspondent.
NZ Herald
19-05-2025
- Politics
- NZ Herald
Europe now: Appeasing Trump
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US President Donald Trump during their February White House meeting. Photo / Getty Images The Trump administration has thrown European security and the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine into disarray. In Part II of Rules of engagement, Andrew Anthony reports on the UK's response. To read Part I, with Andrew Gunn reporting from Kyiv go here. Tomorrow, rearming Germany. Ever since the Brexit referendum nine years ago, the UK has been mired in angst and uncertainty, one symptom of which has been the procession of six different prime ministers in that time. Given this general air of socio-economic malaise, it's been hard to say just what effect the war in Ukraine has had on national morale. When, eight years after it annexed Crimea, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the situation was quite straightforward for most Britons. Russia was the bullying aggressor and Ukraine the plucky defender of its national territory, deserving of our sympathy and solidarity. Many people took in Ukrainian refugees, and, rather late in the day, the UK government instituted sanctions on Russian trade and individuals. While the moral case hasn't changed much, other than at the extremes of political debate, there is little consensus about what needs to be done. The second term of Donald Trump has utterly changed our relationship with the world at large, because so much of that relationship – economic, military, cultural – was conducted within the American sphere of influence. Now, all that we took for granted is under disruptive challenge. Nato, the so-called 'special relationship' and the idea that the US is our firmest ally in dealing with Russia aggression – all of it is being torn up by the Trump administration. In one sense, the UK and Europe in general has relied on a US defence shield that enabled its beneficiaries to become complacently entitled. Like some overgrown adolescent, we complained about American power and influence, but nonetheless expected the US to finance our defence from a dictatorship armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Now that we are being called upon to look after ourselves, there is a growing recognition that it's a dangerous – and costly – world out there without the security of US protection. Throw in Trump's early-April tariffs announcements and the angst is turning to full-blown anxiety. Although trade negotiations since have eased US tariffs on UK cars and metal exports, uncertainty remains. A leading UK economic journalist tells me the tariffs could necessitate further tax rises and/or further cuts in spending by Sir Keir Starmer's administration. Any fragile sense of growth has been crushed by Trump's threats. His trade war with China, the falling dollar and shrinking markets, says this expert, create conditions that 'look very much like 1929 [the start of the Great Depression] all over again'. It's not as if he's an alarmist kind of character, given to bleak warnings. But he can't really see a way out of the crisis for the UK. Obviously, most Brits have limited understanding of market mechanics, but they can see their pensions shrinking and, having experienced the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, are aware these things have a momentum of their own that a government – at least the British one – is powerless to stop. The government clearly hopes that if it can indulge and flatter Trump enough, lay on a state visit with all the ego-massaging trimmings, then he might just play nice and cut us a trade deal that enables us to continue sending Land Rovers and whisky to the US. But that presupposes that international markets and the Western world as we know it don't collapse. In other words, the best case scenario is that we suck up to Trump and he steps back from triggering a global crash almost 100 years after the last one devastated the world. By the same token, very few Britons know much about Ukraine, its history, geography or culture. Everyone can see Putin is a bully. It's not been forgotten that he launched chemical weapons attacks on former Russian agents on British soil, killing one British citizen and severely harming others. Russian acts of destabilisation and disinformation grow in severity and regularity – from cutting communication cables at sea to economic and digital crime – and so only those who admire power and ruthlessness for its own sake have any sympathy with Putin's cause. Yet there is nonetheless widespread belief the Crimea is never going to return to Ukrainian control. It would have been difficult enough to achieve that if the US backed Zelenskyy to the hilt, but impossible given Trump has told him to accept its loss. If the war is to end, the feeling is it will end on terms that are favourable and acceptable to Russia. What that will mean for European security is a question which is beginning to make itself known in the national consciousness. For one thing, Starmer has already committed to raising military spending from 2.29% of GDP to 2.7% within two years. The post-Soviet bloc days of demilitarisation and falling defence budgets are well and truly over. Unable to depend on the US and cut off from the EU, the UK feels like an increasingly embattled place to be – as though we are being borne back into a dangerous past by currents we are not strong enough to resist. Sunny optimists are nowhere to be found. Andrew Anthony is the Listener's London correspondent.
NZ Herald
18-05-2025
- Politics
- NZ Herald
Europe now: The reality of life in the shadows of Putin & Trump
The Trump administration has thrown European security and the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine into disarray. In Part I of Rules of engagement, Andrew Gunn reports from Kyiv. Tomorrow, the UK and Trump appeasement. Wednesday, rearming Germany. I am briefly woken by the wail of the air raid siren, but manage to get back to sleep. Call it disassociation, or what you will, but like many others in Kyiv, I have given up on taking shelter every time I
