By , a deputy editor at Foreign Policy, and , a columnist at Foreign Policy and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. Sign up for Adam’s Chartbook newsletter here.

 

Germany’s election campaign has focused on topics ranging from the welfare state and retirement benefits to tax levels and, above all, migration. But those policies seem somewhat beside the point in light of the latest developments in Ukraine, as the Trump administration pursues a cease-fire deal with Russia—one that may have to be secured by European troops, including from Germany.

Can Germany manage to send troops to Ukraine? How can Berlin end its military dependence on Washington? And does Germany’s next chancellor have plans to fix its economy? Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Germany’s election campaign has focused on topics ranging from the welfare state and retirement benefits to tax levels and, above all, migration. But those policies seem somewhat beside the point in light of the latest developments in Ukraine, as the Trump administration pursues a cease-fire deal with Russia—one that may have to be secured by European troops, including from Germany.

Can Germany manage to send troops to Ukraine? How can Berlin end its military dependence on Washington? And does Germany’s next chancellor have plans to fix its economy? Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: Olaf Scholz, the current chancellor of Germany, has responded to the requests for peacekeeping troops in Ukraine by saying he was “irritated” that the topic has even come up. But could Germany, on a logistical level, even manage to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine? Does it have sufficient spare capacity to be playing this kind of role at all?

Adam Tooze: It’s quite difficult to get concrete information on the actual deployable strength of the Bundeswehr, what it can actually do. They are supposed to be building a permanent presence of 5,000 men, a kind of brigade-strength unit in Lithuania, which is notably to deter the Russians. As far as I’m able to establish by looking back through NATO planning documents, they are supposed to have one division ready for mobilization for combat over a 10- to 30-day time horizon. This is the 10th Panzer Division, which incorporates bits of the Dutch army as well. So if we say a beefed-up division would be in the 20,000-men range—men and women, I think at this point—that would be probably about as much fighting strength as the Bundeswehr has. I think we’d be erring on the high side if we said they had 30,000 troops that are actually capable of fighting. You know, that’s one battle in the Ukrainian conflict. That would seem to be about the number of units that the Germans have as capable units. And I think testing them in practice has been somewhat embarrassing. In the maneuvers of 2024, things didn’t go well. A lot of equipment broke down.

And then there’s the logistical element that you bring in, which is, could these units be moved? And this is where the full extent of the German malaise really becomes evident, because all the way back to the 19th century, the Germans were pioneers in using railways as means of moving troops. And for heavy units like armored brigades and divisions, the railway remains essential for long-distance travel because you can’t drive a 60-ton tank from Germany to Ukraine and expect it still to be functioning. And if these are not peacekeeping units, but actually part of a security guarantee for Ukraine, in other words, they’re actually deterrent forces, then they need to have heavy equipment with them. They can’t just be lightly armored. They need actually to be capable of deterring the Russians.

And so then the question becomes, can the Germans actually move a division-sized unit with any kind of speed across their increasingly rundown railway system? And the conclusion seems to be that they can’t. As you know, since you live in Germany, its transport system right now is in a very poor state. The German Council on Foreign Relations estimated that Germany would need €30 billion in investment in its railways, in its bridges. The entire apparatus of NATO military mobility that was once hardwired into the German transport infrastructure has been dismantled.

CA: How long would it take for Europe to effectively separate from the United States in terms of its military dependence? And where is the additional money going to come from—will countries like Germany need to make a choice between its welfare state and its defense in this new geopolitical context?

AT: The short answer to this is it’s totally doable. The Americans have been asking the Europeans to do more for ages. That this has caught them as flat-footed as they are is nothing but their own fault. After all, Trump 1.0 was a clear warning that this was a real issue. And [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s aggression is not, after all, something sudden. And furthermore, Europe already right now spends enough money, €342 billion in 2024, to pay for a military that would be certainly the third-largest and most potent and technologically sophisticated in the world after the United States and China. But you would need to spend that as a single unit in a concerted way. You would need to focus it not on the sprawling mess that is European militarism and its detritus today, but on a highly trained army of up to 500,000 soldiers, something like that across all three arms with a tight focus on ground deterrence, superiority and technology and aircraft and then some naval deployment, which you’d have to decide what you’re actually going to use it for. But that kind of money, €342 billion is perfectly adequate to do the task.

But it’s a matter of political will. It requires you actually to concentrate that resource. And [Friedrich] Merz, the prospective winner of the German election, is actually very strong on this, because he’s campaigned for ages for a European army. And it’s the obvious way to go. Under those circumstances, it would take years. It would be a matter of decades to disentangle yourself from the United States. And you might ask yourself, do you really want to be fully disentangled from the U.S.? Probably not. Why would you do that? It’s cheaper in many ways to acquire arms from other people, and you have more influence as the customer, really, than you do as the supplier in many ways, though the supplier is necessary. And we shouldn’t exaggerate the threats. The only one that really matters for Europe is Russia. And Russia is a deterrable state, as far as Europe is concerned.

CA: How does Germany’s center-right CDU [Christian Democratic Union]—the likely winners of the election—align between the center-left parties (which it’s likely to create a coalition with) and the far-right AfD [Alternative for Germany], which the Trump administration has been encouraging it to pursue a relationship with? Where does the CDU align with those other parties on these big issues?

AT: On migration, I think that the Christian Democrats, as opposed to the Social Democrats and the Greens, align much more closely with the restrictive, xenophobic, Islamophobic stance of the AfD. And Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU, who in some ways is a kind of pro-European, Atlanticist, former business consultant, mainstreamer, opened the question of migration, and in fact tore down what’s called the firewall, which is supposed to bind all of the establishment parties of German politics in an agreement that none of them would do business with the AfD. And he actually tore that down and launched a legislative proposal that could only possibly pass with AfD support. It was a huge scandal. And in the end, in fact, he was embarrassed because he didn’t get the votes that he needed to pass it. But on that issue, I think there’s no question at all that the alignment of the CDU is more clearly with the AfD. One is also tempted at that point to say this is also the issue on which the AfD is least distinctive. Like in some senses, quite contrary to the nonsense that [U.S. Vice President J.D.] Vance was purveying at Munich, the idea that Europe is some sort of haven of liberal multiculturalism in which no one has any interest in excluding migrants is belied by the reality of, well, everything in European history and politics. It’s just nonsense. It’s part of MAGA bullshit. It’s just not true any more than it’s true in the United States, where [former Presidents Joe] Biden and [Barack] Obama were vigorous deporters of migrants, and [former Vice President Kamala] Harris promised to be much more serious about migrant deportation than President Donald Trump. It’s posturing. It’s not really a considered position. It’s a destructive posturing. It’s racist and xenophobic and it’s Islamophobic.

Where the AfD really does deviate from the increasingly consensual right-wing drift is precisely over Ukraine, NATO, and, by implication, the relations with the United States. And there are two elements to this. One is that the AfD’s roots are in East Germany, and I don’t think there’s any question that there is a kind of lingering appreciation on the part of many voters, notably in the east, but also perhaps an appreciation amongst left- and right-wing voters in the west for the willingness of Putin to be a sovereign, to stand up against global American liberal hegemony. And, certainly on the more ideological side of the AfD, people like Björn Höcke [believe]—this is the key element—that what Putin represents is sovereigntism. And if there are people in Germany who want to talk openly about American power and its financial side, it is the extreme right.

They’re the people that break the consensus that somebody like Merz represents, which is that you don’t openly talk about the dirty side of American power. You accept it as a reality. You embrace it. You consider yourself privileged players within that system, but you don’t actually ever explicitly state even things like the brutality of the postwar settlement [that] are very difficult for mainstream German parties to articulate, because they are the terrain of the far right. So that’s where the AfD and the CDU are just completely at odds with each other. And in many ways, I think Merz’s foreign-policy program is closer to that of the Greens, who are kind of neocon in the American sense, you know, values-based Atlanticists.

CA: Friedrich Merz, the likely next chancellor, has talked about how the German economic model is broken. But his prescriptions mostly seem to involve improving Germany’s competitiveness, cutting costs, becoming more efficient, and basically keeping the economic model going. Is that commensurate with what’s broken?

AT: My mantra on this is what Germany needs is not more competitiveness, because competitiveness is code for exports. And that’s precisely the wrong way to think about Germany’s economic problems. Germany’s chronic trade surplus, which they celebrate as a sign of their competitiveness and they want more of it because that means they’re more competitive and that’s a good thing, is in fact a symptom of a real problem, which might even be described as too much competitiveness.

And why too much? Because you have to ask, why do German firms need to go looking for business abroad to such an extent? And the short answer is they do it because they don’t have as big a market at home as they would need to achieve the efficiency and the scale that they do and to take advantage of their highly specialized skills. And why is this a problem?  Because consumption is too low. This deficit of demand at home doesn’t have the same origins as it does in China. The problem in Germany is not that the savings rate is particularly high. What’s chronically low in Germany is investment. And that’s what Germany needs. It needs domestic investment to provide markets for Germany’s capital goods industries. That investment would also heat up the economy even more. It would lead to more imports. It would therefore adjust Germany’s chronic trade surplus toward something closer to balance. And what it would do is both create immediate demand in the German economy, but it would also create and provide the foundations for long-run growth, which is the thing which is most troubling to German society and which is beginning to show up in so many different places. And that’s really the big issue.

Now, Merz will tell you that of course he favors investment and everything he’s trying to do is to increase investment. But what he has in mind is private investment. And there just really isn’t any serious analysis of the German economy that will tell you that private investment can get you to the kind of levels of extra spending that are necessary. I think the latest estimates put the deficit for Germany alone at something like €500 billion, which need to be spent urgently over the next 10 years. And some of that can come from the private side, but it needs movement on the public sector side as well. And this is where Merz is just profoundly reluctant.

He seems to understand the problem. There’s wide suspicion that he really deeply understands the problem and he’s holding back for political reasons, because the German electorate are convinced that more investment that’s publicly funded means debt and debt is bad. Whereas, of course, when you look at an economy like Germany’s, you have to ask yourself why they don’t have more debt-funded investment. And this has kind of been one of the beneficial effects of the shocks that Germany’s been receiving from the Trump administration, is that Merz has actually begun to talk more open-mindedly about the possibility of common European debt-funded investment in defense. And this really would be a step in the right direction. He’s also demanded that that then not be spent nationally, that there’d be genuine European convergence. So that would make for an even better policy. So Merz as the Atlanticist with a pro-European turn that actually opened the taps for debt would be the sort of Merz-led government that we would need to address some of Germany’s pressing issues. But investment, investment, investment is the key.