by Michael Hollister
German version published at apolut media on July 02, 2026

4.185 words * 22 minutes readingtime

The Shelter Germany Is Leaving – Part 1: The Finding

In-depth analysis instead of daily information overload.

What options Germany’s movement opens for others – and why no one is asking the question.

On June 3, 2026, Germany lost a vote it had never lost since reunification. In the election of non-permanent members to the UN Security Council, the Federal Republic received 104 votes – fewer than Austria with 131 and Portugal with 134. A total of 191 states voted; the required two-thirds majority stood at 127. Germany had held a seat on the Council six times before, most recently in 2019 and 2020, and had run every eight years without ever failing. This time it was eliminated in the first round, the result announced by Annalena Baerbock in her capacity as President of the General Assembly. The second-largest contributor to the UN system, a country that had understood itself as a multilateralist for decades, could not secure a majority. The magnitude of the fall is quantifiable: in its previous candidacy, Germany had received 184 of 190 votes cast and entered with overwhelming support. Eight years later, 104 remained; the federal government announced it would not run again until the 2035/36 and 2043/44 terms.

The causes are disputed, and that is part of the finding. Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul blamed primarily the late entry – Germany had only declared its candidacy in 2024, while Vienna and Lisbon had campaigned for years – and simultaneously faulted Moscow for working behind the scenes against the bid. Others pointed to the accusation of double standards: the chairman of the German United Nations Association cited the criticism of many states that Germany insisted vehemently on international law when it came to Hamas yet far less so regarding Israel’s conduct of war. Added to this was the fact that the chancellor himself, at the G7 summit in June 2025, had called the war against Iran the “dirty work that Israel does for all of us” – a position that went far beyond restraint – along with the U.S. course of action in Venezuela. No single cause can be isolated. But a thread runs through the explanations, and it leads not to Vienna or Lisbon but to those regions of the world whose votes Germany once held securely: the Global South. What appears as a diplomatic defeat may be the first visible symptom of a quieter movement – one whose traces are found not in the General Assembly hall in New York but in the factory floors of Gauting, Schrobenhausen, and Ludwigsfelde.

The Question Posed in the Subjunctive

Part 1 of this analysis outlined a finding: Germany is moving, in four stages – political alignment, financial and military aid, arms production on German soil, conversion of civilian industry – out of a protective space under international law whose exact boundary international law itself does not define. The third stage rests on an unspoken assumption: that German sites are considered safe from Russian attack, while factories in Ukraine are not, due to the war. It is precisely this assumption of safety that Part 2 takes up.

The question is not whether Russia would be within its rights to attack German sites. The question is: what options does Germany’s own movement open for an adversary that the adversary did not previously have – and is the Federal Republic aware of this? Whether Russia will exercise those options is the subject of a debate barely conducted in the political mainstream – though very much so in the broader public. But whoever makes the possible more probable while remaining silent about the destination of his own movement owes himself the question of consequences. It is the more uncomfortable continuation of the question from Part 1: there, the issue was whether Germany is moving; here, it is what that movement enables. Three scenarios can be thought through. All three are cast in the subjunctive, all three reproduce Russian lines of argument rather than German attributions of blame. And all three end at the same point: where argumentation stops and decision begins.

Scenario One: The Factory as a Target

The first scenario concerns the law of armed conflict. International humanitarian law contains a clear category for objects that may be attacked. Under the definition recognized in customary international law, codified in Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and in Rule 8 of the Customary International Humanitarian Law study by the International Committee of the Red Cross, military objectives are those objects which by their nature, location, purpose, or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose destruction offers a definite military advantage. The ICRC explicitly names the munitions factory as a textbook example – and notes that civilians working in such a factory share the risk of an attack on that target without themselves being combatants.

Precisely such objects are now being created on German soil. The facility operated by Quantum Frontline Industries near Munich manufactures combat drones one hundred percent for an actively belligerent state; the joint venture Auterion Airlogix is set to produce thousands of autonomous drones with ranges of up to approximately 930 miles, designed for strikes deep into Russia; in Schrobenhausen, Patriot guided missiles roll off the production line. According to research by the news service German Foreign Policy, the stated reason for relocating part of this production to Germany lies explicitly in the fact that German sites are considered safe from Russian attack – while factories in Ukraine are not, due to the war. It is precisely this assumption of safety that is under examination here. By the standards that any belligerent power applies to military objectives, these factories could be classified as military targets. That is neither a German finding nor a Russian one – it is the logic of the law of armed conflict itself, and it holds regardless of who articulates it.

That a conflict party is prepared to execute this logic on foreign soil is not a theory. On June 23, 2025, during the Twelve-Day War, Iran struck the U.S. air base Al Udeid in Qatar in retaliation for the American strikes against its nuclear facilities – the largest American base in the Middle East. What was remarkable was the precision of the distinction: Iran targeted the base, not Qatar. Tehran explicitly emphasized that the strike was not directed against “friendly and brotherly” Qatar, and Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari confirmed that Iran had declared months earlier that U.S. bases on foreign soil would become legitimate targets in the event of an American attack on Iranian territory. It was Iran’s second strike against a U.S. base after the attack on Ain al-Asad in Iraq in 2020; the pattern continued in the fighting of 2026. A belligerent power thus distinguished between the host country and the military installation on its soil – and struck the installation. Also notable was the calibration: Iran announced the strike in advance to keep it manageable – evidence that a belligerent power can hit a military object on foreign soil while simultaneously attempting to control escalation.

Transposed to the German situation, this would produce a scenario that the official safety assumption does not account for. But here a sharp line must be drawn: the classification of an object as a military target belongs to the law in war and governs what may be attacked within an already existing armed conflict. It does not, however, create a right to war – that is, no authority to open a new front against a state that is not yet a party to the conflict. The leap from the sentence “the factory is a military target” to the sentence “Russia may therefore attack German soil” presupposes that Germany is already a party to the conflict. Yet Part 1 identified precisely this threshold as indeterminate and disputed by the official German position. The scenario does not resolve this question. What it shows is that the assumption of German safety rests on a threshold that Germany is progressively shifting through its own actions.

Added to this is a second, scarcely considered barrier – the one official Berlin assumes will absorb everything. Were Russia actually to strike a German site, the result would be what might be called the NATO trap. Many regard Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty as an automatism that deters any attacker. The text says otherwise. Each ally commits to assisting the attacked partner with “such action as it deems necessary” – action that may include military force but need not. Each state decides for itself; even triggering the collective-defense clause requires consensus within the alliance. This cuts both ways. Germany could not rely on automatic military assistance, nor would a limited strike necessarily trigger the feared automatic conflagration. It is precisely this political discretion that might leave Germany absorbing a calibrated strike largely on its own – severe enough to hit, limited enough not to force an invocation of the alliance clause. Both comfortable assumptions – the safe protective space and the deterrent automatism – would be fragile at once.

Scenario Two: A Clause No One Has Deleted

The second scenario concerns a text that has stood unchanged in the Charter of the United Nations for eight decades. Articles 53 and 107 of the Charter contain the so-called enemy state clause. Under it, enforcement measures could be taken against the “enemy states” of World War II – primarily Germany and Japan – without special authorization from the Security Council, should these states resume an aggressive policy. The General Assembly repeatedly described the clause as defunct, most recently by consensus in Resolution 50/52 of December 11, 1995: “have become obsolete.” It was never deleted. The reason is procedural: deletion requires a formal amendment of the Charter under the process provided for that purpose, which has never been undertaken.

Precision is mandatory here, because much is asserted at this juncture. It is not the task of an analysis to rule on whether a provision that remains in the treaty text and was never deleted is obsolete because it was never applied. That is a judgment call, and it belongs to the reader. What is to be recorded are the findings. First finding: the text exists and, as the Research Services of the German Bundestag noted matter-of-factly in their 2017 briefing, “has never been formally amended since its adoption in 1945.” Second finding: the same briefing frames obsolescence not as fact but in the subjunctive – Article 107 “could in this respect be discussed as an example of a treaty provision losing its legal validity through consistent non-application.” It is the establishment itself that hesitates here, not a Kremlin-aligned voice.

That the clause is not dead paper but an instrument that has already been diplomatically retrieved is documented in the cabinet minutes of the German federal government. In 1968, in the context of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the negotiations over the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Moscow reminded Bonn of the clause via aide-mémoire. The three Western powers thereupon assured – in declarations of September 16 and 17, 1968 – that the enemy state clauses did not entitle the Soviet Union to unilateral force in the Federal Republic; on September 23, 1968, Bonn transmitted its own legal position to the Allies. The clause was thus once a real card on the negotiating table, not a historical fossil. Whoever declares it dead today is making a statement about its effect, not about its existence; the letter stands, the effect is contested. The scenario reads: a state could invoke the never-deleted text unilaterally – as a legitimation device, as a legal basis, as a justification for measures that would otherwise require authorization by the Security Council.

The counterposition deserves to be rendered fairly and in full. The federal government has held, since the accession of the two German states to the United Nations in September 1973, that the clause is obsolete; that Germany has sat on the Security Council multiple times and provided a president of the General Assembly demonstrates, the argument goes, that it exercises the full rights of an equal member. With the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990, the argument continues, the final settlement with respect to Germany was concluded, stripping the clause of any basis. And here lies the real twist: the argument from non-application that underpins the reassurance cuts both ways. Whoever says the clause has lapsed through consistent non-application is invoking the very principle of desuetudo that simultaneously exposes the fragility of the reassurance: it is a principle without a fixed expiration date, one that holds only as long as all parties adhere to it. The reassurance is fragile for a further reason: it rests on the Two-Plus-Four Treaty – the very treaty whose spirit Germany’s own movement is currently altering, as the third scenario shows.

The sharper barrier, however, lies in a different treaty. On August 12, 1970, the Federal Republic and the Soviet Union signed the Moscow Treaty, whose core was a mutual renunciation of force: both states committed, in accordance with Article 2 of the UN Charter, to refrain from the threat or use of force in their relations. Russia, as the successor state to the Soviet Union, is bound by this commitment – a binding reaffirmed by the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990, in which the Soviet Union itself participated as one of the four powers. Whoever sought to deploy the enemy state clause against Germany would simultaneously have to contend with his own treaty-based renunciation of force under the Moscow Treaty – two texts pulling in opposite directions. Which one outweighs the other is not an academic question. It is the question that presents itself on the day a state decides to elevate one text over the other – and acts.

Scenario Three: The Spirit of a Treaty

The third scenario concerns not a shot but a declaration – and not a breach of the letter but the erosion of a spirit. Over everything hangs a circumstance rarely recalled in day-to-day politics: World War II never ended for Germany with a classical peace treaty. In its place came the Two-Plus-Four Treaty of 1990, by its full title a “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany” – legally a settlement, not a peace treaty in the traditional sense, signed by the two German states and the four victorious powers, including the Soviet Union. In Article 2, it commits the Federal Republic to the declaration that only peace shall emanate from German soil; actions designed and undertaken with the intent to disturb the peaceful coexistence of nations, particularly to prepare a war of aggression, are unconstitutional and punishable under it. In Article 3, Germany renounces nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and caps its troop strength at 370,000.This treaty is the foundational basis on which the assumption rests that Germany is and will remain safe.

Against this spirit stands a different tone today. In his government declaration of May 14, 2025, Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced that the federal government would provide all the financial resources “the Bundeswehr needs to become the conventionally strongest army in Europe.” This, he said, was fitting for the most populous and economically powerful country in Europe, and the partners demanded it. The contrast to the language of the early Zeitenwende is measurable: a delivery of heavy weapons that was debated for weeks in 2022 runs as a footnote in 2026; the announcement of joint arms production appears as a business story. Between a treaty that aimed for “only peace” from German soil and the declared goal of the continent’s strongest conventional army – coupled with German soil producing long-range weapons for an active war – a tension arises. It is not a violation of law; Germany is not waging a war of aggression, and no serious jurist claims otherwise. It is an anomaly between letter and spirit that deserves to be named.

Even if one were to assume, following the Russian line of argument, that this foundational basis had been violated, the path would not lead where it is meant to go. The law of treaties recognizes, for cases in which one party violates its obligations, the principle of exceptio non adimpleti contractus – the plea of the unfulfilled contract – and, codified in Article 60 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the right to suspend one’s own obligations or terminate the treaty in the event of a material breach. The legal consequence of a treaty violation is thus suspension of obligations, not the opening of a right to use force. A treaty partner who called the foundational basis into question could shed his own commitments – a step with considerable political consequences, but no blank check for violence. This path, too, ends at the same barrier as the other two.

Into this picture fits a historical piece of the mosaic that must be handled with due caution. In December 2022, former Chancellor Angela Merkel stated in an interview with Die Zeit that the Minsk Agreement of 2014 had been “an attempt” “to give Ukraine time”; Ukraine had “used that time to become stronger.” The wording is not in dispute – it also appears in a federal government response in Bundestag printed paper 20/6861. Former French President François Hollande confirmed a few weeks later in the Kyiv Independent that Merkel had been “right on this point”; the achievement of the Minsk agreements was to have given the Ukrainian army “that opportunity” to better train and equip itself. Hollande referenced the Normandy Format, in which Poroshenko, Merkel, Putin, and he spoke monthly in lengthy phone calls about the progress of the Minsk protocols – a real, if grinding, process, not a mere maneuver. What is documented, then, is that the agreements bought time and that Ukraine used that time for military strengthening. What Merkel and Hollande described is a treaty whose stated purpose was not its central substance – but rather time gained for one side’s military strengthening. Russia calls that fraud. The EU service EUvsDisinfo classifies this reading as a pro-Russian distortion. Whoever reads the words of the signatories themselves can draw the conclusion in either direction – and that is precisely what makes this piece of the mosaic so explosive: the problem is not the interpretation but the fact that the words of both signatories allow it. What appears as a piece of a Russian argument rests on quotes spoken in Berlin and Paris.

Power Logic: Who Benefits from the Silence

The question cui bono leads here, too, not to a conspiracy but to a structure. Germany’s movement generates interests that make questioning the safety assumption uncomfortable. The Defense Ministry is planning procurement on the order of €400 billion; a struggling automotive industry, for which the German Association of the Automotive Industry projects the loss of up to 225,000 jobs by 2035, is seeking to fill capacity at plants whose civilian future is ending; defense corporations are seeking capacity for full order books. For an industry simultaneously suffering from high energy costs and a flagging economy, defense production is not primarily a political decision but a business one – and that is precisely what makes the conversion so difficult to reverse: it is driven not by ideology but by order books. When the state, through the development bank KfW, itself becomes a major shareholder in a tank manufacturer, the line between regulator and interested party blurs. In this constellation, hardly any relevant actor has an interest in asking loudly whether Germany’s protective space will hold.

Notable in this context is the climate surrounding the conversion. In Osnabrück, state security investigated an antimilitarist initiative that had criticized the defense minister; at a company assembly, the workforce was instructed not to speak with activists or the press. Of all places, the city of the Peace of Westphalia, which calls itself “City of Peace,” could become a site of expanded arms production. That is a finding, not a judgment – but it belongs in the picture of a debate that is being closed inward rather than opened, while outward every step appears without alternative.

Here the same fallacy must be avoided as in Part 1: from the fact that a question is uncomfortable and surrounded by interests, it does not follow that the reassurance is wrong. The official position may prove correct, and no scenario need come to pass. The power logic does not explain why the safety assumption is inaccurate – it explains why the question is so rarely asked. Above the business logic, however, lies a foreign-policy logic, and here the circle closes back to the beginning. A rearmament that appears without alternative domestically is read differently across much of the Global South – as the departure of a Germany that understood itself as an advocate of a rules-based order. The silence of some is the abstention of others. The defeat in New York, in which accusations of double standards and eroding support converged, is not proof – the causes are manifold, and the competitors had advantages. But it is a harbinger. A movement that promises security inward can produce isolation outward. What is intended as strength can prove a boomerang: the more clearly Germany becomes Europe’s leading military power, the less it is regarded by those who once saw it as the impartial multilateralist it wanted to be elected as.

Conclusion

Three scenarios, one finding. In each of the three cases, Russia can arrive at a conclusion Germany cannot want – from the classification of a factory as a military target, from a clause never deleted, from the erosion of a treaty. Whether Russia draws these conclusions is open. That the basis for doing so exists is not. Germany’s movement creates occasions, foundations, grounds for invocation – and it shifts the threshold beyond which one’s own safety is taken for granted, month by month, a little further, without so much as looking for it. This movement cannot be taken back. A production line into which a billion euros has flowed and on which thousands of jobs depend develops an inertia that defies political steering. What appeared politically reversible is anchored in business reality.

No one is saying Russia will exercise these options. The question is not addressed to Moscow; it is addressed to Berlin. A society that produces weapons for a war and simultaneously trusts that it will remain untouched by that war ought at the very least to be able to name what that trust rests on. It does not. It accepts the drones, celebrates the speed-of-light production, tallies the billions – and leaves the question of the price to silence. That is the real anomaly: not the movement, but the silence about its destination. Quo vadis, Germany? What is unsettling is not that the answer would be uncomfortable. What is unsettling is that a country is leaving the protective space without so much as glancing at the door behind it.

German version published at apolut.net on July 02, 2026

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About the Author

Michael Hollister
is a geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist. He served six years in the German military, including peacekeeping deployments in the Balkans (SFOR, KFOR), followed by 14 years in IT security management. His analysis draws on primary sources to examine European militarization, Western intervention policy, and shifting power dynamics across Asia. A particular focus of his work lies in Southeast Asia, where he investigates strategic dependencies, spheres of influence, and security architectures. Hollister combines operational insider perspective with uncompromising systemic critique – beyond opinion journalism. His work appears on his bilingual website (German/English) www.michael-hollister.com and in investigative outlets across the German-speaking world and the Anglosphere.

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