© REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

Many French had a feeling of déjà vu when a truck barreled into a Berlin Christmas market two weeks ago, killing 12 – tactically, it seemed to echo an attack in Nice this past summer in which a truck drove into a Bastille Day celebration. In both cases, the so-called Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility, though in Nice the French found that the attacker was only inspired by the terrorist network (and mocked IS on Twitter for claiming responsibility). Now each country is facing an electorate increasingly concerned by IS-related attacks, and enemies who seek to take advantage of refugee flows and porous borders.

Despite these similarities, the French and German responses stand in stark contrast. France, long familiar with terrorism, has adopted a heavy-handed approach, while Germany has opted for more restraint. Now each country is discovering the disadvantages of its strategy: France is wrestling with the ineffectiveness of expansive state powers, and Germany with the ineffectiveness of limited ones.

France: More is Less

“Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer ‘yes,’ you must accept all the necessary consequences.” The French colonel’s infamous defense of brutal counter-terrorism tactics in the 1965 film classic The Battle of Algiers is indicative of a French policy that has remained controversial for its relegation of civil liberties to second priority status. True to form, following the November 2015 attacks France enacted a state of emergency that expands police power and has come under fire for its civil liberties abuses. It remains in effect despite initially being limited to three months.

Bellicose language has accompanied France’s tough stance. “France is at war,” declared President François Hollande after the Paris attacks, launching airstrikes on IS. Presidential hopefuls from across the political spectrum concur, from far-right Marine Le Pen to center-left Manuel Valls. Republican candidate François Fillon asserts, “It’s no longer about terrorism… we are at war.”

But for all its intensity, the response inspires little confidence. A French parliamentary report found the state of emergency to be largely ineffective, and after Nice 67 percent of those polled said they didn’t trust the government to effectively fight terrorism. At a memorial, a bristling crowd shouted “murderer!” at Valls, then prime minister. Hollande was criticized for seeming unable to come up with an approach beyond re-extending the state of emergency. Some have suggested more draconian measures, but with three major attacks in 18 months amid already broad police powers, it is unlikely this would satisfy demands for better protection.

Germany: Less is More

Germany’s approach is more subdued. Compared to France, its history with terrorism is less extensive and its IS-linked attacks both more recent and less severe. Meanwhile, the specter of its totalitarian past impels it to maintain decentralized government powers and minimal surveillance. A reluctant military power, it has refrained from conducting counter-IS airstrikes.

In response to recent attacks, the government has delicately upped its counter-terrorism capabilities. A nine-point plan introduced this summer extends some state powers, but is weighted toward broadening the counter-terrorism toolkit. Last week, the government passed a law allowing more public video surveillance, but softened the blow by making installation voluntary, not mandatory.

Germany’s rhetoric is also more tempered. Merkel has described the terrorist threat as a “war” only sparingly and with utmost caution. In the days following the Christmas market attack she avoided the term, instead stressing the “need to defend the values of democracy and rule of law on our side.” She made a point of being “extremely proud of how calm people have stayed.” The comment was consistent with Merkel’s cool-headed leadership style, but also reflected her intention to stand her ground against parties like the populist, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which advocate for a forceful government clampdown.

Promoting Sound Solutions

As Germany and France seek to improve counter-terrorism, they could stand to learn from one another. Germany cannot and would not want to adopt the French model, but as it cautiously treads forward, it can look to the successes and drawbacks of its neighbor’s experience. France, on the other hand, can learn from Germany’s track record in operating within legal restrictions as it pursues new approaches. Counter-radicalization programs are one option, particularly for a country that struggles with integrating marginalized populations. France has begun, with little success, to implement these. Germany, however, has been doing this since the 1980s, in programs aimed first at neo-Nazis and later adapted to new threats.

The two countries share the need for better coordination domestically and within Europe. The Berlin attacker, Anis Amri, was a known threat, but slipped surveillance when crossing state jurisdictions. Similar failures led a French Parliamentary inquiry to call for the establishment of a national counter-terrorism agency. It also reiterated EU ministers’ calls to respond with greater European cooperation – Amri’s escape to Italy, via France, underscores persistent gaps. Some could be filled by taking steps to repair logistical shortcomings rather than wading into a sovereignty battle, such as ensuring standardized entry of information into the Schengen database, which was found wanting in the Paris attacks.

France and Germany have always had their differences, but they can both benefit by promoting sound solutions within the union and discouraging knee-jerk reactions at home that are more cosmetic than productive. This way, leaders stand a better chance of avoiding that eerie feeling of déjà-vu all over again.

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© REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

Rule 1: Don’t complain, don’t explain. Rule 2: The lady is not for turning. After eleven years in power, Chancellor Angela Merkel has demonstrated just how well she has internalized the rules of Europe’s other long-serving women, Queen Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher. Those rules served Merkel well this week when, in an indication of just how serious the situation in Germany is, she broke her third rule, interrupting her holiday to go before the press.

Holidays in Germany are holy, and in the past, no matter the crisis she was facing, Angela Merkel always took her two weeks. But these are not normal times in Germany. In the space of ten days, a 17 year-old Afghan refugee attacked tourists on a train with an axe; an 18 year-old Munich native shot dead nine people before killing himself; and, within 24 hours of each other, one Syrian man killed a woman with a machete and another blew himself up with a rucksack bomb. In a final incident, an Afghan refugee escaped from a psychiatric facility and ran around Bremen shouting “I’ll blow you all up” before he was arrested and locked up again.

Four of the five incidents involved refugees or asylum seekers, two had links to the so-called Islamic State (IS) and, taken together, they ended a freak lucky streak that saw Germany spared the violence that has rocked its European neighbors. Though each case must be viewed individually, together they have rattled Germans’ confidence.

A defiant Merkel appeared before the press to declare that Germany is “at war” with IS, and that she would not allow Islamist terror to undermine German values or force a change to her refugee strategy. “The terrorists want us to lose sight of what is important to us,” she said.

Restoring Public Trust

Her challenge now: to shrug off growing domestic pressure to get tough on immigrants while restoring public trust and minimizing angst. It is important, she said, not to confuse cause and effect, to face down those whose terror campaign had contributed to the refugee crisis rather than turn on those fleeing the resulting terror.

It was a classic Merkel performance – a cool, considered refusal to appear rattled, or to take any emotional bait offered by the journalists present. No, she was not exhausted by this latest crisis, no, she wasn’t considering standing aside, and no, she didn’t doubt for a moment that she did the right thing last year.

Then, under the mantra “We can manage this” (“Wir schaffen das”), she urged Germans to welcome people fleeing terror in Syria and elsewhere. Over one million people came by year’s end. “I stand by the main decisions we made,” she said. “We have achieved a lot, even though these days it’s clear what we have yet to do.” Germany faces a new “challenge” since coming into the crosshairs of IS, she said. It was a typically Merkel understatement: the Süddeutsche Zeitung joked that if Merkel had been around in 1912, she probably would have called the Titanic sinking a “challenge”.

Not For Turning

But, like another iron-willed woman leader, Merkel is not for turning. She knows Germans’ willingness to welcome refugee has been cooling since New Year’s, when sexual assaults were committed by non-German men – including some asylum seekers – during celebrations in Cologne and other cities.

That welcome will have been cooled even further by news that the axe attack last week near Würzburg and the suicide bomb attack in Ansbach were, as she put it, “based on what we know, Islamist terror.” “That two men who came to us as refugees are responsible for the acts in Würzburg and Ansbach mocks the country that took them in,” she said. “We will do everything to investigate these barbaric acts, find the backers, and give them their just punishment.”

Amid pressure from her political allies in Bavaria – on the front lines of the refugee crisis and the recent terror wave – Merkel presented a nine-point plan to improve the fight against terrorist acts and structures. Among the measures: a new body to decrypt Internet communication; additional security staff; a national migration register; and an early warning system to catch radicalized refugees.

Again and again she refused to admit any failures in the last year; but, with an eye on limiting the damage, she also pointed out that all decisions she took were made in consensus with other political players, as well as the police and security services.

Her Bavarian allies, the Christian Social Union (CSU), pushed ahead with their own post-attack plan on Thursday, promising tighter security measures and expedited deportations of failed asylum seekers, such as the Syrian man behind Sunday night’s bomb attack. “All our predictions have been proven right…Islamist terrorism has arrived in Germany,” said Horst Seehofer, the CSU leader and Bavarian premier, and a vocal critic of last year’s asylum measures.

“No Excuse for Xenophobia”

A year before Berlin enters election mode, as pressure grows on Germany’s left and right fringes, Merkel warned fearful Germans not to follow populists. A few isolated attacks by asylum seekers and refugees were “no excuse for xenophobia.” And though Germany was at war with Islamist violence, she insisted that this was not a war on Islam, distancing herself from far-right groups like the AfD and Pegida.

It was an impressive performance in its sheer unremarkability – in other words, classic, low-wattage Merkel pragmatism. But will that be enough to face down Islamist terror, the greatest challenge of her political career so far?

Germany’s chancellor refused to admit that Islamist terrorists are her greatest challengers yet, but this week she staked her political future on beating them – no matter how exhausting. “The role of the state is to restore trust, that is what we are working on,” she said. “But there are evenings when I’m glad to go to bed.”

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Sources: IFOP, Pew, IPSOS-Mori, infratest-dimap

Polling in Europe has reflected an awareness of this new normal. In Britain, 74 percent said that they expected a major terrorist attack to be committed in the UK in 2016, compared to 49 percent two years ago. In Germany, two thirds said in December that they were afraid that a terrorist attack would be carried out at some point in the immediate future, a number that has risen steadily since the terrorist attack in Paris in January 2015. Fifty-seven percent said that Germany is threatened by the “political situation” in the world. And in France itself, 98 percent responded on November 16 that the threat of terrorism was high, while 59 percent said that France was in a state of war. (This last figure dropped to 37 percent in mid-December – but 94 percent still said that the threat of terrorism was high.)

There is less consensus, however, about what to do to combat IS. Germans want to support French military operations against IS, but only up to a point: over half said that Germany should provide France military support, but when asked what that support should entail, only a third wanted Germany to play an active role in air strikes, while only a fifth approved of the use of German ground troops. The only option that won clear approval (59 percent) was German participation in reconnaissance and refueling missions. Seventy-four percent of Germans said more must be done to close security gaps, but 63 percent said that military operations would likely increase the threat of terrorism.

In the UK, popular opinion is steadily shifting against military operations in Syria entirely. While 59 percent approved of the RAF participating in air strikes targeting IS the week after the attack, that support has dwindled dramatically: only 44 percent said on December 3 that they would support the RAF participating in air strikes, while the number who opposed grew from a fifth to 36 percent. Britons were almost evenly split (42 percent to 37 percent) when asked if the UK and the United States should send ground troops into Syria. Part of the shift represents a domestic political battle: following a staunch anti-air strike campaign from Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn and a bruising fight in the House of Commons on December 1, Labor voters were the most likely to change their positions, going from 52 percent in favor of British participation in air strikes on November 24 to 51 percent opposed on December 3.

Meanwhile, in France, public opinion supports taking a number of dramatic steps to fight terrorism – both abroad and at home. Eighty-five percent said in November that they supported military operations against IS, and even in September, two months before the Paris attacks, 56 percent were willing to send French ground troops as part of a coalition force in Syria. Eighty-four percent were prepared to accept limitations on their personal freedom to improve security, 74 percent were in favor of immediate apprehension of people evaluated by the security services as dangerous (or under special observation), and, at the end of December, 85 percent said they would support rescinding the French citizenship of double citizens born in France convicted on charges of terrorism.

And what of the Americans, who will have to play a significant role if military operations in Syria are to escalate? Eighty-three percent said in early December that IS represented a “major threat” – compared to half who said the same of climate change and the rise of China and slightly over 60 percent who said the same of Iran’s nuclear program. Sixty-four percent approved of US military operations against IS, and 50 percent were more worried about the US doing too little in Syria, compared to only 42 percent who were concerned that the Americans would become too involved. At the same time, the nation was evenly split on the deployment of ground troops, with 47 percent favoring the option and 47 percent opposing.

While air strikes might be able to roll back the advance of IS, it is ground presence that will shape the post-war order in Syria. With the major transatlantic powers reluctant to send ground troops, that task will likely fall to regional powers already active in the country – including Iran, Hezbollah, the Kurds, and whatever Syrian opposition forces are left, friend or foe.

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REUTERS/Yves Herman

The ringleader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, travelled freely within Europe and back and forth to Syria. For instance, he was allowed to fly from Cologne to Istanbul in January 2014 even though there was a Belgian alert notice. What went wrong? Abaaoud appears to have been under intermittent surveillance by the authorities, such as when Belgian authorities tipped off their Greek counterparts in January about his likely presence in Athens. Greek police then raided an apartment where Abaaoud may have been, but there was no trace of him. However, the surveillance appears not to have been systematic, and his travel would also have been aided by the borderless nature of the Schengen zone, meaning that he appears to have enjoyed an operational advantage in countering any surveillance. There also appear to have been some failures in sharing operational intelligence and information between national security services.

There were the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January, and at least two failed attempts over the summer – on a church in Villejuif, and in the Amsterdam-Paris Eurostar train. Were French and European authorities not alert enough? Our baseline assessment is that the scale of the jihadist threat facing Europe – in terms of numbers of active and potentially willing militants – now exceeds the capabilities of most European security services to carry out comprehensive surveillance and assessment. Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that a number of plots will come to fruition, or will be foiled by luck near the point of execution. It is also entirely feasible – although there is no direct evidence as yet – that small plots such as the Villejuif church attack and the Eurostar attempted shootings were actually an intentional stratagem by the jihadists to distract the authorities from the much larger and more “spectacular” Paris attacks. The massive amount of “chatter” intercepted by intelligence services means that accurate prioritization of plots likely to succeed necessarily involves a degree of subjective assessment.

Is it more a hardware or a software problem? Do the intelligence services have the right (surveillance) tools, or is there a lack of understanding of the so-called Islamic State and how IS jihadis operate? The problem is largely not one of hardware or software: most of Europe’s security services have the requisite technical ability to monitor jihadists, with legal frameworks in place. Some deficiencies have been noted, leading to reforms after the Paris attacks – such as new databases and financing in Belgium, as well as the expansion of search and detention powers, alongside new counterterrorism legislation in France that includes bolstered powers for data collection and intrusive surveillance and an increase in personnel dedicated to counterterrorism. The basic problem is the substantial scale of the threat, which is not matched by the necessary human resources within most security services to carry out analysis and assessment. Moreover, the problem is compounded in Belgium – a key center for jihadist activity – by the country’s complex federalist structure, multiplicity of police services, and its relatively small security service also keeping tabs on more “traditional” targets in the major international city of Brussels. In sum, the issue is one of the threat likely now being greater than the deployable security resources.

Over 5,000 fighters from Europe have joined IS, compared to about a hundred from the United States. Where is the real failure – our intelligence concerning their activities, or our inability to prevent radicalization? The effort to prevent radicalization has largely lost ground in recent years to the Islamic State in particular due to the jihadists’ effective use of social media. Many models analyzing the radicalization of young people predate the explosion of Twitter onto the social media scene and are now outdated, since they assume the physical presence of an individual who guides the radicalization process (extremist imam, fellow prisoner, etc). Most of that radicalization now happens online. Moreover, since the Edward Snowden revelations, a lot of jihadists appear to have increased their operational security online by using legal encrypted chat applications such as Surespot, Wickr, and Telegram, even though this was also happening before. In short, the online government response through counterradicalization narratives has been comprehensively outmaneuvered by the Islamic State, which moves to get potential recruits off open media and onto encrypted channels as quickly as possible.

Are we really doing worse than the US when it comes to fighting homegrown terrorism? If so, why? There are certain countries in Europe, such as Bosnia, Belgium, Kosovo, and France, from which a high pro capita number of jihadists travel to the Iraq and Syria battlefields, and this certainly suggests that efforts to counter homegrown terrorism have been less successful than in the US. There are likely to be several reasons for this, including a more integrated and affluent Muslim community within the US that identifies with US nationality, greater levels of disenfranchisement among Muslim youths in many European countries, and easier physical access to the principal jihadist theater in Syria. That said, and even though the risk of a successful “swarming” attack in the US is almost certainly lower than in Europe, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the US remains a key target for extremists from both the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda (witness the 9/11 attacks), and there is therefore little room for complacency.

After the Paris attacks, there have been calls for improved collaboration between existing European intelligence services; Schengen seems to make this an obvious requirement. Why are EU intelligence agencies still so reluctant to work together? And how could they cooperate better? EU intelligence agencies are not, on the whole, reluctant to work together – this is a media myth. On any given day, numerous joint operations will be running in various bilateral, trilateral or multilateral formats according to the “need to know” principle, and operational intelligence is routinely shared where a common threat has been identified. The reluctance in EU agencies is to share operational intelligence (as opposed to assessed strategic intelligence) at a multilateral institutional level – such as the EU, Europol, or NATO – given concerns about handling and potential leakage.

Tracking suspects is personnel-intensive. Do European intelligence services have enough manpower? No Western democracy will ever have the necessary ratio of security/police personnel per capita to ensure total surveillance of all suspects and to prevent all terrorist attacks; that would necessitate a police state surpassing even the former East German Stasi. The challenge for national authorities is to ensure that suspects are accurately prioritized and given the necessary level of surveillance, in line with personnel availability, and that is where the Paris attacks have shown that counterterrorism manning in both Belgium and France, is probably less than it now needs to be.

The Paris attacks have spurred calls for a central European intelligence agency. Would such an agency really improve our security? Or would we create a paper tiger? There is already a central EU body charged with collating strategic intelligence from EU states and producing threat assessments for EU policymakers – the EU Intelligence Analysis Centre (INTCEN) based in Brussels. However, INTCEN does not direct its own operations or carry out intelligence collection, which remain the prerogative of nation-states. As things stand at the moment, a central EU intelligence agency would be highly unlikely to improve security, given that the nature of the threat differs between states – and states are therefore best-placed to carry out their own assessments and allocation of targeting priorities. Moreover, different states have different intelligence capabilities and histories of handling classified information, meaning that pooling sensitive intelligence at an EU-28 level is not going to happen any time soon.

Expenditures on police forces, surveillance, internal intelligence, and counterterrorism have risen over the last decade, while defense spending has gone down almost everywhere across the EU. The US has long seen the lack of European military spending – and a lack of engagement when it comes to stabilizing countries in Europe’s neighborhood – as the real reason for the heightened terrorism threat. Is Washington right? The issue of European states’ defense spending has long been a transatlantic bugbear, with only a handful of European states meeting the NATO target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. Yet the internal response to terrorist threats needs to come largely from a non-military perspective, accepting that conventional military operations to degrade the Islamic State (such as airstrikes in Iraq and Syria) will largely be ad hoc decisions by the more militarily powerful European states. Where European states arguably need to be smarter is in directing some of their finite defense resources towards procuring kit with a counterterrorism application, such as drones, and burden-sharing on the development and procurement of intercompatible high-cost platforms. This is now complicated by the resurgence of Russian assertiveness in foreign policy, which means that any tilt toward defense procurement in asymmetric warfare also needs to be balanced against more traditional interstate considerations.

How, in your view, will IS react to being fought harder? Drawing the West more closely into military engagement is precisely what the Islamic State wants. It feeds into their narrative of the West as aggressor; civilians will be killed as a result of Western airstrikes and this will be exploited for propaganda purposes on social media; and military intervention remains unpopular with large segments of European populations. We have seen the Islamic State expanding substantially in the past year through its wilayat (province) model, and a further expansion is likely before any rollback starts to take place. Countries to watch include Libya, which is likely to be a locus for future Islamic State activities, and Morocco, which has contributed a large number of participants to the battlefield in Syria and which has avoided major attacks in the last 18 months only because of its relatively efficient security services.

It is often said that “there is no military solution to IS” – do you agree? And what else is needed? There is indeed no uniquely military solution to the problem – to retake Raqqa, for instance, would require a substantial military ground force that is currently not in the cards. Many politicians talk of a “generational struggle”, and I think that’s largely the case. What is needed is a much more coordinated and comprehensive roll-out of so-called “counter-narratives” on social media to dissuade potential recruits, and that requires theological engagement to debunk some of the Islamic State’s doctrinal justifications for its actions. Increasing security budgets and manpower may help to mitigate the threat somewhat, but they do nothing to challenge the Islamic State’s powerful appeal to susceptible youths.

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – January/February 2016 issue.

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The Bundeswehr operation is being undertaken in the framework of an alliance against terror, an alliance that is meant to fight and diminish the so-called Islamic State (IS), but not really to end the civil war. Combatting IS, however, should be only one element – albeit an important one – of a comprehensive strategy to end the war and to establish a post-war order in Syria. And the latter must be approached in steps: it is important that Bashar al-Assad will no longer be the head of a future Syrian government. When that is accomplished, a strategy for the reconstruction and stabilization of Syria must be implemented – otherwise any anti-terror strategy will only be tilting at windmills, as Islamic fundamentalism will continue to feed off ongoing conflicts in the region’s several failed states.

The current military activity is not entirely without logic; but unless this anti-terror operation is paired with a regional peace and rehabilitation strategy, it will not pacify the region or contain terror in the medium- or long-term.

That said, rebuilding Syria will cost a great deal of money. Syria is a devastated country. But we don’t have the luxury to decide if we want to take on another nation-building project post-Afghanistan; there is simply no alternative here. Along with the problems created by Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the war in Syria is yet another fundamental, perhaps even historic threat to the European Unionʼs cohesion and existence.

In the first EU security strategy paper released in 2003, it was stressed that the EU should strive to establish a “ring of well-governed states” to the East and to the South. We have such a ring – but only as long as we are talking about current or near-future EU member states. Even there, we have not yet exactly achieved our goal.

The reality is that the vision of the European Union established 12 years ago – a union that would be surrounded by a cordon of stability, growing prosperity, and cooperation, both with the Mediterranean countries in the South and South East and the post-Soviet countries in the East – has broken down completely. Thus the question of Syria must be tied into a broader review of European security planning. It is time to revise the previous strategy, and to ask what went wrong and why.

If the EU wants to claim and show that it has a common foreign policy, it must do more than provide a selective response to a terrorist attack in Paris. This will be the great task of the EU over the coming years – developing a long-term strategy, for which a great deal of resources and engagement will be required aside from funds needed for military engagements.

Because of the relative withdrawal of the United States, there is a certain vacuum in the MENA region that is being filled by Russia and Iran, whose position have grown even stronger. That may lead to new rivalries in the region, rather than greater stability. Since other actors are not in a position to play the role of regional stabilizers, the EU should help establish a security architecture for the Middle East. We are now dealing with problems that touch on our own security interests rendering a comprehensive European strategy – one that encompasses European financial and development resources, along with military cooperation – absolutely necessary. The EU will also have to be able to act (with others) in certain areas to establish a deterrent capacity, and through it to establish stability.

Which elements might such an approach entail? One, though perhaps not the most decisive, is greater concentration of national security competencies at the EU level.

The December 2013 European Council focused on EU security and defense policy; the resulting paper was titled “Defense Matters”. One does not need to read the rest; it contained very few real commitments to undergird this proclamation. The EU has thus far not considered it necessary to actually pursue its objectives in this area, including the development and completion of a common foreign policy. The Lisbon Treaty, which in theory laid the groundwork for this, can serve as the basis for further integration steps – and for strengthening the role and visibility of the pertinent European institutions. This refers to, in particular, the role of the Council President and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

What we have experienced – and not just in the financial and Euro crises, but also in foreign policy disputes with Russia and the various crises in the MENA region – is not a common policy, but intergovernmental approaches. And one only rarely sees any inclination to transfer these jobs to EU bodies.

If Berlin is to take on a leading role – a desire expressed both within and outside Germany – it cannot and should not simply provide a direction for the rest of Europe to follow. There are better ways for Germany to play the role of a leader: the Federal Republic could put its foreign policy weight behind strengthening the visibility, credibility, and capability of the European Union as a whole. It is regrettable that, despite four years of failure in the Middle East and several hundred thousand casualties, it required a decision by the United States and Russia to convene the peace conference in Vienna – why were the EU Council President and the President of the Commission not empowered months ago to invite the concerned parties themselves, in the name of 500 million Europeans?

After all, the population of the entire Russian Federation is not even a third that of the European Union – Russia only remains a great power due to its military capacities in certain limited areas.

Germany should therefore throw its weight and its credibility as a non-nuclear weapons power and its credibility of not being a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council behind an effort to achieve an EU foreign policy that is more than intergovernmental. This could be Germanyʼs great potential contribution to the future of Europe – and German citizens should also recognize that this is one area in which “more Europe” will not simply mean greater budgetary contribution. Quite the opposite: through a more unified European foreign policy, crises can be managed more effectively, even saving money, as the member states could avoid duplicating expenditures in areas like defense and equipment, among many others.

This does not yet mean taking the leap and forming a European army; it makes more sense to keep more feasible steps in mind, such as more comprehensive pooling and sharing and the avoidance of doubling capacities. The budgetary contributions of the 28 EU members amount to almost half of US defense expenditures – but the EU produces only about 10 percent of the United States’ combat power. What a waste of resources, year after year!

Coming back to Syria, the approach adopted by the Vienna Conference is sound: but the EU should play the leading role in this process, instead of a supporting one.

For the EU, regional stability needs to be one of its key goals – including a balancing arrangement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Russia obviously has its own interests in the process. Regarding this last point, criticism should not be aimed at Russia for defining and defending its own interests, but rather at the means it uses to achieve them. The fact that Russia wants to be directly involved in establishing a post-war order in Syria, rather than being locked out like in the cases of Iraq or Libya, is not unacceptable.

This Vienna Process offers a chance to not just lay the groundwork for peace in Syria specifically, but to go further and develop a shared understanding of how the various actors in the region should deal with one another in the future.

In the long term, this region needs something like a Helsinki Process. The Helsinki principles were controversial in Europe, yet it was possible to codify them in 1975. There is of course no guarantee that such rules will always be observed. In Europe, they were openly violated in the recent Ukrainian crisis. Yet rules of conduct are useful, even if they are occasionally bent or broken.

The development of a rule book in the MENA region should be one of our strategic long-term goals. In light of the continuing wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and other countries, that may seem like a pipe dream at the moment; yet this vision should not be ignored or forgotten as the Vienna process is driven forward.

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This time Germany really moved quickly. Only one day after French President Francois Hollande asked Chancellor Angela Merkel for military help against the so-called “Islamic State” (IS) in Syria, the Berlin government came back with a substantial package.

German soldiers will not attack IS directly, but they will provide intelligence and logistics to make France’s bombing attacks more effective. And while German officials still do not want to speak of a war, it’s clear that this is going to be a serious combat mission.

This turnaround for a nation so deeply skeptical of war is remarkable, yet there are compelling reasons for Germany’s military engagement: with the threat of terrorism ever more present, the German government has come to believe that IS needs to be dealt with militarily. At the same time, Germany’s historic bonds with France put it under particular obligation after the terrorist attacks of November 13.

The Bundeswehr will send a frigate to protect France’s aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, in the eastern Mediterranean. It will also provide up to six specially equipped Tornado airplanes to help identify bombing targets, and a German tanker aircraft will help French planes to gas up mid-air. In total, the Syria effort will involve about 1,200 soldiers, making it the country’s biggest mission abroad.

Further afield, Germany will backfill for France in Mali, sending an additional 650 soldiers to help control the dangerous north of the country. Finally, it will increase the number of German soldiers active in training and equipping Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq from 100 to 150.

Altogether, this amounts to a serious effort. The new missions are dangerous: German pilots could be shot down over Syria, while German soldiers could be ambushed in Mali. At the same time, joining the alliance against IS is likely to make Germany an even more attractive target for Islamist terrorists.

Skeptics Asking Questions

There are skeptics – and not just amongst the opposition parties, but also within Merkel’s coalition. How effective will the mission be, given that the United States has been bombing the Islamists in Syria and Iraq for 15 months without tangible results? Will the West be drawn into deploying ground troops? And does it have any kind of exit strategy?

In the absence of a clear UN mandate, there are also doubts about the legal basis for the intervention. The fight against IS might force the West to come to an agreement with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, a ruthless dictator responsible for killing at least 200,000 of his citizens since 2011.

Popular support for Germany’s new mission is shaky at best. A poll published in late November showed 47 percent in favor and 46 percent against the proposed Syria mission. This lukewarm support could quickly deteriorate further if German soldiers are killed, or if German reconnaissance errors lead to civilian casualties in Syria.

All of this is, of course, perfectly well known to the chancellor and her advisers. In her ten years in power, Angela Merkel has always been extremely reluctant to engage in military missions. In 2011, she refused to join the alliance led by France and Britain that toppled Libya’s dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. Merkel’s decision on Libya caused enormous strain within Europe and NATO, yet Merkel stood firm. The outcome of the Libyan campaign – a failed state dangerously close to Europe – seems to have proven her right.

This time around, however, Berlin has acted quickly and decisively to support France militarily. “When the French president asks me to think about what more we can do, it is our duty to think about it,” Merkel said at a meeting with Hollande in Paris last week. “Military means are needed to fight the Islamic State.”

The “Clearest Case of Evil Since Pol Pot”

Indeed, the Paris attacks and the subsequent terror scares in Germany and Belgium seem to have led to a profound change of attitude in Berlin. IS is now regarded as an evil that will continue to spread unless it is countered militarily; should the Islamists continue to terrorize the regions under their control in Syria and Iraq unchecked, they will also hatch new terrorist plots against the West. “Against IS, soft power will achieve nothing,” said a high-ranking government official. “IS is the clearest case of evil since Pol Pot.”

Just as importantly, Merkel and her government are conscious of what it would mean to disappoint France’s expectations. Franco-German relations remain the most important anchor for European integration. Given the trouble that Europe is currently in, Germany simply cannot afford to let its closest ally down.

The euro crisis has left bitter resentment against Germany; so has the refugee crisis. In Britain, polls show that the anti-EU camp might actually win the referendum on EU membership. And just look at how pleased the new Polish government is with itself for doing away with the EU flag at its press conferences.

In all of this, Merkel and Hollande have made huge – and astonishingly successful – efforts to keep up a united front. That would certainly have been blown to bits if Germany had failed to respond to France’s call for help after the terrorist attacks. If IS had managed to sow dissent between Paris and Berlin, its November 13 attacks would have marked an important strategic victory. Upholding the Franco-German relationship, and with it, a chance to put Europe back on a more even keel, is the single most important argument for Germany’s new military mission.

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© REUTERS/Alexander Zemlianichenko/Pool

When Iranian parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani addressed the participants at the October 15 Valdai Club (the topic was “War and Peace”) he was wearing black, as is traditional among Shiites on Ashura in commemoration of the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali. However, the mere fact that Larijani was invited to share a panel with Russian president Vladimir Putin surely must have cheered up the mood in Tehran – as well as Putin’s statements, which depicted the Islamic Republic as an indispensable partner in the search for a solution to the war in Syria and in the fight against the so-called Islamic State (IS).

But is this Tehran-Moscow axis a tactical marriage of convenience, or does it herald the emergence of a strategic alliance?

On the surface, the two states have several converging policy designs, including the immediate objectives of preventing the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s Ba’ath regime in Damascus and the defeat and annihilation of what remains of United States-backed opposition groups in Syria, as well as the long-term total humiliation of the US and its allies in an attempt to roll back the post-Cold War American world order.

And it would seem the two have arrived at a certain division of labor to achieve these objectives. Since September 30, 2015, Russia has been conducting air operations in Syria, both to destroy opposition forces and to provide air support to the Syrian army, and it has intensified its arms deliveries to Damascus. Iran, on the other hand, is providing the boots on the ground, supplementing what remains of the Syrian army with Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) forces, Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, and Shiite militias from Iraq, Afghanistan, and even distant Pakistan.

This arrangement minimizes the risk of Russian and Iranian losses, which is essential for Russia in particular, as it still struggles with the painful “Afghanistan syndrome” and suffered a devastating blow on October 31 when an IS affiliate succeeded in bringing a bomb onto a Russian airliner departing from the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing 224 vacationers and crew members. But the Iranian authorities are also keen to avoid casualties, which carry the risk of shifting public opinion, and so are happy to leave the heavy lifting to the more willing, and more politically expendable, Shiite militias and irregulars.

Limits of Convergence

The convergence may come to a sudden end, however, as the two sides discuss in greater detail the relative degree of order and stability they hope to achieve in Syria. Iran may want a perpetual low intensity conflict, where it may conveniently use the threat of the IS as a bogeyman in its relations with the US and the Europeans and thus legitimize its continued military presence.

Russia, on the other hand, is more likely to prefer a Syrian regime that is weak enough to be dependent on Moscow for continued support, but also strong enough to be able to effectively exercise its power throughout the entire territory of its state. An estimated 7,000 Russian citizens have reportedly joined the ranks of IS, from which they may turn their attention to the volatile regions of the Northern Caucasus or Central Asia. One therefore expects Putin to aim for nothing less than the total elimination of all pockets of IS resistance in Syria. Indeed, if this was not already his goal, the successful downing of the Russian airliner over the Sinai desert clearly will have made it more difficult to accept, however tacitly, any IS presence anywhere.

This difference in perspective most likely also translates into different views on the possible duration of the two states’ respective engagements in Syria. If Tehran actually prefers a continued low-intensity conflict, it will worry less about when the conflict ends and how it can eventually exit in a coherent way. Moscow, on the other hand, is restricted much more by time, and the Russian public is unlikely to accept a military involvement counted in years and trillions of rubles.

Moreover, the apparent lack of an exit strategy notwithstanding, the Kremlin surely must be thinking long and hard about how to leave Syria gracefully in case the US and its allies refuse to accept Bashar al-Assad as the legitimate ruler of Syria. Russia will only be able to provide military life support to Assad as long as Russian public patience lasts, but will find it difficult to leave him alone to be toppled by IS or one of the numerous opposition groups hoping for his downfall.

A related point of contention is that of the fate of Bashar al-Assad himself. While Moscow may be ready to replace him with another leader to save a regime subservient to Moscow, Tehran – the IRGC in particular – considers the preservation of Assad the only guarantee of regime survival in Syria.

Fundamental Distrust

Even more critically, however, the Russian-Iranian relationship is still complicated by a fundamental mutual distrust between the two parties.

By asserting itself in the Syrian theater of war, Russia demonstrates to the Iranians its superior military capabilities, insists that to sidestep it would be a bad decision, and tries to keep Iran within its sphere of influence. At the same time, Russia may also sell out Iranian interests in Syria if it manages to extract concessions from the US. Such a course would be consistent with existing Russian policy of using the Islamic Republic as a bargaining chip in its dealings with the US.

Putin’s claim at the Valdai Club that Moscow had been “deceived by the United States” with regard to Iran’s nuclear program was a crude attempt at covering his government’s support of UN Security Council sanctions against Iran, while simultaneously extracting money and political concessions from Tehran in return for not allowing even harsher resolutions.

The political leadership of the Islamic Republic is only too aware of Putin’s scheming. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, however, along with the accompanying removal of the international sanctions regime have made Tehran less dependent on Russia, and seem to provide Tehran with greater maneuverability between Washington and Moscow. Iran’s use of US air support in the spring 2015 seizure of the Iraqi city of Tikrit – and Moscow’s fear of more instances of military cooperation between Tehran and Washington – may have been one of the motives behind Russia’s military engagement in Syria.

Bashar al-Assad, too, has an interest in gaining greater independence. By using his Russian benefactor, the Assad regime hopes to reduce its total dependence on the benevolence of Tehran, which may cause some tension between Iran and Russia, with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Putin both competing for the position of master of Damascus and architect of the future order of Syria.

The official speeches in both Tehran and Moscow may celebrate the close ties between the two states and their joint efforts to save the “legitimate” ruler of Syria , thus restoring what they see as a lost international order. But behind the curtain problems abound, and the tactical cooperation which we are seeing now will have a difficult time developing into a fully fledged strategic partnership.

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© REUTERS/Mohamed al-Sayaghi

To date, it is unclear what the real Saudi political endgame in Yemen is. Thus far, the kingdom’s actions appear to have only exacerbated tensions in the country. Air strikes have hit Yemen’s critical infrastructure and more importantly have sparked a humanitarian crisis in the country with several million people in need of food and other basic supplies. On April 21, the Saudi-led coalition announced the end of Operation Decisive Storm claiming it had achieved its military objectives. A new operation, called Restoring Hope, should focus on a political solution in Yemen and on counter-terrorism at home. …

Read the complete article in the Berlin Policy Journal App – July/August 2015 issue.

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