A ghost creeps through Germany. This spirit also has a name: it’s called a negotiated solution. Behind this is a peace mantra that evokes what has long been lost: the rule of law. But Vladimir Putin does not want to get involved in this civilizational achievement. He orders: Keep it up: War. The “friends of peace” have no answers.
Most recently it was the Federal President, in the so-called “summer interview” on television. Frank Walter Steinmeier produced a double ending there: “Every war ends at the negotiating table.” One can say: It’s wrong, a myth. And it’s not necessarily a good thing either. “Negotiation” sounds like balance, justice and peace. What a mistake. First of all, wars do not usually end with negotiations. Second, negotiations do not necessarily bring about peace. Let’s take Poland.
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First, Poland was a victim of the Hitler-Stalin pact that eliminated the country. After that, Poland became a victim of the Soviet leader Stalin and the Western Allies. At the negotiations in Yalta, Stalin demanded Poland’s incorporation into his Soviet empire, and at the negotiations in Potsdam in 1945 the Americans and British agreed.
Poland lost around half of its territory. As a war victim. The half. It was compensated at the expense of Germany. Hundreds of thousands of Germans were expelled in the course of the “west shift”, not only because Stalin had in mind countries that should be ethnically homogeneous, but because the Allies in the West agreed with him – against human rights. Winston Churchill promised Stalin a “clean carpet”.
rule of law? Rather the brutal power of the factual. In other words: the winner of the war determines the prices – including the price of peace. There is no balance of equal to equal when equal to equal does not exist. Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians are interested in negotiations.
Putin has just ordered the war to continue. Ukraine has decided to continue fighting the Russians. Western industrialized countries have decided to help Ukraine in this. In other words, there is no room for negotiation.
If Putin agreed to negotiations, he could not even be sure of being allowed to keep the Donbass, which he is about to conquer. If Valodymyr Zelenskyy agreed to negotiations, he could not even be sure of getting Donbass back. If the West were to agree to negotiations, it would have to reckon with Putin making the membership of Sweden and Finland in NATO a price.
For a truce, not even for peace. Peace does not break out when the guns are silent. If anyone has proven what hybrid warfare is capable of, it was the Russians with their “little green men” in the Donbass and their cyber attacks on Western institutions – such as the German Bundestag.
Ergo, neither the Russians, nor the Ukrainians, nor the West have an interest in negotiations. That’s true as long as you’re fighting. That’s why these open letters from “peace friends” have a purpose – they demand peace at any price, which is only possible if western Ukraine stops delivering weapons. In the end it boils down to capitulation.
Which, from the point of view of the letter writers, is justified because an “escalation” threatens, the significance of which goes far beyond the restriction of freedom for Ukraine: the annihilation of mankind in a nuclear war. However, this construct has flaws in reasoning: if the fear of a nuclear war were decisive in any case, we should immediately abolish NATO and recommend the peaceful return of Putin’s empire to the Baltic States, the Poles, Romanians, Hungarians and East Germans.
Then, however, there was no peace, only the absence of military force. A situation that Christian Mölling, research director of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), calls “strife without war”. Which leads to another uncomfortable thought: peace is not civil. Peace needs military. In a world where there is a historical revisionist or imperialist Putin, yearning for an unarmed peace is a rather naïve promise, if not a dangerous one.
“Friends of peace” like to use German history. And forget two things: That Germany owes its peace before Hitler to hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers who died in battles for it. And his peace before the Soviets especially the Americans. DGAP Director Mölling: “All those who want to establish Germany as a peace power today are doing so on a basis that others have pacified with violence – legitimate violence.” And further: “The fear of their own country as a possible perpetrator appears to this day more important than dealing with Putin as the real perpetrator.”
Violence is not harmful per se, violence can even be necessary. This is also how international law sees it.
One last thing about the Federal President. Wars can also end without any negotiations at all, or with a surrender peace in which aggressors simply leave the field again, humiliated by their opponents’ willingness to fight. Attackers can also simply walk themselves to death. Russians, like Americans, British and French, and of course the Germans, have plenty of experience in this.
