German coalition wrestles with national security reform

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, German officials had hoped to use next weekend’s Munich Security Conference to unveil their long-awaited national security strategy.

But disagreements in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition have put paid to those plans. The annual security gathering, dubbed the “Davos of defence”, will most likely not be the place to showcase progress on his promised Zeitenwende, or historic turning point, that pledged a more assertive role for Germany in European defence.

The dispute centres on a disagreement over whether Berlin should set up a US-style National Security Council (NSC) — an idea that some German ministries fear could hand too much power to Scholz’s office.

“The issue is: how much of the brain and the muscle in that set-up should rest with the chancellery and how much with the other ministries?” said a person familiar with the discussions. Another put it more bluntly: “It’s a power question.”

German diplomats and some of the country’s western allies have argued for more than 10 years that Germany needs a coherent approach to national security that matches its political and economic standing — and avoids mistakes such as the blindness policymakers showed to the risks of depending on Russian gas.

Scholz’s government, which came to power in December 2021, included a commitment in its coalition agreement to produce a national security strategy. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine the following February brought a new urgency to the task.

“Facing up to this nuclear armed big power in Europe — Russia — we have to get our wits together,” said Ekkehard Brose, a former diplomat who now heads the government-funded Federal Academy for Security Policy. “There’s a very concrete challenge, not just an abstract realisation that this is what others expect of us.” 

While there have been various German policy documents addressing security over the years, there has never been a “truly integrated, cross-ministry strategy”, according to Sarah Brockmeier, a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt.

She pointed to two events in 2021 — Berlin’s chaotic handling of the international withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left Afghans employed by the German army at the mercy of the Taliban, and the devastating floods in Germany’s Ahr valley — as examples of where greater strategic planning and clearer decision making could have limited the damage.

The task of leading the process to draw up a national security strategy was handed to Annalena Baerbock, the Green foreign minister. She said Germany needed to think of national security as much more than “military plus diplomacy” and called for the country to “rigorously address our economic dependencies”, especially when it comes to China.

Baerbock has pointed to the role of business, municipalities and universities in making strategically important decisions, and called for the strategy to encompass the response to the fallout from climate change and trade policy as well as cyber attacks and conventional warfare.

A separate policy on Berlin’s relationship with Beijing is expected to be published once the overall strategy is finally settled.

The disputes that have held up the plan, according to one of the officials briefed on the details, include the question of whether to include a commitment to meet Nato’s requirement of spending at least 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence. There is also disagreement on how to co-ordinate the response to natural disasters.

But the most sensitive issue is the idea of establishing an NSC such as the ones in the US and UK that bring together ministers from across government along with representatives of the intelligence services and other agencies.

The body would almost certainly be based in the chancellery. But Baerbock’s foreign ministry is reluctant to hand too much power to Scholz and his team.

Christoph Heusgen, a long-serving foreign policy adviser to former chancellor Angela Merkel who is now the chair of the Munich Security Conference, said this week that the previous government never even broached the subject “because we knew it would represent the kind of fundamental break, the kind of structural change, that would be impossible to master in a coalition government.”

Advocates of a German NSC argue that the chancellor already has the final say on critical issues such as last month’s decision to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. “Ultimately, for crisis management, it happens anyway,” said Julia Friedlander, a former member of the US NSC who now heads the Berlin office of Atlantic Bridge, which promotes closer ties between Germany and the US. “But there has to be some sort of more formalised structure for communication.”

Some argue that a security council is no fail-safe against bad decisions.

Peter Ricketts, a former senior British civil servant who helped set up the UK’s own NSC in 2010, said the British version had failed to prepare for coronavirus even though a pandemic had been set as one of the top risks facing the country. “There’s an issue about progress chasing and follow-up,” he said. Still, he believes that Germany’s “disjointed” system would benefit from an NSC to improve co-ordination and promote long-term thinking.

Berlin has sought to play down the seriousness of the disagreements. A spokesman for Scholz refused to be drawn on questions about internal disputes at a press conference last month, saying only that the discussions were “progressing well” and that the strategy would be finalised before the end of March.

But experts wonder what will be left, and whether it will be too watered down to be meaningful — perhaps by ducking the decision on forming an NSC. Ricketts cautioned against that: “A national security strategy without a National Security Council is only halfway there — it’s just a document.”

Additional reporting by Guz Chazan