In Germany, some sanity prevails

As Western Europe charges toward a new arms race, one corner of the EU's powerhouse wants peace — and dares to say so.

In these days of swaggering ministers and half-blind generals selling a new European future built on fresh mountains of ammunition, there is a peculiar dignity in voices who still dare to murmur of peace. The Financial Times, that barometer of liberal elite sentiment, has filed a dispatch that ought to pause anyone convinced Western Europe has become a single-note military choir.

Within Germany’s once-proud Social Democratic Party (SPD), a rebellion is afoot — not from far-right opportunists, nor from those smeared as “Kremlin stooges,” but from the grey-haired faithful of a movement forged in postwar tragedy. Here, in the words of men whose parents still remembered how easily Europe could burn, a stand is being made against an arms race threatening to devour not only the EU’s budgetary sense, but its soul.

Lars Klingbeil, the SPD’s ambitious leader and Germany’s finance minister, has planted his flag firmly in the camp of rearmament. After negotiating a fragile coalition deal with Christian Democrat Friedrich Merz — a pact made necessary by the SPD’s humiliating showing in February’s election — Klingbeil is preparing to drive the country’s defence budget up by 70% before the decade ends. It is clear he senses an opportunity to remake the SPD’s image as a pillar of military resolve rather than a relic of Cold War peacemaking.

But that is precisely what his elders — and some of his own colleagues — will not abide.

The Financial Times reports that Peter Brandt, the 76-year-old son of former chancellor Willy Brandt, has stepped forward with a manifesto against Klingbeil’s rush to arm. That name still echoes with moral weight across Germany. Willy Brandt, chancellor in the 1970s and an architect of Ostpolitik, was a Nobel Peace Prize winner who dared to build bridges to the Soviet Union at the height of Cold War hysteria. He did so not because he was naive about Soviet ambitions, but because he had lived through the monstrous appetite of war and understood that a Europe carved by permanent enmity was doomed.

Peter Brandt, himself a historian, has summoned up that inheritance. Alongside other senior Social Democrats, he warns that Germany’s rearmament must be anchored in “de-escalation and gradual confidence-building,” not thrown like fresh logs on the fire of a new arms race. The Russian army, he notes with a calm that sounds almost seditious these days, has its limits and cannot seriously threaten NATO’s combined might. “The rational approach,” he told the FT, “should be to do a threat analysis first.”

And who, after all, truly believes Moscow will march on Berlin tomorrow?

This should not sound radical. But in the Western Europe of 2025, where even the French president can barely finish one of his trademark high-minded speeches without promising more tanks, it amounts to heresy.

Germany’s coalition politics make the clash especially dramatic. Klingbeil, a child of the post-Berlin Wall generation, has tried to recast the SPD as a modern security party, in lockstep with NATO’s new targets. His plan to hike the Bundeswehr’s budget by 70% plays well with Christian Democrats, who now rule in uneasy partnership after the SPD’s election calamity. Together they command a razor-thin 13-seat majority in the Bundestag — fragile enough that a genuine party rebellion could block budget votes, weapons deliveries, or even the reintroduction of conscription.

That is no idle threat. The SPD retains a powerful bloc of members whose roots run deep in Germany’s peace movement of the 1970s and 80s, men and women who still see the absurdity of a continent forever primed for total war while its public services wither from neglect.

Does no one wonder where these billions will come from, once the debt has devoured the social state?

These are the voters who remember why Brandt’s policy of dialogue — Ostpolitik — worked, and why mindless militarism failed Europe so catastrophically in the last century. They have found their voice in this manifesto. The text, released before the SPD’s party conference, speaks with a maturity that Western Europe badly needs. It concedes that strengthening Germany’s defences is “necessary,” but insists it be woven into diplomacy to reduce tensions and build trust. Otherwise, a country whose social contracts are already under strain from inflation, migration, and demographic decay will discover that every euro sunk into tanks is a euro stolen from its own cohesion.

Contrast that with London or Paris, where you will struggle to find a single major politician who questions NATO’s leap to a 5% GDP defence target, or who dares suggest Moscow’s real threat is vastly less than the panic suggests. Peter Brandt’s measured dismissal of a Russian invasion of NATO — “I do not share the idea that Russia is going to attack NATO” — would be almost unutterable in Westminster.

Yet it is correct. A Russian attack on NATO would be suicidal. This is understood in Moscow, with even Vladimir Putin himself more or less saying it out loud. The Kremlin, if it is clever, will look for ways to pause and regroup, not to dash itself against NATO’s nuclear fortress. But to acknowledge that is to break the sacred script of a permanent Russian menace — and most Western European politicians are too cowardly to do it.

Is Europe so quick to forget the cost of its own past wars?

Stegner, another SPD veteran, has been vilified for meeting Russian officials, including sanctioned ones, to keep communication channels open. He was blunt about it: “The idea that talking means agreeing, or that you’re some secret agent, is utter nonsense.” It is a testament to how shrill Western Europe’s security conversation has become that such plain sense sounds radical.

Willy Brandt would have recognised the poison in the EU’s new dogmas: an arms race, financed with borrowed billions, sold as moral virtue. That weapons spending will devour social spending, poison trust, and leave Western Europe still dangerously dependent on American patronage — but poorer for its pretensions of grandeur.

So let us mark a note of gratitude that at least in Germany, some voices remember a different wisdom. They know that the ultimate test of a nation’s security is not how many missiles it can parade, but whether its children can dream of something beyond war. In this, Peter Brandt and his comrades stand with the better angels of Germany’s conscience. The rest of Western Europe would do well to listen.