Germany’s New Muscular Foreign Policy ‘Lies in the Hands of Strong Women’

BERLIN — It was Chancellor Olaf Scholz who, three days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, broke with Germany’s postwar pacifism, vowing to give his country the necessary resources and muscle to lead on security matters in Europe.

Those now tasked with carrying out that change — the biggest foreign-policy shift in Germany since World War II — are women.

Christine Lambrecht, the Defense Minister, is visiting Washington this week to oversee a rearmament program worth 100 billion euros (roughly $110 billion) for the German military. Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister, is devising Germany’s first national security strategy. Nancy Faeser is in charge of homeland security and organizes the welcome for hundreds upon thousands of Ukrainian refugees.

As war rages across Ukraine, just a 10-hour drive away from Berlin, it is the first occasion that Germany has all three national safety positions filled by women. This puts them on the frontline for both a cultural revolution and a strategic one.

Christoph Heusgen, a veteran German diplomat who was Ms. Merkel’s national security adviser for 12 years, summed up his former boss’s secret of success in foreign policy and security matters: “No vanity, no testosterone.”

But unlike Mr. Scholz (a Social Democrat), Ms. Merkel has never achieved gender parity within her government. Only now, a quarter-century after Madeleine K. Albright, who died last week at 84, became America’s first female secretary of state, does Germany have its first female foreign minister and its first female interior minister. (There have been already two female defense ministers.

Some spy an analogy for the foreign-policy change, which had so far eluded the traditionally more promilitary Christian Democrats of Merkel. Just like it took a male chancellor to achieve gender parity in government, it took a progressive government to announce €100 billion to revamp the German military, said Roderich Kiesewetter, a conservative lawmaker and former soldier.

Had his own party announced this, “the result would have been turmoil, public unrest, demonstrations — the whole so-called peace movement would call us warmongers,” Mr. Kiesewetter said.

Instead, it falls to Ms. Lambrecht, a onetime supporter of that peace movement who joined Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats in the 1980s when she marched against nuclear power and in favor of disarmament, to buy armed drones and a new generation of fighter jets that can drop nuclear bombs.

Ms. Lambrecht is a former justice minister at 56 years old who is thought to be on the right side of her party. She has no military experience and embodies the deep-rooted change in German mindset since the attack on Ukraine in February.

Before the war started, Ms. Lambrecht spoke for many Social Democrats when she insisted “not to draw” the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany “into the Ukraine conflict.” She defended Germany’s ban on arms shipments into conflict zones, offering Ukraine 5,000 helmets and a field hospital instead.

Now, she proudly identifies Germany as the largest supplier of arms to Ukraine and defends plans for increasing military spending beyond 2 percent of gross national product.

“We have to say goodbye to the idea that we live in a peaceful Europe,” Ms. Lambrecht said in a recent interview. “The threats are coming closer — they have come closer. The idea that there are borders that are accepted by all, that’s over. We saw how Putin is trampling all over international law.”

She is candid about her own — and her country’s — belated pivot, something that observers say gives her credibility with those who still need convincing.

“If I’m honest, I could not have imagined it before this brutal offensive war,” she said. “There is a before and an after.”

When Ms. Lambrecht meets President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan; Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III; and members of Congress in Washington this week, she has one message for them: “We stand by our allies’ side and are conscious of the responsibility that we must and want to take on in this alliance. We are not just talking, but taking concrete measures.”

One of those measures is to develop a national security strategy, Germany’s first, and the woman in charge of it is the foreign minister, Ms. Baerbock. Hawkish about Russia, she is determined enshrine into a lasting doctrine the current consensus for a more muscular and values-based international policy.

She noted that this consensus is fragile.

“If there hadn’t been the war, some of these decisions may never have been taken,” she said. “I want to make sure that we won’t forget in four months or even in four years why we made some of these decisions.”

It is more than a policy shift for Ms. Baerbock (a member of Green Party), she says. It is a shift in the way Germany sees itself and defines itself. Germany is no longer hiding behind its past, but actively shaping the future.

“It’s good to know history, but we cannot formulate the future only with the past,” she said. “As Germans, we have a special responsibility, but we have to work for the future.”

Ms. Baerbock, 41, is a representative of a new generation of German politics. She was born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like others in her generation, she is not afraid to talk about “leading” or “führen” — long a taboo in a Germany traumatized by the memory of its onetime Führer, Hitler.

Ms. Baerbock, a mother to two young children, has personalized and humanized war diplomacy almost daily, always with an eye towards the future.

“I grew up in a united European Union at peace, and as a western German it’s my responsibility to ensure the same for my children and grandchildren,” she said. “I actually have the responsibility to lead so that other generations in neighboring countries can also live in peace. And this is a change in identity.”

Openly advocating a “feminist foreign policy,” Ms. Baerbock described her arrival as “a culture shock” for Germany’s male-dominated security community, something she shares with Nancy Faeser, the interior minister.

“It should be normal in the year 2022 that women are heading security agencies,” Ms. Faeser said in an interview. “It’s an important and good signal for Germany.”

Some ministers in her ministry now add privately, which is long overdue. In 2018, Ms. Faeser’s predecessor appointed only men to eight junior minister posts. The ministry had to remove the photograph of the nine men from its website after such an outcry.

A more gender-balanced lens on security is not just a question of fairness but good policy, said Ms. Faeser, who is managing the arrival of some 250,000 refugees from Ukraine — a number expected eventually to exceed the 1.2 million who came from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan in 2015 and 2016.

“One priority is taking care of young women and children,” Ms. Faeser said. “Many of these women and children are traumatized not just from war but because they had to leave behind their husbands, fathers and sons. They require special attention. Because so many women are coming alone, we are particularly vigilant.”

Ms. Faeser has increased police officers at refugee train stations in order to guard against sexual predators as well as human traffickers.

She is not involved in the planning of how to welcome refugees, or promoting a system for registering and dispersing them between the 27 E.U. countries, Ms. Faeser’s job also includes keeping watch on critical infrastructure at risk from Russian cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. Germany has a significant Russian-German community.

“Ever since the illegal war started, we have seen Russian disinformation campaigns peddling the narrative that Ukraine has to be liberated,” Ms. Faeser said.

One of the most extreme cases of fake news meant for stirring Russian sympathy was a homemade film showing a woman describing in tears how a Russian teenage had been brutally beaten by Ukrainian refugees.

“The video was fake, that is confirmed,” Ms. Faeser said. Expert in the issue of far-right extremism, far-right terroristism, and online incitement to hate, she is no stranger.

Ms. Faeser so far has been spared most of the sexist comments her fellow female ministers have received. Ms. Baerbock, who ran as the Green candidate for chancellor before joining Mr. Scholz’s government in a coalition, was the target of several online disinformation campaigns, some of them orchestrated from Russian accounts.

But with the revival of Germany’s military now in the headlines, it is Ms. Lambrecht, the defense minister, who has become the primary target.

“Does this minister know how to do war?” Germany’s best-selling tabloid, Bild, recently asked.

Ms. Lambrecht doesn’t take the criticism personally for now. “Honestly, I’m pretty busy and don’t have time to think about why some things are written about me,” she said before boarding her plane to Washington. “My job is to make the military significantly better. Judge me at the end.”