Germany: Cyberdome Über Alles?

Germany is mooting a “cyberdome,” a defensive shield against drones and other forms of sabotage, in response to Russia’s failed attack against the Leipzig/Halle airport. “These attacks will increase, but we can defend and protect ourselves,” is how the interior minister at Berlin, Alexander Dobrindt, frames the effort. It’s hard to imagine this defensive crouch serving as much of a deterrent against the Kremlin’s mounting aggression, though.Germany’s response instead calls to mind the old Soviet aphorism, credited to Lenin but later popularized by President Nixon, a leader well-versed in Moscovite duplicity. “Probe with bayonets,” the old Soviet maxim goes. “If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.” In recent years President Vladimir Putin and his camarilla have been probing our allies in the North Atlantic Treaty and meeting with mush.Leipzig’s airport incident involved several explosives-laden drones that failed to detonate. The attempted attack, laid by Berlin to Russian saboteurs, is but the latest episode of what the Times calls a “dangerous pattern of escalation” by Moscow. Other recent cases, per the Times, involved “plots to place incendiary devices aboard DHL cargo planes,” to “blow up railroad tracks in Poland,” and to “burn down warehouses and shopping centers all over Europe.”Last summer, these columns cautioned that a Russian fighter jet incursion into Estonian airspace, after Kremlin drones meandered into Poland, was “being met mainly with verbal flak.” America’s former envoy to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Julianne Smith, argues that the lax response means that the Russians “have not been adequately deterred.” She adds that because “Moscow has not paid a price, Putin is interpreting that as a signal to keep going.”Yet Europe’s lack of spine could well reflect an awareness that the Continent lacks the defense capacity to mount any kind of effective resistance to Russia’s aggression. This point is underscored by columnist Walter Russell Mead, who notes in the Wall Street Journal that the European Union’s plans to strengthen its security posture are “going awry” despite boosting defense spending between 2020 and 2025 by some 80 percent.Mr. Mead laments the “economic rivalries and lack of coordination” that he predicts will “make it unlikely that European rearmament will achieve its goals.” He finds the Continent’s powers “aren’t yet thinking strategically.” Feature, he says, the exclusion of Great Britain “from core elements of the EU’s 150 billion euro lending program,” meant to help foster the creation of a “strong European defense industry.”The French daily Le Monde, in an editorial, reckons that the Leipzig attack means Moscow is engaged in “a deliberate testing of European resolve.” The Parisian paper credits Berlin with denouncing Russia as the culprit, but asks: “Can the response to an act of war really be limited to closing a consulate in Bonn and the Russian House of Science and Culture in Berlin, immediately followed by the closure of Goethe Institutes in Russia?”Le Monde concludes that the Leipzig response “cannot be limited to Germany alone,” and suggests escalating “actions targeting what has become Russia’s Achilles’ heel: its economy.” Such moves could push the Kremlin toward negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, but the military component of a deterrence strategy cannot be ignored. As George Washington put it in 1780: “There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet an enemy.”

Germany: Cyberdome Über Alles?

Germany: Cyberdome Über Alles?

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