At the risk of being repetitive, I want to pull together pieces written in this space over the past two years. The remilitarisation of Japan and Germany, and the claim that the West will not allow Israel to collapse.
There is a new development … If the war in Western Asia continues for much longer, the militaries of the belligerents will probably start running out of munitions. There is little reliable information about the actual quantities available to them or about their quality, but early in the US-Israel war, Gen Dan Caine, chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, raised alarm about a likely depletion of munitions. That concern was echoed in the Israeli media.
Into the breach, last month, stepped Germany. Reports in European media suggested that Volkswagen was exploring “viable options” for producing defence components for Israel. Cause for concern, and congruent with a shift previously written about in this column (about Japan’s remilitarisation), is Germany’s continued drive from post-war pacifism to an aggressive militarisation and domestic war preparedness not seen since about 1935.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz has upped the ante against non-Germans in a manner not seen since the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which specifically targeted “non-Germanic” people. Merz is a right-wing conservative and has been accused of xenophobic tendencies for his strict line on immigration, which Germans thought they had left behind.
In 1935 Germany spent about 6-billion reichsmarks on defence, the equivalent of €30bn-€40bn in 2025. (I used Deutsche Bundesbank data and tables of conversion. Trust but verify, dear reader.)
We have, then, in the first instance a political leader who has been criticised for denying people “German-ness … simply because of their appearance” in preparations for what Merz himself described as “large-scale deportations”.
Bear in mind that in the late 1930s Germany began to deport hundreds of thousands of non-Germans … In a second instance, the Military Service Modernisation Act, which came into effect on January 1, stresses that males between 17 and 45 would need approval to leave the country for longer than three months.
Here we have faint echoes of Germany’s Youth Law of 1936, which demanded loyalty and patriotism and encouraged war preparedness among young men. Tie this to a third instance, what the Atlantic Magazine referred to as “the new German war machine”. What the Financial Review of Australia described as abandonment of postwar pacifism and what the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung, a centre-right German think-tank, referred to as “the end of (unconditional) pacifism”.
Threat or ruse?
The Germans have justified remilitarisation because of “the Russia threat”. That may be true, but it may also be a ruse. For instance, the Europeans have for more than 500 years imagined a Russian threat. Since the Muscovy era, across the Tsarist period, the Soviet Union and into the current period, Russians have been described by Europeans as a “pig-headed” and “misguided” people who have to be tamed and civilised.
In 1835 the French politician Saint-Marc Girardin wrote: “If the Slavs who more and more are falling under Russian influence come to dominate Europe, farewell to all that I consider to be the freedom, verve and essence of European civilisation.”
The Europeans draw a direct line from Ivan the Terrible (1530–1684) to Peter the Great (1672–1725) and Vladimir Putin. Let us set that aside for another discussion.
So, two of the belligerents that were responsible for the death of tens of millions of people in 1914-45, Germany and Japan, are remilitarising and driving far-right, verging on xenophobic, polities.
Having discussed Germany above, the Japan Self-Defense Forces have been involved in indoctrinating children in elementary schools with militarism and war preparedness. The Tokyo Shimbun newspaper raised the alarm in May 2024. The Japanese justify their militarism on a perceived threat from China. Also for another discussion.
These all lead us back to Donald Trump’s “war of choice” against the people of Iran. Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, is an open Trump loyalist. Merz was the head of BlackRock’s German subsidiary, BlackRock Asset Management Deutschland AG. The UN reported last year that BlackRock was heavily implicated (financially and ideologically) in the Israeli war on Gazans.
It seems clear, given Volkswagen’s reported switch to manufacturing military equipment and Merz’s unflinching support for Israel, that the European world is on board for the current war and for Israel’s next war.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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