Germany to unveil first National Security Strategy

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is set to unveil Germany’s first National Security Strategy which aims to provide an overview of the country’s foreign policy and ensure a cohesive cross-ministry approach to security.

Scholz said Germany from now on would invest more than 2% of economic output on defence up from around 1.5% currently, after years of resisting pleas from NATO allies to do so – a pledge expected to be included in the National Security Strategy.

Germany has had policy documents in the past addressing security but Scholz’s three-way coalition agreed it wanted a more comprehensive strategy in its pact in November 2021.

That idea gained a new urgency following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which exposed the poor state of the German military, Germany’s over-reliance on Russia for energy and insufficient protection of critical infrastructure such as gas pipelines.

Germany had been too complacent in light of new threats including increasingly assertive authoritarian states such as Russia and China in the decades of peace and prosperity following the end of the Cold War, analysts said.

The Ukraine war, however, heralded a “Zeitenwende” or “turn of era”, as Scholz said in a landmark speech days after the invasion, requiring Germany to prioritise security more and spend more on defence.

“The Russian invasion and autocratic tendencies in other areas of the world require that we project our stance in a more robust way,” said Nils Schmid, foreign policy spokesperson for the parliamentary group of Scholz’s Social Democrats.

Mikko Huotari of the Mercator Institute for China Studies said he expected a “significantly more critical language on the challenge that China poses internationally” in the strategy.

The document is unlikely to go into Germany’s policy on China at length, however, as the government is expected to publish a separate China strategy later this year.

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It is the result of months of canvassing both expert and layman opinions at a district, state and national level in a process led by the Greens-run foreign ministry.

While the coalition had originally agreed to conclude the document within its first year in office, this was delayed by various disputes between parties and ministries.

One of the most contentious issues was the idea of a National Security Council, which the government eventually abandoned due to disagreements over where it should be housed.

The council’s creation would have upset the balance of power between the ministries and chancellery, said Thorsten Benner of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi).

“Such major changes can only be agreed as part of a package deal during coalition negotiations, not almost two years in.” Benner said.