Irish Examiner view: Leopard must change its spots

A Leopard 2 tank during a demonstration event held for the media by the German Bundeswehr in Munster near Hannover, Germany in September 2011. Picture: Michael Sohn, File

Mixed messages coming from Berlin about the German willingness to supply Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine — and also permit countries which have purchased the same tanks send them to the Ukrainian army — has put the country in a bind it never expected or anticipated.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, in which an emboldened and cruel Germany under the rule of Adolf Hitler annexed large tracts of Europe, razed towns, villages, and cities and slaughtered millions of people, the country has changed.

Under the political guidance of Konrad Adenauer initially and then Willi Brandt and under the terms of the Marshall Plan, a devastated and divided Germany rebuilt and became the economic powerhouse we know it to be today. 

Although split in half by then allies — America, Britain, France and Russia — and with large amounts of its former territory ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union, the Federal Republic of Germany became a model pupil for the world.

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It is never easy for countries vanquished by the hell of war on an unparalleled scale to get themselves back on their feet in the way Germany did, especially while remaining a bulwark of Western democratic idealism and at the same time as being the focal point of a geopolitical Cold War which threatened to plunge the world into nuclear hell.

This was never an easy tightrope for a nascent Germany to traverse while also reconstructing itself into an industrial dynamo. 

That it had been militarily emasculated and forced by its western allies to swallow whole their ideals, somehow made the task easier and gave Germany and its people a sense of purpose, identity and hope.

But the horror inflicted by Germany on the peoples of Europe, left the country with an internal sense of insecurity about its place in the world.

Only by Germany acting as an honest broker — financially, industrially and without pretention to being a military power — could it retake its place at the table of nations. Last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine put all that on hold and the country and its people was suddenly forced to re-evaluate decades-old certainties.

Having spent its post war years studiously avoiding poking the bear at its borders, Germany found itself at the centre of an alliance trying to save a democracy it had itself once trampled into the Steppes. Germany’s new found wealth and confidence was shattered by the fear it would once again see war at its doorstep.

It is understandable, therefore, that there’s a reluctance in Germany to be seen in any way as an aggressor, given the price it paid for having been one in the past and that is why there has been hesitancy in Berlin in allowing its Leopard 2 tanks to become central to the Ukrainian struggle.

But it is surely time for the German Leopard to change its spots. The big difference now is that while once an unadulterated aggressor, it is now a defender against aggression. It should be proud of that, not afraid of it.