On Wednesday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s cabinet will announce Germany’s first National Security Strategy to provide an overview of foreign policy and ensure a unified cross-ministry security approach.
In November 2021, Scholz’s three-way coalition agreed to a more comprehensive security strategy.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany’s military, energy dependence, and gas pipeline defense were exposed.
Analysts argued Germany was too complacent in the decades of peace and prosperity after the Cold War in the face of new threats like aggressive authoritarian regimes like Russia and China.
In a major speech days after the invasion, Scholz called the Ukraine war a “Zeitenwende” or “turn of era” that required Germany to prioritize security and invest more in defense.
Scholz said Germany would invest more than 2% of economic output on defense from 1.5%, a goal expected to be included in the National Security Strategy.
“The Russian invasion and autocratic tendencies in other areas of the world require that we project our stance in a more robust way,” said Nils Schmid, foreign policy spokesperson for Scholz’s Social Democrats’ parliamentary party.
“Significantly more critical language on the challenge that China poses internationally” is what Mikko Huotari of the Mercator Institute for China Studies predicted from the strategy.
The government is due to publish a separate China strategy later this year. Thus, the document is unlikely to detail Germany’s China policy.
The Greens-led foreign ministry spent months gathering expert and layperson comments at district, state, and national levels.
The coalition intended to finish the paper in its first year, but party and ministry conflicts delayed it.
The administration scrapped the National Security Council after conflicts about its location.
Thorsten Benner of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) said the council would have disrupted the ministries-chancellery power balance.
“Such major changes can only be agreed as part of a package deal during coalition negotiations, not almost two years in.”
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