German Submission to the Americans, 1944-2025
Is it over?
The geopolitical unity of the Western powers is supposed to have come about as a result of the Cold War. The Soviet Union is supposed to have posed such a formidable threat to Western Europe that dependence on American security provision was the only option in the aftermath of the midcentury world struggle. But this chronology is incorrect. European, and in particular, German submission to the United States began even before the war was over and years before Truman kicked off the Cold War in 1947.
In the Summer of 1944, the Red Army carried out the largest offensive of the war. Operation Bagration (Операция Багратион) shattered Army Group Centre—Germany’s largest army group with some thirty divisions and half a million troops—leaving the Wehrmacht crippled.
Around the same time, the Western Allies finally came through on their long-delayed promise to join the struggle. Operation Overlord succeeded in establishing a beachhead at Normandy. Some 1.5m troops had landed by the end of July, and 2.0m by the end of August.
Even the most diehard war winners in Germany knew at this point that the war was over. The Führer felt that, having failed in the struggle for survival, the German race ‘deserved to be wiped out.’ But capillary forces, quite outside the control of the Great Dictator, were at work.
What begins to happen soon after is that the Germans make a strategic decision—perhaps it was decentralized common knowledge. They decide en masse that it was better to surrender in the West faster than the East—to the Germanic Western powers rather than Slavic Eastern power. The latter had been officially assigned (Generalplan Ost) the historical role of the Red Indian—the job of the Slav was to vanish into oblivion and make way for German settlers. As it turned out, Stalinism proved stronger than Nazism.
At any rate, as the noose tightens, the Germans fight a bitter fighting retreat in the East, and start giving way in the West. This is the origin of the German submission to the United States that is obscured by standard periodizations that reset the clock at war’s end.
After the US blew up Nord Stream 2, the German Chancellor was ordered to visit the White House. The Chancellor is supposed to have talked to Biden for two days straight—Biden being half awake, Jake probably led the discussion. No press conference was held. Our fearless press did not ask why. They decided on a credulous cover story, that was then simultaneously rolled out in America and Germany.
German submission to the United States was not always this blatant. In the early days of the Cold War, the US went out of its way to accommodate German concerns. Adenauer in particular, could and did stand up to the White House. The US had decided to resurrect the Wehrmacht to counter the Red Army. When the question of fielding tactical nuclear weapons in Europe was raised in the mid-1950s, Adenauer insisted, successfully, on dual control. (This was the most significant Western escalation in the Cold War. It directly triggered the Berlin crises—the Cuban crisis was also about Germany.)
The Cold War sensu stricto ended in 1963, once the Kennedy-Khrushchev confrontation had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and both side shat their pants. But the US was not happy at all about the unilateral German peace offensive called Ostpolitik. Americans understood that the East-West division of Germany was a very sensitive matter to the Germans. So they tolerated it. Still, it is a far cry from the US blowing up German infrastructure, ordering the German Chancellor to Washington, and having him parrot a cooked up story. Not to mention, swallow a secular energy shock to German industry. (Germany has always led the world in industrial chemistry—perhaps the Americans wanted to kill it.)
When the Americans escalated their war in Vietnam, officially the Germans stayed neutral (as opposed to Australia, the classic sub-imperial power). German civil society, even more so than elsewhere, was violently opposed to the war. Privately, German policymakers counseled restraint. The Americans were so drunk on their own power that they didn’t give a shit.
In 2003, Germans opposed W’s drive to war against Saddam—both officially, and especially in civil society. The gap that opened up in transatlantic relations became even more of a chasm. Back in the Sixties, American civilian militarists’ main headache was de Gaulle—who was floating an all too reasonable plan for peace in Vietnam. On their harebrained scheme to depose Saddam, the American faced practically lock-step opposition from Western Europe. Bush resorted to a ‘coalition of the willing’—composed on subservient post-Communist states of the East.
The above historical snippets raise an obvious question: How did we go from Adenauer to Scholz? How and why did Germany become more submissive to the United States? This is really anomalous. If anything, as temporal distance from Nazism increases, should we not see Germany become more assertive rather than less? What gives?
I don’t know the correct solution to this puzzle. But it seems to me obvious that some sort of elite ideological marination is at play here. The routines, playbooks and scripts of German dependence and submission have become ossified over time. Generations of German elites have come to accept their impotence in the face of American unilateralism. In part, this must be a sociological phenomenon: some sort of ideas are welcome at transatlantic think tanks and MSM; others not so much. Strategic autonomy may be good for French posturing but the Germans ‘know the deal.’
Whatever the explanation of German dependence and submission, the Trump revolution in American foreign policy must have shocked them out of their marinated routines. Poor Germans. The US forced the issue in Ukraine to bleed Russia. Outside the direct belligerents, Germany paid the highest price. Yet, they went along with it with barely a peep. This is the behavior of a woman in an abusive relationship that keeps making excuses for her husband’s abuse for far too long.
The fundamental issue is that, Biden’s bleeders notwithstanding, the US has bigger fish to fry than to bleed Russia. China is becoming so strong that it will consume the entire strength of the United States just to hold the line in Asia. As I have argued before in the context of the emerging tripolar nuclear order, the US cannot for long hold the line simultaneously in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The US will absolutely have to leave European security to the Europeans. This is not that big of an ask. The Europeans need to grow the fuck up.
The main question is how Europe can be secured. This is not an issue of finance alone. The main issue is how European armed forces can be combined into an effective military force. This is the only question for Europeans. Everything else is a waste of breath.