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By Jeffrey Sachs
Chancellor Merz,
You have spoken repeatedly of Germany’s responsibility for European security. That responsibility cannot be discharged through slogans, selective memory, or the steady normalization of war talk. Security guarantees are not one-way instruments. They go in both directions. This is not a Russian argument, nor an American one; it is a foundational principle of European security, explicitly embedded in the Helsinki Final Act, the OSCE framework, and decades of postwar diplomacy.
Germany has a duty to approach this moment with historical seriousness and honesty. On that score, recent rhetoric and policy choices fall dangerously short.
Since 1990, Russia’s core security concerns have been repeatedly dismissed, diluted, or directly violated — often with Germany’s active participation or acquiescence. This record cannot be erased if the war in Ukraine is to end, and it cannot be ignored if Europe is to avoid a permanent state of confrontation.
At the end of the Cold War, Germany gave Soviet and then Russian leaders repeated and explicit assurances that NATO would not expand eastward. These assurances were given in the context of German reunification. Germany benefited enormously from them. The rapid unification of your country — within NATO — would not have occurred without Soviet consent grounded in those commitments. To later pretend that these assurances never mattered, or that they were merely casual remarks, is not realism. It is historical revisionism.
In 1999, Germany participated in NATO’s bombing of Serbia, the first major war conducted by NATO without authorization from the UN Security Council. This was not a defensive action. It was a precedent-setting intervention that fundamentally altered the post–Cold War security order. For Russia, Serbia was not an abstraction. The message was unmistakable: NATO would use force beyond its territory, without UN approval, and without regard for Russian objections.
In 2002, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a cornerstone of strategic stability for three decades. Germany raised no serious objection. Yet the erosion of the arms-control architecture did not occur in a vacuum. Missile-defense systems deployed closer to Russia’s borders were rightly perceived by Russia as destabilizing. Dismissing those perceptions as paranoia was political propaganda, not sound diplomacy.
In 2008, Germany recognized Kosovo’s independence, despite explicit warnings that this would undermine the principle of territorial integrity and set a precedent that would reverberate elsewhere. Once again, Russia’s objections were brushed aside as bad faith rather than engaged as serious strategic concerns.
The steady push to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia — formally declared at the 2008 Bucharest Summit — crossed the brightest of red lines, despite vociferous, clear, consistent, and repeated objections raised by Moscow for years. When a major power identifies a core security interest and reiterates it for decades, ignoring it is not diplomacy. It is willful escalation.
Germany’s role in Ukraine since 2014 is especially troubling. Berlin, alongside Paris and Warsaw, brokered the February 21, 2014 agreement between President Yanukovych and the opposition — an agreement intended to halt violence and preserve constitutional order. Within hours, that agreement collapsed. A violent overthrow followed. A new government emerged through extra-constitutional means. Germany recognized and supported the new regime immediately. The agreement Germany had guaranteed was abandoned without consequence.
The Minsk II agreement of 2015 was supposed to be the corrective — a negotiated framework to end the war in eastern Ukraine. Germany again served as a guarantor. Yet for seven years Minsk II was not implemented by Ukraine. Kyiv openly rejected its political provisions. Germany did not enforce them. Former German and other European leaders have since acknowledged that Minsk was treated less as a peace plan than as a holding action. That admission alone should force a reckoning.
Against this background, calls for ever more weapons, ever harsher rhetoric, and ever greater “resolve” ring hollow. They ask Europe to forget the recent past in order to justify a future of permanent confrontation.
Enough with propaganda. Enough with the moral infantilization of the public. Europeans are fully capable of understanding that security dilemmas are real, that NATO actions have consequences, and that peace is not achieved by pretending that Russia’s security concerns do not exist.
European security is indivisible. That principle means that no country can strengthen its security at the expense of another’s without provoking instability. It also means that diplomacy is not appeasement, and that historical honesty is not betrayal.
Germany once understood this. Ostpolitik was not weakness; it was strategic maturity. It recognized that Europe’s stability depends on engagement, arms control, economic ties, and respect for the legitimate security interests of Russia.
Today, Germany needs that maturity again. Stop speaking as if war is inevitable or virtuous. Stop outsourcing strategic thinking to alliance talking points. Start engaging seriously in diplomacy — not as a public-relations exercise, but as a genuine effort to rebuild a European security architecture that includes, rather than excludes, Russia.
A renewed European security architecture must begin with clarity and restraint. First, it requires an unequivocal end to NATO’s eastward enlargement — to Ukraine, to Georgia, and to any other state along Russia’s borders.
NATO expansion was not an inevitable feature of the post–Cold War order; it was a political choice, taken in violation of solemn assurances given in 1990 and pursued despite repeated warnings that it would destabilize Europe.
Security in Ukraine will not come from the forward deployment of German, French, or other European troops, which would only entrench division and prolong war. It will come through neutrality, backed by credible international guarantees. The historical record is unambiguous: neither the Soviet Union nor the Russian Federation violated the sovereignty of neutral states in the postwar order — not Finland, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, or others. Neutrality worked because it addressed legitimate security concerns on all sides. There is no serious reason to pretend it cannot work again.
Second, stability requires demilitarization and reciprocity. Russian forces should be kept well back from NATO borders, and NATO forces — including missile systems — must be kept well back from Russia’s borders. Security is indivisible, not one-sided. Border regions should be demilitarized through verifiable agreements, not saturated with ever more weapons.
Sanctions should be lifted as part of a negotiated settlement; they have failed to bring peace and have inflicted severe damage on Europe’s own economy.
Germany, in particular, should reject the reckless confiscation of Russian state assets — a brazen violation of international law that undermines trust in the global financial system. Reviving German industry through lawful, negotiated trade with Russia is not capitulation. It is economic realism. Europe should not destroy its own productive base in the name of moral posturing.
Finally, Europe must return to the institutional foundations of its own security. The OSCE — not NATO — should once again serve as the central forum for European security, confidence-building, and arms control. Strategic autonomy for Europe means precisely this: a European security order shaped by European interests, not permanent subordination to NATO expansionism.
France could rightly extend its nuclear deterrent as a European security umbrella, but only in a strictly defensive posture, without forward-deployed systems that threaten Russia.
Europe should press urgently for a return to the INF framework and for comprehensive strategic nuclear arms-control negotiations involving the United States and Russia — and, in time, China.
Most importantly, Chancellor Merz, learn history — and be honest about it. Without honesty, there can be no trust. Without trust, there can be no security. And without diplomacy, Europe risks repeating the catastrophes it claims to have learned from.
History will judge what Germany chooses to remember — and what it chooses to forget. This time, let Germany choose diplomacy and peace, and abide by its word.
Respectfully,
Jeffrey D. Sachs
University Professor
Columbia University
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Jeffrey D. Sachs
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.