The question of Germany

The United States once thought of turning Germany into an agricultural and livestock country, without an industrial pulse, with the aim of preventing its rearmament forever. Eighty years later, the United States is pushing Germany to rearm. Henry Morgenthau Jr., sponsor in the forties of a pastoral Germany, would be horrified today.

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Henry Morgenthau father was an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson during World War I and U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. They were descendants of a German Jewish family. His son reached the position of Secretary of the Treasury during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Horrified by the news reaching the United States about the persecution of Jews in Europe and the concentration camps in Germany, Morgenthau concluded that drastic measures were necessary.

If the Nazis and their allies lost World War II, everything had to be done to prevent a new rearmament of Germany in the future, and the only way to achieve this was to prevent the reconstruction of its industry. German territory would be fragmented into various protectorates and reduced to an agricultural and livestock plain.

Not everyone in Washington agreed with this idea. In London, economist John Maynard Keynes also did not share it; he considered it impossible. The leaders of the Soviet Union liked the Morgenthau plan and aspired to militarily conquer the most fertile lands of Germany. The circle around General Charles de Gaulle also agreed. Free France wanted to settle scores.

A year after the war in Europe ended, the Americans began to realize it was not possible. Without German industry, European economies would not recover, which would lead to greater social unrest that would strengthen the communists of Western Europe, since they had played a key role in the resistance to Nazi-fascism in countries like France and Italy.

The French Communist Party had been the most voted in the first free legislative elections held in October 1945. In Italy, the communists were participating in writing the new constitution and formed a strong electoral front together with the socialists. The United States had to work hard to ensure that the Christian Democracy won the first elections after the new constitution, held in 1948.

West Germany was full of refugees who had to be fed. The British were literally exhausted, having returned to ration cards; the Labour Party had defeated Winston Churchill at the polls, and Washington was not going to forgive London a single cent of the credits granted to resist during the war.

The best was to shelve the Morgenthau plan, allow and encourage the recovery of industrial activity in Allied-occupied West Germany, and deploy another plan, the Marshall Plan, so that European economic engines would restart under the political tutelage of the United States. Thus was born the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in May 1949, immediately replicated by the Soviets with the founding of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in October of the same year.

In this context, the GDR decided to build the Berlin Wall in 1961 to separate the two republics. The construction of that wall was the culmination of Cold War policy in Europe. The German economic takeoff, accompanied by a generous welfare state, agreed upon by Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, became a powerful showcase of the Western world under American aegis. In West Germany there were more individual freedoms than in the other Germany, people worked hard and lived well.

France accepted, it had no other option, but devised a brilliant control mechanism. France and Germany would share the same policy for coal extraction and steel production, then fundamental in an industrial society; they would watch each other. Thus was born in 1952 the European Coal and Steel Community, the famous ECSC, the first embryo of today’s European unity. Strasbourg, capital of the disputed Alsace, became a symbol of that project. In Strasbourg is the main seat of the European Parliament, the seat of the Council of Europe (an organization distinct from the EU, focused on human rights), and the seat of the European Court of Human Rights, a symbol of the legal guarantees arising from European pacification.

The first major status change occurred in 1990 with the accelerated reunification of Germany following the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from the European territories conquered by the Red Army. German reunification did not excite the British or the French, nor the liberal Margaret Thatcher, nor the socialist François Mitterrand, but the Christian Democrat Helmuth Kohl knew how to present it as an unstoppable event. The Spain of Felipe González supported reunification.

A country of eighty million inhabitants was born in central-northern Europe, bordering France and Poland. The European Economic Community based on a certain balance of four countries with about sixty million inhabitants each (France, West Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom) ended. The Europe of the euro under German hegemony arrived. A silent hegemony, without ideological displays, without theatricality, until now.

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The next curve comes now. Germany is rearming. Germany is rearming because it feels betrayed by Russia, and for a second even more important reason: because the Trumpian aegis is threatening to withdraw the American troops stationed in the country since the end of World War II. This morning (Spanish local time), the United States government just announced the withdrawal of 5,000 American soldiers from Germany within a year. There is a circulating hypothesis: to close bases in Germany and move forces to Poland, a country that would later be pushed by its nationalist right to leave the European Union, becoming the main U.S. protectorate in Eastern Europe.

The Germans feel betrayed by the Russians, pushed by the Americans, and worried about the Chinese. They had plans to sell many German electric cars in China, and things are happening the other way around. The Chinese are conquering the European market with their efficient electric car brands. They have lost Russian gas, lost American friendship, and seen the Chinese market limited. This is a model crisis like no other.

The Germans believed they had agreed on perpetual peace with Russia with the two gigantic Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. They did not even build regasification plants on their coasts to receive liquefied natural gas. They decided to close all their nuclear power plants. They blindly believed in the pact with Russia. The Merkel error, say now some people who once applauded Mrs. Angela Merkel as a model stateswoman. The Russians tried to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022, believing that Germany, held by gas, could only protest in a minor key before a lightning capture of Kiev.

Today’s Russian army is not the Red Army of 1945, although they keep their banners, flags, insignia, and some of their tactics: the tank and the human avalanche, whoever falls. They could not take Kiev, since the British and Poles had well trained the Ukrainian military. And Germany was forced to give up Russian gas. To top it off, a command apparently Ukrainian, according to consolidating information, blew up the Nord Stream pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. September 26, 2022. That day began to change the course of reunified Germany.

During the last German federal election campaign (February 2025), German diplomats watched horrified as their country was being destabilized simultaneously by Washington and Moscow. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin bet on the far-right Alternative for Germany; both bet on the destruction of the European Union. Let no one be mistaken. This is one of the declared objectives of the United States National Security Strategy, published last December. From that hostility arises German rearmament. The rearmament that today would make Henry Morgenthau Jr. pale.

They want to have the most powerful army in Europe to preserve their autonomy, to be the main defensive pivot in Eastern Europe, to therefore maintain their economic area of influence in Northern and Central Europe. And they want rearmament to allow them to inject state money into their industrial system without being accused of violating European rules. They want to keep the European Union alive, but with policies and rules accepted by their middle classes, who today feel very disoriented. Their priority is also internal consensus in Germany. At this moment, AfD leads the polls and Chancellor Friedrich Merz does not manage to appear as a popular figure.

The United States does not reject German rearmament… if Germany buys the weapons from them. Point number XV of the recent and much-discussed political manifesto of the American tech company Palantir defends German rearmament: “The neutralization of Germany and Japan after the war must be reversed. The disarmament of Germany was an excessive correction, for which Europe pays a high price today.” That is what the people of Peter Thiel think. If Morgenthau were to rise from the dead…

Rearmament requires a militaristic ideology and young Germans seem little interested in the army. There is talk of instituting compulsory conscription (by lottery) if there are not enough volunteers. There are protests in schools. Rearmament requires cuts and the German federal government has begun to announce them this week. Cuts in healthcare and pensions. They want to save 17 billion in social spending this year, and 30 billion next year. A new pattern of the German welfare state is emerging and that concerns all Europeans.

Those who do not see it do not know history. In the seventies, Germany was very influential in Spain’s transition to democracy. Our constitution contains features of the Bonn Basic Law of 1949. The German social-democratic model has always had weight in Spain. The German CDU (a party more conservative than Christian democratic) is today the main European connection point of the Spanish Popular Party, whose president has no special inclination for European or international politics.

Theoretically, Chancellor Friedrich Merz is the great protector of Alberto Núñez Feijóo in the European sphere. Two months ago, Merz supported the joint attack by the United States and Israel against Iran. Today he considers that Trump has fallen into a trap and that the American president does not know how to get out of it. Trump now despises him – “Merz doesn’t know what he’s talking about” –, threatens to close American bases in Germany, and has just raised tariffs on European-made cars to 25%.

The moment of Germany concerns us. When Germany takes out the scissors to cut, we must pay attention.

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