US Senator Chris Coons is expected in Berlin this Thursday. The Delaware Democrat, whom Joe Biden represented in Congress for decades, is considered a close confidante of the US President. The US embassy says nothing about the agenda of the visit, according to information from Süddeutsche Zeitung Coons and other members of the US Congress should meet the possible future Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) as well as the party leaders of the other Ampel partners.
The mission: to find out what to expect from the new German government. The timing is spicy, because by Wednesday, 6 p.m., the 22 working groups, divided according to topics, should each provide the chief negotiators with five pages of text, which they then have to weave into a coalition agreement – each status is therefore provisional, the party leaders can still change, delete, add, the working groups delegate unresolved conflicts to the boss level. But a point in time when allies can still exert influence.
The greatest interest of the visitors from Washington should arouse what the working group 20 “Security, Defense, Development, Foreign Affairs, Human Rights” has worked out – and what that means for the transatlantic relationship and therefore for NATO.
Demands from leading Social Democrats and the Greens to withdraw the US nuclear weapons still stationed in Germany were considered an explosive device. As part of its nuclear participation in NATO, Berlin has committed itself to using its own jets to bring bombs to their destination in a crisis. That is part of the nuclear deterrent that applies especially to Russia. At least in the paper of the working group, however, the requirement was not included, it is said.
The acting foreign minister and chief negotiator of the SPD, Heiko Maas, pointed out that hardly any passage is read as carefully as this internationally – and emphasizes the importance of NATO. Some in the working group are said to have found this presumptuous, others as a necessary connection to reality – depending on their own attitude.
Will the Germans buy new fighter jets?
But that does not mean that the subject is over. Because so far the Bundeswehr keeps aging tornadoFighter jets ready for the nuclear scenario. Keeping them operational beyond 2030 would cost billions. Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (CDU) had already started talks with the US before the election and wanted 45 US jets of the type F-18 buy as a successor – Coons and colleagues will want to hear how things are there too. Whether the working group would come to an agreement on this question was considered open until the end – it would ultimately be decided by the housekeepers anyway, it said.
According to experts, the order volume should amount to at least eight billion euros. Inevitably, the question arises again of how Germany intends to hold up in the future with the goal, decided with the participation of the SPD, of spending two percent of economic output on defense – which the Americans like to remember.
An explicit commitment to this, it is said from negotiating circles, can not be found in the paper – the SPD and the Greens had questioned it in the election campaign. The tendency is rather to spend three percent in total on foreign, security and development policy – a suggestion from the election manifesto of the FDP.
The two percent are not a question of faith in Washington either – it is more about the European allies acquiring key military skills in order to fulfill international commitments in security policy. In the case of the Bundeswehr, these are mainly new heavy transport helicopters, the procurement of which under the old government failed over the last few meters. Such an order – a minimum of five to six billion euros, should also go to manufacturers from the USA due to a lack of alternatives – and also depend on what the traffic light intends to do with the defense budget.
When it comes to Nord Stream 2, the traffic lights are waiting for now
The biggest conflict between Washington and Berlin, on the other hand, is left out: the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, about which Biden spoke to Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G20 summit in Rome, has been assigned to the energy working group. And according to reports, the traffic light will not position itself for this. The SPD refers to the ongoing certification process at the Federal Network Agency. In the case of the Greens and the FDP, however, it is assumed that European courts could overturn a permit for the gas pipeline by German authorities.
The relationship with Ukraine is being dealt with by the Europe working group, which will offer Kiev a European perspective, as they say. The formulations of the foreign working group on the country chapter Russia would, however, take recent developments into account and name both internal repression and aggressive action against neighboring countries. At the same time, the working group states that there is no security in Europe against, but only with, Russia. On Tuesday she had formulated more than ten pages – now one has to cut away more than half of an already superficial text, complained one person from among the negotiators.