Wolfgang Schmidt asks for patience from allies urging his country to head efforts to support Ukraine.
Germany delivered the first of four long-promised Iris-T air defence systems to Ukraine on Tuesday. Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
Germany is still a “teenager” when it comes to foreign security policy, its chancellor Olaf Scholz’s chief of staff has said, asking for patience from western allies urging Europe’s largest economy to take a more proactive leadership in its support of Ukraine.
“We are getting into a situation that Americans have known for decades: people want us to lead,” said Wolfgang Schmidt, a longstanding ally of Scholz who also serves as the political point of contact for the country’s intelligence agencies.
“We are in the teenager years in that role,” he said, responding to criticism that Berlin has been slow to live up to the Zeitenwende or “epochal turn” on military and foreign policy Scholz had declared in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We are not yet an adult when it comes to foreign security policy. In teenager years you have a lot of hormones, there’s a lot of overshooting and shouting, you are not very sure of yourself and don’t know where your place is.”
Schmidt, who has rarely appeared in public since being appointed minister of special affairs last December, was speaking on a panel with the US historian Anne Applebaum that was chaired by the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, at a summit of progressive politicians and thinktanks in Berlin on Thursday.
The Social Democrat, who has been Scholz’s right-hand man through his tenure as mayor of Hamburg, German finance minister and now chancellor, denied that his government was failing to pull its weight in military terms.
“Germany is now the third largest supplier of military equipment to Ukraine, after the US and the UK,” Schmidt said at the Berlin Progressive Governance Summit. “I am not willing to accept that people are singling out and blaming Germany. That is a collective decision neither the French, the Brits, the Canadians nor the Americans are doing. No one is delivering their modern battle tanks to Ukraine.”
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