4,000 word essay, excerpted. They think that massive US expense for their protection is normal, and have a smug sense of moral superiority.
[WarOnThe Rocks] Unfortunately, strategic thinking is something that does not come naturally to younger German foreign policymakers. In fact, it is completely alien to us. For three decades, we have been cocooned away from the harsh world of power politics. The exceptional world that we grew up in was our normal. The ideas that developed out of 1989 were our convictions. Now that geopolitics, and specifically geopolitical power politics, is back, we are lost.
I experienced this many times, but it took me a while to realize that German millennials, the oldest of whom were born in the early 1980s, think about foreign policy in a peculiar way. The longer I lived outside Germany, and specifically in countries where geopolitical and strategic thinking is more common, the more I found myself baffled by some of the discussions my peers in Germany had. This was perfectly summarized by a fellow German millennial: "Geopolitics just sounds so much like troop movement!" he declared. This epitomizes in one statement several beliefs and convictions I encounter often among my German peers: a skepticism of geopolitics, an inability to think in terms of power and interest, and a rejection of the military as an instrument of politics. German millennials think of international politics in terms of values and emotions rather than interests. Of course, values and interests are not mutually exclusive and are often linked in a way that makes them difficult to disentangle. But, as Germans, we have learned to reject the interests part of the equation completely. My generation has developed an almost romantic idea of international relations. We see alliances as friendships and disagreements in terms of value differences. And German millennials struggle with the military — specifically the idea that the military is an element of geopolitical power. This is a phenomenon already prevalent among the German population (and strong among the Green Party, which could come into power in Germany after the September elections). But it is even more pronounced among millennials, as a recent poll shows: A higher number of millennials support reducing the German defense budget than any other age group, while support for a budgetary increase is lower among millennials than among all other groups.
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