When Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s federal president and former foreign minister, received the Kissinger Prize in November 2022, he gave a candid assessment of his country’s (and his own) foreign policy failures. Since the world has changed, he said, “we must cast off old ways of thinking and old hopes,” including the idea that “economic exchange will bring about political convergence.” In the future, Steinmeier declared, Berlin must learn from the past and “reduce one-sided dependencies” not just on Russia but also on China.
As the war in Ukraine rages on, few German politicians would take issue with the assertion that Berlin must reduce its energy dependence on Moscow. In fact, the German government has done so. And rhetorically, at least, German leaders are promising to ease the country’s economic dependence on China, as well. “As China changes, the way we deal with China must change, too,” German Chancellor Olaf Scholz argued in an op-ed for Politico in November. In a piece for Foreign Affairs magazine, he also argued for “a new strategic culture” as part of Germany’s Zeitenwende, or tectonic shift, in foreign policy, which he announced after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So far, however, Scholz has been reluctant to upset the status quo with Beijing—not least because Russia’s war and high energy prices have taken a toll on the German economy. Large German companies that are heavily dependent on China’s market are keen to expand their operations instead of cutting back.
