George Friedman - The Next Decade

Germany can afford to distance itself from America, in part because its traditional problem of being squeezed from both sides is gone and it has a close and friendly relationship with France. Germany no longer borders Russia but now has Poland as a buffer. Germany needs natural gas, which the Russians have in abundance, and the Russians need technology and expertise, both of which Germany has to spare.

In addition, significant population decline will soon affect Germany’s industrial plant, as a labor shortage, combined with an aging population, creates a formula for economic disaster. Even with its own decline, Russia will still have a surplus of labor that Germany can utilize, both by importing Russian workers and by moving production to Russia. The only way to counteract population decline is by encouraging immigration, but immigration and national identity in Europe are at odds.

If Germany doesn’t want to bring workers to its factories, it can move its factories to where the workers are. Russia is also undergoing a decline in population, but because it has such a weak economy focused on primary commodities, it still has a surplus workforce, meaning people who are unemployed or underemployed. If the Russians want to move beyond simply exporting energy and grain and develop a modern industrial economy, they need technology and capital, and the Germans have both of those. The Germans want workers to man their factories and natural resources to fuel their economy. German businesses of all sizes are already deeply involved in Russia, adding to the new reality of a Moscow-Berlin relationship that soon will be the pivot of Europe, more dynamic if not more significant than the other relationships each country has.

With France at Germany’s back—tied there by economic interests—Russia will move closer to the European core, setting off a new dynamic in the EU. Tension between the core and the periphery is already rife. The core is Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium, the advanced industrial heartland of Europe. The periphery is Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and eastern Europe. Still in the early stages of economic development, these smaller countries need looser monetary policies than their more advanced neighbors and will have wider economic swings, so they will be more vulnerable to instability.

Meanwhile, France has hedged its bets, positioning itself as both a northern European power and a Mediterranean power, even to the point of considering the formation of a Mediterranean Union alongside the EU. In French thinking, this would include southern European countries, North African countries, Israel, and Turkey. This is an attractive idea in the abstract, but in reality the difference in developmental stages between Libya and Italy is so profound that it dwarfs the difference between Germany and Greece. Still, we can expect the French to dabble in the Mediterranean, trying to compensate for being Germany’s junior partner in the north.

Germany is uncomfortable in the role that was pressed on it during the 2008–2010 crises. As the Germans reconsider their interest in the EU periphery, the peripheral countries raise questions about the economic benefit of integrating with the Germans. They resent losing control over vast areas of their economies, such as the banking sector, especially when they are expected to stand on their own if a crisis occurs. That those on the periphery are expected to sustain their economies with a monetary policy designed for the core adds to the pressure on both sides.

The old periphery, from Greece to Ireland, is firmly focused on economics. The new periphery, the Intermarium—and Poland in particular—is deeply concerned about Russia. And as we have seen, Poland is especially uneasy over being a neutral buffer between Germany and Russia, a role that historically has never ended well for it.

Also uncomfortable with this alignment is Britain. The UK could live with a Paris-Berlin axis as long as it was countered by the United States, with Britain as the balance point midway. But including Moscow puts too much weight on the European mainland, posing a challenge to British commercial and strategic interests.

As the next decade unfolds, Germany will resume its place on the North European Plain, but allied this time with its historic enemies, France and Russia. Britain will move even closer to the United States. Countries on the old periphery will be left to sort their way through the complexities, but it will be the new periphery—eastern Europe—that will be the focus of activity. The European Union will continue to function, as will the euro, but it will be difficult for the EU to be the organizing principle of Europe when there are so many centrifugal forces.

A fairly extraordinary policy lapse since the collapse of communism is that the United States has never developed a strategy toward Europe. This will soon change. During the 1990s, the United States simply assumed a commonality of interests with the Europeans, but that assumption was never tested during the benign conditions of that decade. The emergence of the EU was never seen as a challenge to the United States, but simply as a natural evolution that posed no problem. Whereas the United States once proceeded out of habit, the decade ahead will require focused rethinking and planning.

When the American response to September 11 opened up the first significant breach with the Franco-German bloc, it also revealed a serious split in Europe. The United States wanted far more direct military help in Afghanistan than it got, and it wanted at least political cover for the war in Iraq. On the votes taken by NATO—such as guaranteeing support for Turkey if it supported the U.S. in Iraq—the overwhelming majority of countries sided implicitly with the United States, but only four countries voted against that support: Germany, France, Belgium, and Luxemburg. It should be noted that any NATO action requires unanimity. Nonetheless, many of the nations that supported the resolution sent at least token forces to Iraq, while Britain made major contributions.

The geography of this support is extremely important. The European heartland, with the exception of the Netherlands, opposed the United States. Most of the periphery—the Intermarium countries in particular—supported the United States, at least initially. Many of the countries that fell in with the United States did so not because they genuinely endorsed the American action but because of uneasiness with the Franco-German bloc. They did not want to be merely subordinate members of Europe, and they saw the United States as an important counterweight to the French and Germans. There was a particularly interesting confrontation between French president Jacques Chirac and the representatives of the Intermarium countries, who had signed a letter rejecting the Franco-German stand and supporting the United States. When that letter appeared, Chirac scolded them for being, in his terms, “badly brought up.” At that point, the breach between these countries and France—and Germany, for that matter—could not have been deeper. The split in Europe over the Iraq war will, I think, become a rough framework for strategic disagreements in Europe, and will redefine U.S. alliances there in the decade ahead.

Tension between the United States and France has varied, but even after Barack Obama took office, the Germans were resolute on the subject of confrontation with Islam. They did not like Obama’s management of the conflict any more than they liked Bush’s, and they did not want to be drawn into it. As should be obvious by now, the United States and the Franco-German bloc simply have different interests.

It is difficult to imagine the Americans convincing the Germans to return to their prior relationship with the United States, or Germany convincing the United States to be indifferent to the rise of Russia. In the next ten years, an ideal solution from the American point of view would be to split the Franco-German bloc, and in fact the president should work to open as wide a breach as possible between the two countries. Still, this can’t be the foundation of his strategy. The United States has little to offer France, while its relationship with Germany provides that country both security and economic advantages.