With This Much Disk Space, Who Needs Friends?

The United States has stopped looking for allies. Its patience with Europe ran out right after 9/11 and political wisdom was washed away in a flood of electronic data. Apparently, a huge gray machine has taken over U.S. policy. Still, Germany continues to profit from it.

On Oct. 3, 1990, the day East and West Germany were reunited, then-President George W. Bush sent a welcoming message to the German people. Anyone who read that message then would likely have dismissed it as optimistic claptrap. But those who have any inkling of America’s political self-awareness reading those words today would sit up and take notice. “Together, building on the values we share, we will be partners in leadership,” Bush told the German people.

Bush, along with Bill Clinton, was one of the last U.S. presidents who truly understood Europe and Germany. When he demanded “leadership” from Germany, he wasn’t just using a throwaway rhetorical device. Bush and his advisers knew what great political weight a bigger and stronger Germany would develop. Of course, American expectations for Germany turned somewhat frosty instead. America already had enough on its plate and nobody really wanted to give a leadership role to a nation that had once graced the world with a Fuhrer.

Now, after 23 years and a few turns of our planet on its axis, both nations have, in their own respective ways, shown leadership and accepted responsibilities. The 9/11 attacks changed the United States as no other event in previous centuries could have. The terrorist attacks threw the nation into a war mindset from which it is only now beginning to slowly escape.

But there are never any timeouts in the competition for power and influence. Now Washington looks toward Beijing. The U.S. military remains by a wide margin the largest and strongest on the planet; when the U.S. president speaks at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate his words only sound nostalgic. Germany no longer plays a major role in America’s new worldview, nor in its international ambitions.

But Germany was able to cultivate its global reticence in the post-reunification era. Should it — or must it — take military action against the evil Milosevic? Should it allow a missile defense shield against Iranian missiles to be set up in Germany? Should we take part in the so-called war on Islamic terrorism, or would better policing suffice?

Foreign and security policy requires unpleasant and dangerous decisions to be made that can quickly morph into moral dilemmas. Good and evil aren’t always so easily apparent and moral superiority doesn’t impress the evildoers. Since the euro crisis, Germans have discovered that their carefully measured mixture of strength and teaching doesn’t necessarily produce the optimum dish. Suddenly every member in the German parliament knows what leadership means in regard to other countries and their sovereignty. It doesn’t mean a warm and cuddly experience.

The United States is as active now as it was before the Berlin Wall came down. With such different conditions over 20 years, it’s no surprise that the two nations have embarked on divergent paths. The pendulum has swung erratically during that time. The years under George W. Bush saw the development of a different security policy, a worldview and a sense of threat not shared by a majority of Germans. Barack Obama began with major modifications, but in the critical areas of intelligence gathering and the use of unmanned drones, the chasm between Germany and the U.S. continued to widen.

The majority of Germans did not concur with America’s quantum leap in security policy; today, they do not share the same feeling of impending threat or agree on what methods should be used to oppose it. Meanwhile, Germany cannot propose any alternative strategies for dealing with al-Qaida, Gadhafi, Iran or cybercrime, for example. All that is needed for the crisis to blossom are a few ingredients like constitutional excesses (Guantanamo, torture, etc.) and the usual culture war cliches that have been around — unchanged — since the days of Alexis de Tocqueville. Materialism and overweight cowboys are still with us today in myriad variations.

Thus, the image of what German policy and those responsible for making it should be is distorted. German politicians today are saddled with the often ugly business of silently weighing national interests against morals and concurring with the American security architecture from which they profit — as long as they don’t have to deliver too many unpleasant messages to the German people.

The list of those responsible includes the German interior minister, the chief of the German intelligence services and the minister of defense. Blame is also shared by the Green Party: Srebrenica had nothing in common with Auschwitz, even if it facilitated military participation in the war there. And in that vein, no, as everyone now realizes, Kunduz wasn’t really about access to drinking water and safe routes for kids walking to school.

And America’s role? The U.S. has been going its own way for several years now, having abandoned alliance policy. Patience with Europe ran out right after 9/11. Political wisdom was washed away in a flood of bits and bytes. Apparently, the big gray machine has now taken control of policy direction. If you have that much disk space, who needs friends?

Up until the reunification of Germany, our political leaders were able to comfortably delegate an important pillar of our sovereignty: responsibility for the external security of the country and its citizens. That security was successful year after year, but responsibility for it was borne by someone else. After reunification, there has been no surge in Germany to assume responsibility for its own national security. Why? Because it was easier and more certain to remain silent and not stand in the way of majority opinion.

Edward Snowden and Merkel’s cellphone have apparently changed all that. Suddenly, the vista widens and our attention is directed to an American security infrastructure that is being as intensively used now as much as it was before the Berlin Wall came down. The Süddeutsche Zeitung series “The Secret War” shows that fact. But that has nothing to do with sovereignty, nor with foreign occupation — ideas dredged up out of the old file cabinet of ideologies. The truth is much more trivial than that: The United States is an invited and welcome guest in this country. It does its security policy business and thereby provides relief for German politicians. One hand washes the other; questions from either side are definitely unwanted.