Germany's Parliament Says No to Tanks for Ukraine Bill

At least for the time being.

The German military’s Leopard 2 tank could be sent to Ukraine, if the German Christian Democratic Union has their way.

Hi there,

I hope you’re staying safe if you’re in the path of Hurricane Ian, and enjoying the crisp fall weather if you’re off the coast.

Germany just voted no on a proposal to send tanks to Ukraine, and I thought you should know about it, because it tells us something wider about how volatile the war could soon become.

What happened here?

German TV reported that the German Bundestag (their House of Representatives) voted overwhelmingly to reject increased arms sales to Kyiv, including heavy weaponry like tanks and armored personnel carriers.

That proposal was put forward by Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, the pro-US party we talked about in last week’s issue on abortion in Germany during the Cold War.

For their part, the controlled-left party we also covered, the Social Democratic Party, agreed that the current level of German arms to Ukraine (Over $500 million) was about right.

When Abortion Policy Is Foreign Policy

The proposal was very overwhelmingly defeated (179 for, to 476 against), which suggests to me it was symbolic, like Texas Republicans proposing bills to secede from the US, or Bernie Sanders sponsoring Medicare for All.

Symbolic bills are used in all kinds of countries to send the message that one party backs an idea, in the hopes of getting to carry it out if they get enough support within their coalition now, or at the next election.

Personally, I think one of the most powerful parties in the country running to the right of the current supposedly left-leaning chancellor, Olaf Scholz — a guy who’s already sending $500 million in weapons and ammunition — tells you something about the range of Serious Political Opinion © you’re allowed to have about war, even in liberal democratic Europe. Even with more than two parties.

Why did Germany vote no, then?

Like we talked about last week, German foreign policy has everything to do with our foreign policy. There are some decisions they will just not make without US and NATO approval.

Like at least 16 other NATO countries, Germany is already sending guns to Ukraine at Washington’s urging, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

It’s just not sending western-manufactured heavy armor… yet.

Ukrainians can knock Russian jets out of the sky with NATO weaponry over their own country, but they can’t yet roll up to the Russian border in it. That’s because, near as I can tell, the US doesn’t want any NATO country doing that.

Again, at least not yet. I suspect that’s because it’ll be a hell of a lot harder to convince the world this isn’t a Washington-backed proxy war when NATO heavy armor gets caught taking the midnight train to Lviv.

Why does a German parliamentary vote matter?

There are a few reasons, but here’s one.

If Russia can point to a decision to send tanks to Ukraine, its foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, can clearly and honestly say, “Ok, now you’re sending tanks, the jig is up, the US-led NATO is very clearly at war against our whole country.”

If that happens, the results could be even more destabilizing than the current, extremely unstable, conflict. Russia could build on already existing support from much of the world outside of North America and Europe. Or, Moscow could consider this a prelude to a mechanized invasion of parts of its territory.

The two sides in this conflict, the Washington-backed NATO coalition in Kiev, and Moscow, both have nuclear weapons, and I don’t need to tell you what’s at at stake there.

Why do people think more tanks will end the war?

The desire to send even larger weapon systems to Ukraine comes from the idea — seemingly supported at all levels in the western military, political, and economic consensus — that the Ukrainian military would be on the brink of victory already, and Russia on death’s doorstep, if only naïve peaceniks, extreme right-wing isolationists, and their counterparts on the radical authoritarian left would get out of the way.

We may not ever send tanks, even if they did spell victory for Ukraine, because a swift and bloodless victory was never the US and NATO’s goal. The goal was to weaken Russia with a proxy war.

Don’t take my word for it either. Listen to a former board member of the defense contractor Raytheon, and the current US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin:

The defense secretary was asked how he defined “America’s goals for success” in Ukraine. He first said Washington wants to see “Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country, able to protect its sovereign territory.”

Then, he said, the United States hopes Russia will be “weakened” by the war. “It has already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly, and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability,” Austin said.

Now, we can have a debate about whether the US should be weakening other countries with proxy wars, but it’s indisputable to anyone that’s what’s going on.

Why can’t we just talk it out?

It’s hard to lay these facts out in the public sphere first and foremost, because public life in America has been totally privatized. What would a townhall meeting about our funding this war even look like? Who’s been in their town hall, if it exists at all?

Instead, these conversations all happen online, where highly-sophisticated algorithmic control, and a system of rewards for compliant journalists and policymakers, and obscurity for the disobedient, allows every state, but particularly the United States, an almost limitless control over what we see, how we feel about it, and which writing we’re exposed to to build our opinions.

It’s not the technology. That’s neutral. The practice of creating a terrifying external enemy, emphasizing wartime atrocities, and threatening our way of life… well that goes back a long time in the US, well before the internet.

It’s the elite political, military, and economic empire which uses that technology, and how.

What’s next?

It’s clear to me, as it is to the majority of the non-western world, that reports of Russia’s death have been greatly exaggerated, and that arms keep flowing because we’re told that with our help, it’ll all be over soon.

Despite Russia taking some hits economically, and now militarily, Russia and Mr. Putin’s government is holding up better than nearly any western pundits and policymakers predicted.

As our governments keep upping the ante, with thinly-veiled threats like that of the new British Prime Minister to use nuclear weapons, only to blame every escalation as necessary to counter Russia, we’ll soon find ourselves at the brink of a great-power nuclear-armed war. We’ll be a citizenry with no clue how we got here, no chance of meaningful progressive reforms at home, and nothing but support for our government’s military, political, and economic empire abroad.

We lived through the laboratories for this kind of right-wing coercion. They were the propaganda campaigns waged ahead of our government’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and our support for war in Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

Prime-time for these propaganda narratives, and the political, economic, and military leaders set to benefit from them, is already underway. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Diplomacy, not more tanks, is the only way off the escalator. It was once an option, reportedly as late as this April, and in order to end this war a negotiated settlement from the “rules based international order,” not more NATO arms, has got to be our only option.

If not, we’ve got a good clue of what comes next.

Till next time,

-Will