Germany stand together, they remain the European center of gravity. If Germany and France collide, that collision rips apart the fabric of Europe, leaving the federated nations to divide and realign in some new configuration.
I’m leaving Britain out of this equation for historical, geographical, and economic reasons. The English Channel has always allowed Britain to step back and engage Europe selectively. But beyond this geographical reality, from the Spanish Armada to the German Blitz, Britain has viewed continental powers as a threat to its survival and has chosen to stand apart. Part of its drive for empire was the desire to avoid being entirely dependent on Europe. Britain normally didn’t build a wall against Europe (although it did in extreme cases), but it limited its involvement. Geography made this possible.
While Europe as a whole remains Britain’s largest trading partner, its largest export target among nations is the United States. When Britain is drawn deeply into Europe, the cause is more often war than economics. British strategy has always been to block a unified Europe as a threat to its national security, not least because the idea of a Europe militarily dominated by France and Germany is intolerable. For Britain to be the junior partner in such an alignment is neither prudent nor necessary.
For all these reasons, British grand strategy is incompatible with an open-ended commitment to Europe. Rather, the British strategy has been to align militarily with the United States. Britain never had the weight to block the Soviets by itself, nor to manage events in Europe. Its alignment with the United States allows it to influence the major imperial power at relatively low cost. Over the next decade, Britain will continue to hedge its bets on all sides, while tilting, as the French and Germans say, to the Anglo-Saxon bloc and culture.
The Franco-German alignment has its own problems. There are two areas of tension today between France and Germany, and the first one is economic. Germany is much more disciplined fiscally than France, which means that the two countries are rarely in sync when it comes to financial cooperation. The second tension revolves around defense policy. The French, and particular the Gaullists, have always seen a united Europe as a counter to the United States, and this would require European defense integration, which inevitably would mean a force under Franco-German control.
The Germans of course value what integration with France and Europe brings, but they have no desire to take on either France’s economic problems or the creation of a European military force set against the Americans. They simply don’t want the potential burdens of the former or the risks of the latter.
Another problem facing the Germans is that once again, owing largely to the financial crisis and the U.S. war in Iraq, their relations with the United States have declined. Germany is an exporting country, and the United States is a major non-European customer. The Obama administration created a stimulus package to get the American economy out of recession, but the Germans took no such measures. Instead they relied on the American stimulus to generate demand for German products. This meant that the United States went into debt to jump-start its economy while (at least from the American point of view) the Germans got a free ride. The Germans also wanted the Americans to participate in the bailout of European countries through the IMF. But beyond these substantial economic disagreements between the two countries, there was a real geopolitical split. The Americans, as we’ve seen, have significant issues with the Russians, but Germans wanted nothing to do with U.S. efforts to contain them. Beyond their aversion to encouraging another Cold War, the Germans, as we’ve already seen, depend on Russia for a large part of their energy needs. In fact, they need Russian energy more than the Russians need German money.
U.S. relations with both Russia and Germany will vary over the next ten years, but we can anticipate a fundamental shift. Whatever the atmospherics, Russia’s growing presence to the east of the European peninsula threatens American interests. Similarly, the more the United States sees its global interests dragging it into wars in places like Afghanistan, the more Germany is going to want to distance itself from its Cold War ally. The greater the U.S. level of concern about Russia, the greater the distance between the Germans and the United States. The sixty-five-year relationship that began at the end of World War II will not survive the decade ahead unchanged.
Germany can afford to distance itself from America, in part because its traditional problem of being squeezed from both sides is gone and it has a close and friendly relationship with France. Germany no longer borders Russia but now has Poland as a buffer. Germany needs natural gas, which the Russians have in abundance, and the Russians need technology and expertise, both of which Germany has to spare.
In addition, significant population decline will soon affect Germany’s industrial plant, as a labor shortage, combined with an aging population, creates a formula for economic disaster. Even with its own decline, Russia will still have a surplus of labor that Germany can utilize, both by importing Russian workers and by moving production to Russia. The only way to counteract population decline is by encouraging immigration, but immigration and national identity in Europe are at odds.
If Germany doesn’t want to bring workers to its factories, it can move its factories to where the workers are. Russia is also undergoing a decline in population, but because it has such a weak economy focused on primary commodities, it still has a surplus workforce, meaning people who are unemployed or underemployed. If the Russians want to move beyond simply exporting energy and grain and develop a modern industrial economy, they need technology and capital, and the Germans have both of those. The Germans want workers to man their factories and natural resources to fuel their economy. German businesses of all sizes are already deeply involved in Russia, adding to the new reality of a Moscow-Berlin relationship that soon will be the pivot of Europe, more dynamic if not more significant than the other relationships each country has.
With France at Germany’s back—tied there by economic interests—Russia will move closer to the European core, setting off a new dynamic in the EU. Tension between the core and the periphery is already rife. The core is Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, the advanced industrial heartland of Europe. The periphery is Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and eastern Europe. Still in the early stages of economic development, these smaller countries need looser monetary policies than their more advanced neighbors and will have wider economic swings, so they will be more vulnerable to instability.
Meanwhile, France has hedged its bets, positioning itself as both a northern European power and a Mediterranean power, even to the point of considering the formation of a Mediterranean Union alongside the EU. In French thinking, this would include southern European countries, North African countries, Israel, and Turkey. This is an attractive idea in the abstract, but in reality the difference in developmental stages between Libya and Italy is so profound that it dwarfs the difference between Germany and Greece. Still, we can expect the French to dabble in the Mediterranean, trying to compensate for being Germany’s junior partner in the north.
Germany is uncomfortable in the role that was pressed on it during the 2008–2010 crises. As the Germans reconsider their interest in the EU periphery, the peripheral countries raise questions about the economic benefit of integrating with the Germans. They resent losing control over vast areas of their economies, such as the banking sector, especially when they are expected to stand on their own if a crisis occurs. That those on the periphery are expected to sustain their economies with a monetary policy designed for the core adds to the pressure on both sides.
The old periphery, from Greece to Ireland, is firmly focused on economics. The new periphery, the Intermarium—and Poland in particular—is deeply concerned about Russia. And as we have seen, Poland is especially uneasy over being a neutral buffer between Germany and Russia, a role that historically has never ended well for it.
Also uncomfortable with this alignment is Britain. The UK could live with a Paris-Berlin axis as long as it was countered by the United States, with Britain as the balance point midway. But including Moscow puts too much weight on the European mainland, posing a challenge to British commercial and strategic interests.
As the next decade unfolds, Germany will resume its place on the North European Plain, but allied this time with its historic enemies, France and Russia. Britain will move even closer to the United States. Countries on the old periphery will be left to sort their way through the complexities, but it will be the new periphery—eastern Europe— that will be the focus of activity. The European Union will continue to function, as will the euro, but it will be difficult for the EU to be the organizing principle of Europe when there are so many centrifugal forces.
THE AMERICAN STRATEGY
A fairly extraordinary policy lapse since the collapse of communism is that the United States has never
