Peace is possible – but it will take security!
Almost all German and many European media outlets, along with politicians, are calling for ‘solidarity with Ukraine’ and its elected president after Selenski’s expulsion from the White House and Trump’s halting military aid to Ukraine. This is the right thing to do and especially important now. But what does it mean in concrete terms?
On Rosenmontag, the TAZ headlined Bernd Pickert’s commentary on the Washington scandal: ‘Europe must now provide a lot of money’. Is that all we can think of, except for more money for armaments and the military? The colleague’s answer in the TAZ: ‘There is hardly any other choice’. Really?
Donald Trump, of all people, demanded on 13 February 2025: ‘Let’s cut our military budget in half’. The US president said he wanted to invite Russia and China to talks to cut their defence spending by half as well. That wouldn’t disadvantage anyone. The ratio would be the same. There should also be a joint nuclear disarmament. Trump’s remarkably realistic and even ethical reasoning: ‘With today’s nuclear weapons, you can destroy the world 50 or 100 times over. We could spend the money on other things that will hopefully be much more productive.’ Apart from many other irritating, wrong and confused considerations, when Trump is right, he is right. Why is there almost no one in Europe taking up these new proposals? Dear old Europe: outrage at Trump is not enough. Someone has to start putting an end to the eternal arms race madness.
Trump’s idea reminds me of the disarmament talks between Reagan and Gorbachev in October 1986 in Reykjavik. The world was on the brink of nuclear disaster. There Gorbachev had first proposed to abolish all nuclear weapons worldwide. Reagan replied, as Gorbachev told me in our joint book ‘Never Again War – Come to Your Senses’: ‘I can’t get my hardliners to agree to that’. So they agreed to scrap 80 percent of the nuclear weapons. The peace movement, which was strong at the time, cheered this progress, which had been considered impossible just a short time before. The world was a safer place and we had the conditions for the peaceful German reunification, which also seemed impossible in terms of realpolitik. A seemingly political miracle. And Reagan was certainly no more of a pacifist than Putin or Trump are today.
‘Let’s cut military budgets in half.’ I, too, know that this vision stands in stark contrast to Trump’s demand to us Europeans. But we should take his surprising demand as seriously as Reagan took Gorbachev’s proposal in Reykjavik. It is worth a try and more helpful than just rejecting everything that comes from Trump. It could be a first step towards further joint disarmament and less money for rearmament. I have no idea whether this proposal will really achieve anything, but not even trying it achieves nothing. Instead, Ursula von der Leyen is proposing to spend another 800 billion euros on rearming Europe. Where are the protests, dear peace movement?
So far, the ancient Roman principle has applied: ‘If you want peace, prepare for war’. The result of this thinking from the Cold War is well known: ever closer to the nuclear abyss. Ever closer to a Third World War. What can we learn from this? According to the renowned SIPRI Institute, the major European NATO states of France, Italy, England, Poland and Germany already spend around 430 billion euros a year on the military, with Russia spending around 320 billion. So the repeatedly asserted material inferiority of the West does not actually exist. The problem is more that each European nation wants its own tank. More cooperation would be more helpful than simply more money.
Above all, however, a new security thinking is needed, along the lines of Trump’s surprising proposal. After three years of Putin’s Russia’s attack on Ukraine, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and caused terrible destruction, we should finally be able to think of more than just spending more and more money on even more weapons. The Süddeutsche Zeitung still sees a chance these days that ‘the war can still be won’ and recommends a corresponding rearmament policy. However, we should no longer want to win wars, but a just peace. To achieve this, not only the security interests of Ukraine, but also those of Russia must be taken into account.
Helmut Kohl, Helmut Schmidt, Henry Kissinger and I, as well as Mikhail Gorbachev, have repeatedly emphasised that NATO has taken insufficient account of Russia’s security interests over the last 30 years: through NATO’s eastward expansion, NATO’s southward expansion and NATO’s northward expansion, which of course pleased us but must have frightened Putin. It is important to find common security interests.
Only by putting ourselves in the shoes of our counterpart (in the Sermon on the Mount this is called ‘love of enemies’) can we build trust with that counterpart. Gorbachev and Reagan successfully demonstrated this. As a historian, I know that anyone who does not believe in miracles is not a realist.
Otherwise, there would have been no peaceful German reunification, no peaceful European Union, no Fridays for Future movement and, in these days, no rapprochement between Öcalan and Erdogan, nor Islamists who might now be bringing peace to Syria. Those who do not believe in miracles are not realists.
Peace is possible – but only if it is secure.
Franz Alt „Frieden ist NOCH IMMER möglich: Die Kraft der Bergpredigt“ | Herder Verlag 2022
