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Too many tanks for the SPD: Leopard 2 A7V
Photo:
Philipp Schulze / dpa
The reluctance of the Scholz government to deliver arms is palpable.
She is being openly and increasingly indignantly criticized by the opposition, her Eastern European neighbors and Ukraine itself.
The tank hesitation is mainly due to the SPD.
With a large majority and clarity, the FDP and the Greens represent a much more offensive position, specifically: German tanks for Ukraine.
But why is the SPD actually slowing down?
And why and how does she coyly hide this attitude behind new, unclean and unrealistic arguments, which her colleague Jörg Römer has neatly dismantled?
Of course, one could look for military reasons, but it is now more likely that it is an internal SPD problem.
One that can be deduced from a kind of SPD psychogram, i.e. an analysis of the soul of the party based on the communication of leading SPD personnel on the subject.
Before that, I would like to brush aside an often-mentioned, theoretically possible justification, namely that too many relevant people in the SPD have benefited from Putin and are still benefiting, from Gerhard Schröder to Matthias Platzeck to Manuela Schwesig.
US intelligence services have just published that Putin has spent more than 300 million dollars buying politicians, politics and electoral influence in Western countries in recent years.
But even if the SPD carries around an extensive Putin legacy – the money and corruption thesis is too simple, populist and doesn't do the SPD justice either.
Because the party is slowing down, but in fact it has already made enormous strides on the Ukraine question, which has to be acknowledged.
The procrastination of the SPD is actually only residual procrastination, which therefore seems all the more incomprehensible.
Leading SPD officials say Germany should not be dragged into a war.
This is of course a legitimate, no – an almost mandatory goal.
However, it assumes that more or less all other politicians and countries dealt with this question negligently.
There is something of German arrogance when the SPD knows best in Europe how to prevent an escalation of the war by Putin.
The SPD has already staged a similar debate on the subject of "heavy weapons".
And then delivered without Germany being drawn into the war.
Of course, the SPD is not monolithic on these issues.
A real politician like Lars Klingbeil, who has an affinity with the military and the West, represents structurally different positions and limits than Ralf Stegner, who at the same time understands Putin and misunderstands Putin.
Not to mention the north-streaming Putin horn Gerhard Schröder.
But in the end the SPD put the brakes on, at the moment especially on the tank issue.
With one signature, Scholz could immediately deliver at least 16 martens.
Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht says: "No country has yet delivered western-style armored personnel carriers or main battle tanks, and we have agreed, also with our partners, that we will not go it alone by the Germans."
This seemingly plausible sentence is a sophisticated PR construction with many little devils in the details.
For example, the »German solo efforts«.
What exactly is the definition of going it alone?
Because battle tanks have already been delivered, just not of the “Western design”.
Is it a German solo effort when Poland delivered over 200 battle tanks in July and Germany none?
Or asked directly in relation to a possible reason for entering the war: Does Putin find it so much nicer
when his troops are overrun by Russian main battle tanks than by German ones?
The argument will detonate if, for example, the USA should deliver tanks, which is quite possible - but the SPD will certainly find new reasons immediately, this time
for
German solo efforts, i.e. not to go along with it.
At the same time, Lambrecht insinuates that "we have agreed with our partners" not to deliver tanks.
That could be an expression of disturbing chutzpah - already in the spring Spain wanted to deliver old German Leopard tanks to Ukraine and, according to experts, was prevented from doing so by Germany.
But even if that's not correct in this form, the PR meaning of this sentence falls apart if you read it carefully.
Agreeing on this can also mean: We just communicated that.
In any case, after the defense secretary's statement, the US State Department said: "The decision about the type of aid ultimately lies with each country itself." That is diplomatic for: There is actually no agreement on no tank deliveries.
When is a tank too much a tank?
It also fits that some countries have delivered or promised western tanks, such as anti-aircraft tanks.
Germany for example, namely Gepard Panzer.
Those are tanks too, but different tanks.
So from the SPD point of view: tanks that cannot be understood as an indirect declaration of war.
It is worth pausing briefly here for historical reasons, because in Germany it is
always
worth pausing briefly for historical reasons.
A security expert says in the »Berliner Morgenpost«: »It is Scholz's fear of the image of the German tank in Eastern Europe.
It's a psychological inhibition that he doesn't overcome." But if it were really about the admittedly problematic image of German tanks in Eastern Europe, then the cheetah would have been the border crossing, because this anti-aircraft tank looks, well, to most people , like a tank.
Putting the visual differences aside, the SPD apparently has a kind of political scale of the probability of war occurring for each weapon, the Putin Going Crazy Scale (PDS).
The ends of the scale are easy to assess: delivering nothing at all is 0, of course.
Five thousand helmets is a 1. A ready-to-use nuclear weapon delivered to Ukraine would then have to mark 100.
So the SPD roughly assumes that anti-aircraft tanks like the Gepard are around 25, whereas infantry fighting vehicles like the Marder are already in the problematic area with an estimated 37 – wait a minute.
It's all complete nonsense!
It is a discussion that starts from the calculability of the completely irrational because it is ideologically thought out anyway.
The SPD wants the highly irrational,
i.e. still evaluate the unpredictable Putin according to the criterion of rationality.
That's why their communicative dance around German tanks seems so absurd.
Structurally, it is not far from wanting to evaluate the future from the position of chicken bones thrown down: one hopes for a logic where there is none.
You want guarantees that don't exist because they can't exist.
Half-heartedness is the best solution
The lost son of Twitter and SPD general secretary Kevin Kühnert conveys the essence of this SPD absurdity: »...that we do not want to encourage Russia to act completely irrationally in the end and to attack completely different states«.
So, from the SPD's point of view, the attack on Ukraine with all kinds of nonsense justifications such as »Ukraine doesn't even exist« is rational?
At the same time, Kühnert, in line with the SPD's brake soul, assumes that the greater danger comes from fighting Putin and not from a victory for Putin.
That is not the assessment of the countries most at risk, such as Poland or the Baltic States, nor of NATO or the USA.
They all see the greatest danger in Putin getting away with his raid.
You don't have to see it that way, of course,
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Reality shock: Ten lessons from the present
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Unfortunately, the half-heartedness of the SPD is based on national self-centeredness.
The party's concerns, which follow the unsuitable Putin exegesis, relate primarily to the well-being of Germany, to German gas prices, to energy-driven inflation, to business with Russia, to the Russia friends in the country and to the SPD.
There is German melancholy in the hesitation, it may be the way it used to be, but it will never be the same again, no matter how it happens.
At first glance, the SPD is serving a part of its clientele, namely not wealthy people.
At second glance, however, their suffering could also be cushioned in other ways, for example with the 9-euro ticket - and at the same time the SPD's actions here are the opposite of international solidarity.
Behind this lies the core of the SPD's will-o'-the-wisp about Ukraine: something
This quality is actually the strenuous downside of a core brand of the SPD: social-democratic prudence.
Forward, but not too fast and maybe stopping in between.
That's not seldom wise - but there are two reasons why that could be very, very wrong at this point.
The first is a dark self-fulfilling prophecy: Without further support from the West and Germany, Ukraine will perish.
Then it would have been right to back Putin, ha!
And the second is even more bitter: In the end, it could appear as if the SPD would want to sacrifice Ukraine's freedom in the hope of lower gas prices.
