2024-07-19 14:47:20
NATO Summit
Armament: Government does not expect strong resistance
Updated on 12.07.2024Reading time: 3 min.
Is an arms race between NATO and Russia looming? Moscow is responding to the alliance’s intention to rearm with threats. The Chancellor is counting on the population’s understanding.
The government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) expects people to understand the US arms buildup in Germany. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck (Greens) also trust that Russia poses a serious threat and that it must be responded to.
On the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington, it was announced that from 2026 onwards the USA wants to station weapons systems in Germany again that have a range as far as Russia.
These include Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of up to 2,500 kilometers, which technically can also be equipped with nuclear weapons, as well as SM-6 anti-aircraft missiles and newly developed hypersonic weapons. Russia and China reacted angrily to the announcement.
Scholz: Incredible rearmament in Russia
“We know that there has been an incredible arms buildup in Russia, with weapons that threaten European territory,” Scholz said on the sidelines of the summit in Washington.
When asked whether he expected greater resistance to the return of such long-range weapons from within his own party, Scholz said: “This decision has been prepared for a long time and is no real surprise for anyone involved in security and peace policy.”
The decision brings back memories of the Cold War. Scholz himself protested as a young Social Democrat in the early 1980s against the NATO double-track decision, which, among other things, provided for the stationing of medium-range Pershing II missiles, which were withdrawn after the end of the Cold War by 1991.
Habeck stressed: “We have to increase our defence capabilities because we live in a very threatening time that is different from the 1980s. That is why naivety is not allowed.” The demonstrations against NATO’s double-track decisions in 1981 were in the Cold War. “Now we are experiencing a hot war in Ukraine because people are shooting and dying there,” the Vice Chancellor told the “Neue Westfälische”.
In the ARD “Tagesthemen” Pistorius said that there could be no talk of a new arms race. “Russia has been stationing these weapons systems for some time now, among other places – as we suspect – in Kaliningrad, which means within absolute range of Germany and other European nations,” said Pistorius. He would not speak of a majority of the population as being critical of the situation.
The head of the Munich Security Conference, Christoph Heusgen, criticizes most of Chancellor Scholz’s federal government for its communication on the war in Ukraine. “In Germany, the defense minister speaks frankly and says that we have to become war-ready,” said the former foreign policy advisor to Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) to the German Press Agency in Washington. His cabinet colleagues, however, still underestimated the seriousness of the situation.
Moscow was clear about the planned deployment. Russian security would be compromised by the US weapons, said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, according to the state news agency Tass. It was “a link in the escalation course” of NATO and the USA towards Russia.
“We are well on our way to a Cold War. All of this has happened before,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state television. He accused Germany, the USA, France and Great Britain of being directly involved in the conflict over Ukraine. “And all the features of the Cold War are returning – with confrontation, with direct conflict between opponents.”
Russia revises nuclear doctrine
The Kremlin called NATO’s decisions on Ukraine a threat to its own security. The decision to admit Ukraine into the alliance sooner or later underlines the alliance’s main goal of keeping Russia in check, Peskov said. He confirmed that work was underway on changes to the nuclear doctrine. The current guiding principle is that Russia may only use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or an existential threat to the country in the event of a conventional attack.