Adjusting to a big-power era, Germany and Japan enhance militaries

At his White House visit this month with a supportive President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio laid out Japan’s assertive new national security strategy, which includes a commitment to substantially higher defense spending.

A week later, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was in Germany taking stock of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s commitment to bigger military budgets and to rebuilding Germany’s armed forces as a tool not just of his nation’s defense but of European security policy as well.

Indeed, Chancellor Scholz’s announcement Wednesday that Germany will send a contingent of its Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine – a step it had resisted taking over recent weeks despite intense pressures from Washington and some European partners – underscored Germany’s new openness to asserting military power in Europe.

Following Germany’s announcement, President Biden announced at the White House Wednesday that the United States will send 31 of its M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. The move was widely seen as intended to quash any doubts about the U.S. commitment to Ukraine, while in turn prompting additional commitments of assistance from Western partners before an anticipated spring offensive by Russian forces.

The reasons for the simultaneous initiatives by Japan and Germany, World War II’s two great vanquished powers, to build up their armed forces and enhance the place of military power in their international relations and security policies can be reduced in each case to one word:

For Japan, it’s China.

For Germany, it’s Russia.

But beyond each country’s specific concerns regarding the aggressive behavior of a powerful neighbor are worries about broader shifts in the global security environment, international experts say – from the breakdown of the unipolar post-Cold War international order, to the waning punch of soft power in an era of big-power politics.

“Japan and Germany are dissimilar in many ways. Japan has undertaken a much faster and sustained rearmament and is a major regional military power, something Germany has not been since the end of the Cold War,” says Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a foreign policy scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “But what is common to both of them are growing concerns about the stability of the international order they both have relied on.”

The war in Ukraine, launched by a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, “has sharpened those concerns for both,” he adds, “and has prompted moves by both to enhance their militaries – such as committing to raising military spending as a percentage of GDP.”

“A change of era”

Germany was shocked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 11 months ago. Since then it has undertaken an intense national debate over the state of its military and the role its military should play in a Europe it had come to assume was beyond the geopolitics of the 20th century and was unlikely to experience war again.

For Japan, the awakening to the threats posed by a rising and increasingly militarily assertive China has been less sudden. But China’s stepped-up actions in the South China Sea and around disputed islands Japan claims as its territory – not to mention Beijing’s increasingly aggressive behavior toward Taiwan – have stirred deep concerns and affirmed Tokyo’s convictions that it must reinforce its military posture to face mounting security threats.

Germany’s shift was highlighted by a speech Mr. Scholz gave just three days after Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. In it, he proclaimed “a change of era” for German defense policy and a turning away from the country’s negligence of the military’s role in asserting national power.

Over ensuing months many German security experts and outside observers – including in the U.S. Congress – started openly doubting the chancellor’s commitment to his words. But the decision to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine reflects a shift in thinking about military power that is under way in Germany, some say.

“It has taken a while and prompted deep debate, but the Ukraine war has belatedly convinced the German political class of the need to rebuild a military that has been neglected for decades and to revise the thinking about the uses of that military in a new era,” says Dr. Brands.

Close coordination with U.S.

For weeks Germany insisted it would not send any Leopards to Ukraine unless the U.S. first committed to sending the Abrams – a signal that it did not want to be the first to send in battle tanks sure to enrage Russia and prompt renewed accusations from Moscow of NATO’s deepening involvement in the war.

In the end Germany did announce its decision to send tanks to Ukraine before the U.S. did, but only by hours. The close coordination hinted at the intense negotiations senior U.S. officials said took place between Berlin and Washington.

Mr. Biden was unconvinced that the Abrams, a fuel-guzzling and complex machine requiring constant technical upkeep and trained operators, was right for the Ukraine war. Those misgivings were ultimately overcome by the overriding goal of pushing Germany over the line on the Leopards and opening the way for other NATO partners to send in heavier weaponry.

In his announcement, Mr. Biden said the Abrams tanks “will enhance Ukraine’s capacity to defend its territory,” though he insisted their dispatch to the war “is not an offensive threat to Russia.” The Kremlin quickly condemned the decisions to send tanks to Ukraine as a “dangerous provocation.”

Germany’s transition has been slower and faced more resistance than Japan’s in part because Germany went farther both in disarming after the Cold War and in pursuing its convictions that the aggressive geopolitics of the 20th century were in the past, particularly for Europe.

“It’s a little bit of a myth that Germany and Japan are only now rearming; Japan for decades has found creative ways to get around the defense limitations in its postwar constitution,” says Michael Desch, founding director of Notre Dame University’s International Security Center in Indiana.

“But at the end of the Cold War the Germans especially really thought it was the end of history,” he adds, “and one result was they allowed their military to atrophy in a big way.”

Replaying Spanish Civil War

Russia’s bloody campaign to obliterate a former Soviet republic that aspires to join the ranks of Western Europe’s democracies, however, has Germany slaying its old ghosts, some experts say.

A shift in thinking over recent months “now has a lot of people on the progressive side seeing what’s going on in Ukraine as a replaying of the Spanish Civil War,” Dr. Desch says, with the defense of Ukraine the equivalent of the “good fight” some in Europe waged during the 1936-39 conflict on the side of Spain’s leftist Republican democracy. “In a similar way, what we’re now hearing is that to preserve the liberal order, we have to be willing to defend it,” he says.

Moreover, Dr. Desch says Germany is “just now waking up to the reality that the unipolar world and international security order it depended on are over. What has replaced them is a new era of great power politics,” he adds, “and one of the lessons of great power politics is that if you want to be secure, you have to be able to take care of yourself.”

Another feature of an era of great power politics is that the expressions of soft power that were increasingly deployed by both Japan and Germany with the end of the Cold War – everything from international economic assistance and democracy promotion to involvement in international cooperation on trade, health, and climate – seem less influential as a war with global repercussions rages.

“What the war in Ukraine has done is to convince both countries that once the shooting starts, soft power only gets you so far,” says Dr. Brands.

“Soft power won’t save Japan once the shooting starts with China, but Japan knows this,” he says. Germany’s political leaders on the other hand “convinced themselves that, with a stable international order based on U.S. military superiority, soft power was enough for Germany.”

Ukraine has changed that, Dr. Brands adds. “One result is this belated effort to rebuild the military and catch up.”