Germany in the world

Understanding German foreign policy.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

For three decades leading up to 2022, German foreign policy was predicated on the idea that countries that do business don’t go to war with one another.

This strategy, known as Annäherung durch Handel (rapprochement through trade), served as the moral justification for buying cheap energy from Russia, selling cars to China, and lifting sanctions on the theocrats in Tehran.

When German leaders were feeling truly inflated by the righteousness of this mission, they even referred to it as Wandel durch Handel (transformation through trade), claiming that selling Mercedes cars to a dictatorship would help turn it into a democracy.

This strategy always necessitated ignoring a large amount of what was going on in the world. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier described the Nord Stream gas pipelines that run under the Baltic as “a last bridge of peace” linking Russia to western Europe.

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