To Beat Putin, West Needs Armor, Not Empathy (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany)

Does historical fear explain German ‘understanding’ for Vladimir Putin’s behavior in Ukraine? For the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, columnist Volker Zastrow challenges the idea that Moscow is justifiably indignant after NATO broke its promise not to expand NATO, and warns that hand-wringing and ‘false empathy’ will do nothing to address the security problem Russia represents. According to Zastrow, only dramatically greater military spending will do that.

For the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Volker Zastrow attacks ‘false empathy’ for Russia, and lays bare Germany’s raw fear of war that he believes now threatens the West:

Since Moscow’s seizure of Crimea and the Black Sea Peninsula via an illegal referendum and military force, Germany has once again been swarming with Russia sympathizers. Since then, statements about how right Putin was and that the West drove him to it have been frequently made in Germany. The E.U. and the West are to blame for Putin’s political aggression. One really must be contorted into knots to believe this, especially since at first glance, it is obviously wrong. Yet like houseflies, such ideas are flying in through the open window, the latest being when Stern Magazine published the allegation that the West had promised Gorbachev that NATO wouldn’t expand if his empire fell apart. This was reprinted everywhere as if proven historical fact. This is simply nonsense.

 

Have we in Germany forgotten that not long ago, the Federal Republic’s membership in the Western military alliance was the biggest obstacle to reunification? At the time, the SPD [Social Democratic Party] brought a touch of Stalin, so to speak, back into play: We thought out loud about whether a unified, alliance-free Germany could be created, as the Soviet dictator suggested in 1952. The Social Democrats were no strangers to such considerations, and since the seventies were quite inclined toward the idea of neutrality. This was called the “second phase of political détente.” During the eighties, there was even a trend toward neutrality among national conservatives. So why not pay the price for reunification that we wanted anyway and once and for all, get out of the East-West conflict and be bloc-free?

 

But reunification came the way it came, because Gorbachev did what he did – and what many hardly thought possible: He accepted the expansion of NATO. Because of this, Magnus Enzensberger considered him among the “heroes of retreat.” On a more basic level, one can say that Gorbachev was a realist. He was aware of how exhausted and weak his country was. So the whole of Germany became part of NATO – and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Now in Germany, however, a quarter of a century later, a legend is taking hold that the Russians had been promised something quite different. Why is that? Do Germans love the Russians so much that for Crimea, they would rewrite their own history?

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