BERLIN–You know times have changed when the Germans announce they are expanding their army for the first time in 25 years–and no one objects.
Back when the Berlin Wall fell, Britain and France in particular feared the re-emergence of a German colossus in Europe. By contrast, Berlin’s pledge last month to add almost 7,000 soldiers to its military by 2023, and an earlier announcement to spend up to 130 billion euros, about $148 billion, on new equipment by 2030 were warmly welcomed by NATO allies.
It has taken decades since the horrors of World War II, but Berlin’s modern-day allies and, it seems, German leaders themselves are finally growing more comfortable with the notion that Germany’s role as the European Union’s de facto leader requires a military dimension.
Perhaps none too soon. The United States and others–including many of Germany’s own defense experts–want Germany to do even more for Continental security and to broaden deployments overseas.
President Obama expressed frustration in an interview this year that the United States’ European and Persian Gulf allies were acting too often as “free riders.” Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has been even more scathing in his remarks, threatening to pull out of NATO if he is elected.
As a July NATO summit meeting in Warsaw approaches, Germany, Europe’s largest economy, is now key to how the alliance will face the twin perils that have transformed the strategic situation in Europe: a more menacing Russia and the Islamic State’s expansion beyond individual acts of terrorism like executions to seizing territory.
In Europe, where NATO’s easternmost members, particularly Poland and the Baltic States, have clamored for permanent deployment of Allied troops to deter Russian meddling, Germany looks set to take command of a brigade in Lithuania, joining Britain and the United States in leading the effort to marshal a robust presence on Russia’s borders.
Under Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany is also playing a part in NATO programs to pool resources of member states for greater collective security. Defense experts hold up increased German-Dutch cooperation as a model.
The path to even a semblance of collective European defense is littered with unmet promises of better cooperation–for example, the quarter-century-old Franco-German brigade, which remains mostly a paper tiger, and the scramble ahead of the Warsaw meeting to find a fourth country to command a unit in the new NATO deployment in Eastern Europe. Britain and France, both nuclear powers, continue to set their own priorities.
But whether on its own or with others, Germany is showing signs of growing more comfortable with embracing a bigger military role, a gradual but distinct shift away from an instinctive pacifism that took hold starting in 1945, and a post-Cold War tendency to shrink the nation’s military.
The shift started becoming publicly apparent in 2014, when Germany’s president and foreign and defense ministers all urged an increased global security role for the country at the annual Munich Security Conference. Weeks later, Russia’s leader, President Vladimir V. Putin, annexed Crimea from Ukraine.
Since then, Germany has responded by helping to build a NATO rapid response force in Eastern Europe, leading the diplomacy efforts in Ukraine, and training and arming Kurdish pesh merga battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Now, a new government strategy document, the first such “White Book” in 10 years, is being prepared. It is likely both to bolster Germany’s role on the world stage–beyond its traditional sphere of activity in Europe–and to talk explicitly of military contributions.
Another major task is to convince skeptical Germans, particularly in the east, that NATO is keeping its 1997 bargain with Russia that alliance troops would not be stationed permanently at Russia’s edge.
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