Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Two German Tank Decision Mysteries

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Germany, Iron Cross, Leopard, Nazi Germany, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Panzer, Prussia, tanks, Ukraine, Ukraine War, World War II

Germany has finally decided to send advanced battle tanks to Ukraine (and to allow other countries whose militaries use the weapon to do te same). So ends a period of reluctance that was widely (and in my view, correctly) attributed in large measure to Berlin’s reluctance to suggest that historic German hyper-militarism is on the way back. Even so, I find two related aspects of Germany’s decision puzzling, to say the least.

At the outset, though, let me be perfectly clear: I’ve long advocated major German (and, for that matter) Japanese rearmanent. Believe me, I understand why the Germans (and Japanese) have long resisted such measures, and why Washington has tacitly supported the resulting defense free-riding.

After all, even nearly eight decades after these countries ignited World War II and committed such unspeakable atrocities before and during the conflict, who would support risking a repeat lightly? (At the same time, permitting Germany and Japan to remain military pygmies meant that American leaders would remain the national security and geopolitical kingpins of Western Europe and East Asia long after both countries had regained the economic power that ordinarily would have led to much more influence along these lines and likely greater diplomatic independence from Washington. Why? Because…well…countries with dramatically different historical experiences and geographic locations naturally often view the world differently.)

But because economic strength inevitably produces the ability and therefore the will to assert uniquely national interests, I always believed that this U.S. approach was simply delaying not only the inevitable, but the kind of orderly transition to the point at which these countries (in tandem with their neighbors, in the case of Germany but not so much Japan) would handle their own defense – and greatly reduce the nuclear war risk America was running because of its deterrence and coupling strategy.

And in a purely military sense, I always worried about the prospect of the United States plunging into a major war in Europe or Asia without allies it could count on one hundred percent – either because they stayed so weak or because they didn’t endorse American policy fully.  

Nor did I ever see any significant evidence that America’s determination to conduct these countries’ national securiy strategies for them (which I called “smothering”) generated any benefits for the U.S. economy. If anything, prioritizing alliance relationships typically convinced Washington to allow such allies to continue the protectionist policies that harmed domestic U.S. industry and its workers. (See this 1991 article for a wide-ranging discussion of both alliance-related security and economic issues.)

So again, I strongly support both the German, Japanese, and other allies’ stated intentions to get serious about their own security. But I have two related questions about Germany.

First, if Germany is so worried about even perception that it’s reverting back to its terrible old ways, why since the end of has it chosen the Iron Cross as the symbol of its military? Granted, it’s not the same Iron Cross the Nazis used. But it’s really close. Moreover, this version was used by the 19^th century Prussians, who were pioneers in developing modern militaries and whose leaders in those days had no compunctions about throwing its weight around first to unify Germany and then ensure that it could rival and even surpass the rest of Europe in terms of continental and global clout. (Not that these neighbors were angels themselves.)

And yet, in 1956, when the German army was reconstituted, West Germany’s president designated as its official emblem. Like no other choices were available then, or have been since? (For a brief history of Iron Cross, see here.) 

Second, why would a long-neutered Germany call any of its tanks a “Leopard”? How could such nomenclature fail to evoke the Nazi era in particular? After all, Hitler’s most famous tanks were the Panther (Panzer) and a late variation (the Tiger). Of course, weapons names should convey might and ferocity. But the world isn’t exactly shrt of other animal predators. And animal predator names aren’t the only words that can do the job.

Obviously, I’m not expecting any revival of worrisome German revanchism. But I still view these two military branding decisions as head-scratchers, and because even the weirdest choices rarely come completely out of the blue, I’ll continue to find them mystifying until I see a sensible explanation.    

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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why China Really is Like Nazi Germany

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Albert O. Hirschman, allies, Biden, China, dumping, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, intellectual property theft, Japan, multilateralism, NATO, Nazi Germany, nuclear umbrella, Robert D. Atkinson, sanctions, South Korea, tariffs, tech industry, technology extortion, Trade, tripwire, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Because Nazi references can be so irresponsibly inflammatory, and therefore have been so often abused, I haven’t yet compared the threat posed by China to the rest of the world to that posed by Nazi Germany. (In my view, these comparisons have been used even more recklessly lately in U.S. domestic politics, chiefly to describe former President Trump and his views and policies.) So even though the People’s Republic, its ambitions, and its burgeoning capabilities do scare the living daylights out of me (and should scare you), I was nonetheless pretty surprised to see precisely this comparison just made by Robert D. Atkinson.

Atkinson is the head of a technology-focused Washington, D.C. think tank who I’ve known since the early 1990s. I’ve admired some of its work and haven’t been so crazy about other examples of its output, but I’ve never, ever considered him a boat-rocker, much less a rhetorical bomb thrower. In fact, my criticisms of the numerous studies and articles issued by his Information Technology and Innovation Foundation stem from my view that they’re way too cautious when it comes to countering China’s wide range of predatory economic practices (which include predatory technology policy practices like the theft and extortion of intellectual property).

And I’ve attributed much of this caution to the Foundation’s donor base – which is dominated by the U.S. and in some cases foreign tech and manufacturing companies that have worked so hard to send so much production and employment, and (voluntarily) so much technology to China for decades. It’s true that many of these firms are now crying foul as Beijing in recent years has aimed to strengthen its own entities’ positions at the foreigners’ expense. Yet their stubborn opposition to the unilateral Trump tariffs and some key sanctions on the Chinese tech outfits that have been major customers made clear their vain hope that they could somehow have their China cake and eat it, too.

Yet here comes Atkinson in the Fall issue of The International Economy (a publication that’s as – proudly – establishment oriented as they come) with a piece titled “A Remarkable Resemblance” likening China’s international economic policies to those of “Germany for the first forty-five years of the twentieth century” – which of course include the twelve Nazi years (1933-1945).

As the author argues, Germany during these decades was:

“a ‘power trader’ that used trade as a key tool to gain commercial and military advantage over its adversaries. Likewise, China’s trade policy is guided neither by free trade nor protectionism, but by power trade, with remarkably similar strategy and tactics to those of 1940s Germany. Understanding how Germany manipulated the global trading system to degrade its adversaries’ capabilities, entrap nations as reluctant allies, and build up its own industries for commercial and military advantage, just as China is doing, can shed light and point the way for solutions to the China challenge.”

Atkinson reports that this description of German policies came from a 1945 book by the important economist Albert O. Hirschman, which concluded that “[I]t’s is possible to turn foreign trade into an instrument of power, of pressure, and even of conquest. The Nazis have done nothing but exploit the fullest possibilities inherent in foreign trade within the traditional framework of international economic relations.”

The author rightly observes that

“Hirschman’s key insight was that some countries— in this case Germany under three very different government regimes from 1900 to 1945—focus not on maximizing free trade or even on protecting their industries, but on changing the relative power of nations through trade to achieve global power. Germany’s policies and programs were designed not only to advance its own economic and military power, but to also degrade its adversaries’ economies, even if that imposed costs on their own economy relative to a free trade regime.”

Germany also consistently sought, as the author points out “to make it more difficult for its trading partners to dispense entirely with trade with Germany, thus creating dependency.” And if that’s not enough to convince you about the comparison with China today, Atkinson himself notes that the German policy recipe also included massive industrial espionage, and Hirschman identified a major element as the equally massive dumping (selling at prices way below production costs) of goods into foreign markets to destroy overseas competition.

Atkinson’s diagnosis of the problem is so spot-on that it makes his recommended solution especially disappointing. Kind of like President Biden, he believes that the best internationally oriented option by far (on top of more effective support for U.S. industry, which I strongly support) is forming a “NATO for trade” that would be

“governed by a council of participating [free trading] countries…if any member is threatened or attacked unjustly with trade measures that inflict economic harm, DATO [the “Democratically Allied Trade Organization] would quickly convene and consider whether to take joint action to defend the member nation.”

I’ve already pointed out that the consensus on standing against China economically among America’s allies is way too weak to enable such multilateral approaches to succeed. But as long as we’re talking in terms of NATO – the military alliance between the United States and much of first Western and now Eastern Europe – and the Cold War, let’s not forget two other big problems. First, NATO (and this also goes for America’s security ties with South Korea and Japan) was never so much an alliance as a protector-protectorate relationship. The vast bulk of the heavy lifting was always done by the United States.

This allied security dependence in turn has produced the second major obstacle to a DATO’s effectiveness. Because the United States coddled allied defense free-ridingcand opened its markets one-sidedly for so long, the allies’ protectorate status was substantially cost-free economically, and even came with trade rewards no other country could remotely offer. (In addition, as I’ve also written, the creation of an American nuclear umbrella combined with the stationining of U.S. “tripwire” forces on the NATO frontlines in Germany also greatly minimized the military risks of siding with Washington.)

Today, however, economic power between the United States and the allies is more evenly distributed, and the allies’ profitable trade with and investment in China has, as noted in my aforementioned writings, greatly increased the economic price they would pay for lining up against China.

Still, by comparing the China threat to the Nazi threat, Atkinson’s article significantly bolsters the case for the United States escalating its response to the “all of society” level – or at least intensifying it qualitatively. Let’s just hope, as the author writes, that this time around the United States fully awakens a lot faster.

Following Up: The Martian is Hollywood’s Latest Pander to China

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China, entertainment, Following Up, Hollywood, movies, Nazi Germany, Washington Post

Talk about cosmic coincidences! Just yesterday, I blogged on a terrific Washington Post piece that detailed how the American movie industry has been including in feature films images and story lines that flatter China in order to persuade Beijing to give their products access to the potentially huge but tightly controlled Chinese market. And last night – quite unintentionally – I wound up seeing one of those very movies – The Martian!

In deference to those intending to see the film, I won’t spill the specifics. Let’s just say that the outcome would have been vastly different had the Chinese space program not decided to volunteer major assistance. Until that plot twist appeared, I was loving the movie. Afterwards, I was feeling so nauseated that I was relieved that I’d foregone popcorn. In fact, had I known about this detail, I would have never seen the film, and rewarded this pandering financially, in the first place.

There is admittedly one complicating wrinkle to this sad tale: The Martian is based on a novel. I haven’t read it, but it’s certainly possible that the favorable treatment of China wasn’t gratuitously injected by Hollywood moguls, but were part of the original story. At the same time, there are any number of great science fiction stories and novels that haven’t made it to the silver screen.

Even choosing this one, therefore, would represent an unmistakably political move, and an especially craven one given China’s recent expansionism in East Asian waters, its engagement in cyber-hacking American businesses, its recent crackdown on legitimate U.S. business activity in China, and its redoubled repression of domestic dissent, among other transgressions. (I have fewer objections to cyber-attacks on U.S. government sites, since however harmful to national security, they do seem to examples of the kinds of espionage every government has engaged in during recorded history.)

And here’s an important historical footnote: Friend Nevin Gussack yesterday called my attention to a recent book that describes a similar Hollywood cave-in to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Here’s a link to an article summarizing it. The American film industry obviously isn’t the sum total of American culture and society, let alone the U.S. economy. Yet its national and global footprints for the last century have been undeniably massive and influential.

As private companies, American entertainment firms have no legal responsibility to champion national interests, or any other value. By the same token, however, their customers have every right to reject their products if they view them as politically or morally objectionable. So I’d urge every one who’s concerned about the Chinese challenge to America’s security and prosperity, and about how Big Business and its government stooges, to boycott The Martian, and tell Hollywood to stop shilling for a dangerous foreign dictatorship.