Hosted by Kat McCann and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Ian Buruma
Ian Buruma is the Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College and a former editor of the New York Review of Books. He is one of the leading writers on modern Japan and China, and also writes widely on European history and politics. His latest book, Stay Alive: Berlin 1939–1945, came out in March 2026. It covers daily life in wartime Berlin, drawing on letters, diaries, archives, and eyewitness accounts. Ian Buruma +2
He was born in The Hague in 1951 to a Dutch father and an English mother. He studied Chinese literature at Leiden University and then Japanese film at Nihon University in Tokyo. From 1975 to 1981 he lived in Japan, working as a film critic, photographer, and documentary filmmaker. He later served as cultural editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and as foreign editor of The Spectator. fantasticfictionWikipedia
His books include The Wages of Guilt, Inventing Japan, Murder in Amsterdam, Year Zero: A History of 1945, A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex, The Collaborators, and Spinoza. With Avishai Margalit he co-wrote Occidentalism. In 2008 he received the Erasmus Prize. His books have also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Episode Summary
For more than half a century, the two main Axis powers of WWII lived under strict limits on their militaries. Now both are rearming fast — driven by the threat of Russia in Europe and China in the Pacific, and by growing doubts about whether the US under Trump can still be relied upon.
Germany is pouring money into defense and rebuilding its arms industry. Japan has created a new intelligence service, is expanding its Self-Defense Forces, and is debating whether to revise Article 9 of its pacifist constitution.
Historian and journalist Ian Buruma — author of Stay Alive: Berlin 1939–1945 — joins former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove and journalist Kate McCann to explain how wartime guilt shaped both countries' foreign and defense policy for generations, and why that influence is now fading fast.
In this episode:
(00:00) Intro
(04:22) Sir Richard on ex-BND chief August Hanning
(08:47) How Germany and Japan responded to WWII
(13:11) Japan’s younger generation and Article 9
(22:11) Should Germany help fund Europe’s nuclear umbrella?
(23:50) Could Japan go nuclear?
(26:54) What is Article 9?
(28:48) Japan’s new intelligence service and arms industry
(32:55) The AfD, the firewall and German rearmament
(36:34) A populist Europe and the end of Pax Americana
(41:29) How the AfD weaponizes German history
(45:06) The one decision to watch
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Transcript
[00:00] BURUMA: I do think we're seeing the end of Pax Americana. Whoever gets elected after Trump, it's not going to go back to the sort of post-war deal that was struck, which also depended so much on the Cold War. It's probably time that large and powerful countries like Japan, South Korea, Western Europe took care of themselves more. It's not a healthy situation, this over-dependence on one country. In one way or another, Europeans and East Asians have to deal with this, whether it's Trump or anybody else.
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[00:35] DEARLOVE: I'm used to pretty intrusive interest in my private life given my profession. I was a field officer in Prague, and when I left the city, about 20 microphones were dug out of my house — because that's what it was like behind the Iron Curtain. But that's a high degree of intrusion. And more recently the Russians hacked my emails and spread those emails around the internet. And that's pretty unsettling. Well, Richard, you must have felt as though the Soviets were watching your every move, and now others are able to watch all your business online. They can find out a lot about you — your private addresses, private phone numbers, financial details, banking details, details about your family, where your children are, patterns of daily life, your travel. There's so much which is vulnerable. The worrying thing is that all that kind of information we just put out there almost routinely now, so it's available for all kinds of scammers and fraudsters.
This is why I use Incogni. They have a wonderful opt-out request which they can send to more than 420 data brokers. And they also have a people's search site facility which keeps your personal information, and they can continue to cover those so that you don't get relisted. On the unlimited plan, the exposure scanner shows where you're exposed across the web. And if you click on Remove Me, the Incogni specialists can then handle that material and scrub it. And you can track exactly what they're doing from a dashboard to which you will have access as an Incogni subscriber. That sounds very comprehensive and perhaps enables us all to protect ourselves like a former spy chief.
For that level of protection, go to incogni.com/onedecision and use code onedecision for 60% off the annual plan. That's incogni.com/onedecision.
INTRODUCTION
[02:47] MCCANN: Hello and welcome to One Decision, conversations about intelligence, about statecraft and the forces that drive world politics, with the people who've been in the room and on the ground. I'm your co-host, Kate McCann.
[03:00] DEARLOVE: Hi, and I'm Sir Richard Dearlove, the former Chief of MI6 British Intelligence. And Kate, it's great to see you again. We haven't seen each other for a few weeks.
[03:09] MCCANN: We haven't, and every time I hear you say that title, I think, my God, what a job. The things you must have in your brain. I never get bored of hearing it. We've got a really great conversation on the way today. Historic changes are stirring within the aggressors of World War Two. Germany and Japan are dramatically scaling up their militaries. They're spending a lot of money. They're developing intelligence services and whole new defense industries. And it means that both countries are shedding their limits on their armed forces, limits that have been in place for more than half a century. So how will that history shape their re-emergence as fully fledged regional powers? And what does it mean for all of us? Journalist and historian Ian Buruma joins us today. A Dutch citizen by birth, he spent significant time in both Japan and Germany. His most recent book is Stay Alive: Berlin 1939–1945. Welcome to the podcast, Ian.
[04:03] BURUMA: Thank you, it's lovely to be here.
AUGUST HANNING AND THE BND
[04:05] MCCANN: Now, before we get started on the topic that we wanted to discuss today, I think we have to get into the issue of August Hanning, because there is something happening in Germany and something happening in the German spy world that Sir Richard, I think at least you will have an opinion on. What's going on here?
[04:24] DEARLOVE: Well, I can only speculate because I don't have great detail at the moment. But August Hanning, the former head of the BND, who was contemporaneous with me when I was head of MI6, has been arrested on charges of treason — from what I've read. And I must say I'm deeply shocked. I knew August extremely well. We worked a lot together, although I haven't seen him since I retired. But I've had exchanges with him from time to time.
Reading between the lines, what I know so far is his chief of staff continued to serve subsequent heads of the BND and clearly was continuing to pass documents to August, and it seems as though August was giving those documents onward to a foreign government — maybe a business contact, but maybe an intelligence officer. It's not clear. And we don't know which country we're dealing with. That hasn't been announced. I was speculating myself whether it might be China. August I know was appointed to a number of prominent German boards and was quite heavily involved in aspects of German business. But it's a pretty extraordinary development and a worrying one.
I think the content of the material is probably more analytical and policy-related than espionage-related, because the BND as a service was not particularly operational — it was much more analytical. Anyway, those are my preliminary comments and I felt, given the subject matter of the podcast, it was important for me to mention this straight away at the beginning.
[06:05] MCCANN: Ian, what do you think it means for the reputation of the BND?
[06:09] BURUMA: In front of Sir Richard, I don't really want to say very much about this because I don't know enough, but it can't be good. And my question to Sir Richard really is: is Germany particularly vulnerable to this kind of thing? Because they seem to have had quite a few of these scandals — ever since Willy Brandt. Why is it Germany that always seems to be so porous?
WHY GERMANY IS POROUS
[06:31] DEARLOVE: Good question. And if you look at the history of the BND and the BfV — that's their Internal Security Service — they have suffered penetrations on a pretty regular basis since the end of the Cold War. There was a former head of the BfV who actually defected back to East Germany early on post-World War Two. And then in recent years, one of the senior officers in the BND — the case is still ongoing, it hasn't been finalized yet in the courts.
My original explanation would have been the division of Germany. And I think that's still reflected politically in the rise of the AfD, which has in my mind a specifically GDR, East German slant to it. And that division of the country — historically, if you read any scholarly study of Germany, part of Germany traditionally looks east. The Prussian Junkers often looked towards Moscow and Central Europe, and the Rhineland looked westwards towards France and the UK and to Europe more generally. So I think that division in Germany — unified Germany, but of course it didn't unify until Bismarck — is still reflected in its politics and in its culture.
[07:51] BURUMA: You think it's a sort of residual sympathy for Ostpolitik — ideological rather than simple corruption?
[08:00] DEARLOVE: I think it's a combination of both, if you want my honest opinion. And what was extraordinary is that the MfS — the East German Intelligence Service — found it so easy to penetrate the West German establishment, particularly when Willy Brandt and others were there. It was continuous and it was unnerving. And of course it reflected how other Western intelligence organizations dealt with the BND and the BfV. We were always worried about their security.
POST-WAR SETTLEMENTS: GERMANY AND JAPAN COMPARED
[08:29] MCCANN: Shall we use this as a good moment to set the tone for the conversation we're going to have today? Because there will be some people who really do understand the depth of the German and Japanese military situations. There'll be those who think, why would I ever need to know about that? So for all of us collectively together, Ian, can you set the tone for us a little? These two countries obviously were in a very different position after the Second World War. How did they react in the years that followed it? What did they do?
[08:59] BURUMA: Well, they weren't really all that different. They were obviously both Axis powers, both were occupied by the United States — Germany only partly, and there were other allies, but Japan pretty much only by the United States. And the difference is that the Allies, the US in particular, had to figure out what had gone wrong, why had these countries gone to war. In Germany, the answer was there'd been the Nazi government, Hitler. As long as you could denazify the country, they would join the Western alliance. It was a civilized country — the country of Mozart and Beethoven — and so on could be resurrected. In Japan there was no Hitler and no Nazi party. It was the same bureaucracy and power during the war that had been there before. So the answer was: it was militarism, the Samurai spirit. So Japan had to be demilitarized, and the Americans wrote a constitution that banned the Japanese from taking part in any kind of combat abroad, even though later they had their self-defense forces.
But otherwise it was rather similar. The deal that was made by the Americans with Western Europe, including Germany — very much including Germany — and Japan was: we will take care of security, you concentrate on rebuilding your economies and wealth, and that'll keep the world safe and make sure that neither the Japanese nor the Germans will ever go to war again. Now that's become more and more threadbare. The deal had already been crumbling a little before, but under Donald Trump it's become an acute crisis. And so both countries, I think, are faced with the same problem.
COLLECTIVE GUILT AND GENERATIONAL SHIFTS
[10:50] MCCANN: I suppose by different I meant different to us, which is my failure to explain the context properly. I suppose what I'm thinking about when I talk about that difference is maybe a sense of collective guilt, or a sense of a need to atone for what happened in the Second World War. Was that reflected in the German and Japanese responses to what happened afterwards?
[11:13] BURUMA: Well, that's a very interesting question. The cliché is always: the Germans have dealt so well with their guilt and faced up to history and all that, whereas the Japanese have swept it under the carpet — they're a shame culture, and this is a typical sort of Asian thing. In fact, the Japanese in the early years after the war, in the late 1940s and 1950s, in cinema, in academe and so on, which was fairly left-wing in those days, faced up to it more quickly than the Germans did. In Germany, when they talk about facing up to history, dealing with, coping with the past and all those things, people are really talking about West Germany. East Germany never had a problem with this because they were the anti-fascist half of Germany. So that was a different issue. But the West Germans did gradually deal with it. That meant mostly dealing with the Holocaust. In school education, the invasion of Norway or Belgium or Holland — that's not the issue. The issue is really the Holocaust.
And the Japanese didn't really have anything quite like that — they killed a huge number of people, but they didn't have anything quite like the Holocaust. And also in Japan, it became — because of this pacifist constitution — history became very political in the sense that the left and the majority of the Japanese population until not so long ago felt that it was right for Japan to have a pacifist constitution and never go to war again because of their war guilt. Now, as long as the left said that, the right — that wanted to revise the constitution and restore Japanese sovereignty and the right to go to war — had to say, well, there's nothing particularly to feel guilty about. All great nations have gone to war, bad things happen in war, and so on. And so what was really a political struggle over the post-war constitutional order also became a struggle over history.
[13:13] MCCANN: And has there been a shift in the younger generations?
[13:15] BURUMA: Yes, because the war has become rather remote — memories of the war. Young people know very little about it. History lessons at school tend to end before World War Two so that teachers don't have to deal with these difficult issues. If you look at the attitudes in polls to constitutional revision — in other words, revising the famous Article 9 that bans the Japanese from going to war — the people who are most vehemently opposed to revision tend to be the older generation, who do still have vague memories or at least had parents who had memories. The young are more sympathetic to it.
CONSTITUTIONAL RESTRAINTS AND INTELLIGENCE ALLIANCES
[14:00] DEARLOVE: The question I was going to ask you, Ian, or ask you to comment on, really relates also to my professional experience in the period well after World War Two, when both Germany and Japan are really important allies politically. But dealing with them, dealing with their bureaucracies — whether you're talking about the armed forces or whether you were talking about the intelligence communities there — was a deeply frustrating experience, because they were constitutionally bound, both Japan and Germany. They were awash with intelligence opportunities and there was a sort of fundamental inability to exploit their positions geopolitically.
So we had these allies that had a permutation of experience and potential ability, and it was completely unexpressed. I can give you a specific example — Japan's relationship with North Korea and the massive North Korean community that you've actually got in Japan, and the complete inability of Japan to exploit this for intelligence purposes when we're all scratching our heads about what on earth was going on in North Korea. I'm sure from your observations and research, Ian, you can comment on that.
[15:32] BURUMA: Yes, that doesn't surprise me at all. I think both countries — West Germany, that is; East Germany again I think is a different subject — West Germany and Japan became very, very sensitive to the use of intelligence, especially domestically, for obvious reasons, and both felt entirely comfortable, I think, leaving all the dirty work to the Americans. And felt rather virtuous. We no longer want to deal with these kinds of things. We're nations of peace, and the world should follow us. And all that other stuff, well, let the Americans do it. And so I think this is changing, and it's changing rather fast because of the Trump administration, because they realize — and I'm sure the Prime Minister of Japan when she expresses herself in rather forceful ways about China is not doing so only because she's a conservative hawk — I think she's doing it fully conscious of the fact that they can't rely on the Americans anymore.
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[16:42] DEARLOVE: I'm used to pretty intrusive interest in my private life given my profession. I was a field officer in Prague, and when I left the city, about 20 microphones were dug out of my house — because that's what it was like behind the Iron Curtain. But that's a high degree of intrusion. And more recently the Russians hacked my emails and spread those emails around the internet. And that's pretty unsettling. Well, Richard, you must have felt as though the Soviets were watching your every move, and now others are able to watch all your business online. They can find out a lot about you — your private addresses, private phone numbers, financial details, banking details, details about your family, where your children are, patterns of daily life, your travel. There's so much which is vulnerable.
We just put out there almost routinely now, so it's available for all kinds of scammers and fraudsters. This is why I use Incogni. They have a wonderful opt-out request which they can send to more than 420 data brokers. And they also have a people's search site facility which keeps your personal information, and they can continue to cover those so that you don't get relisted. On the unlimited plan, the exposure scanner shows where you're exposed across the web. And if you click on Remove Me, the Incogni specialists can then handle that material and scrub it. And you can track exactly what they're doing from a dashboard to which you will have access as an Incogni subscriber. That sounds very comprehensive and perhaps enables us all to protect ourselves like a former spy chief.
For that level of protection, go to incogni.com/onedecision and use code onedecision for 60% off the annual plan. That's incogni.com/onedecision.
GERMANY'S REARMAMENT MOMENT
[18:52] MCCANN: Shall we turn to Germany first, then? Because that shifts us quite nicely onto the change in tone. What do you think the moment was where it became not just acceptable but desirable in Germany to talk about rearmament, to talk about military capability, to talk about spending vast sums of money, and we are talking about huge amounts of money, on defense? What was the moment that tipped it into that territory?
[19:18] BURUMA: I think Ukraine probably has a lot to do with this. And the moment it became really much more acceptable is when the Greens became the great defenders of supporting Ukraine, because the Greens after all would have been inclined to pacifism before. If a CDU or CSU politician — someone on the right — would have talked like conservatives in Japan about the need for Germany to let bygones be bygones and concentrate on defense and that kind of thing, it wouldn't have been surprising. But when the Greens started using that kind of language, I think that did change things fairly fundamentally.
[20:02] DEARLOVE: But when Merz's predecessor made this speech about increasing the defense budget by this huge sum of money, and then completely failed to implement — he committed to the expenditure, but it didn't really advance that much further, partly because it was blocked by the coalition relationship in the Bundestag. It seemed to me as though this was more taking a stance than taking a decision. So how far have things actually advanced now under Merz? In terms of implementation of that degree of expenditure and the process of rearmament — my impression is they really have started implementation now and there's cause for optimism in terms of the rearmament of Germany as a bulwark against Russia.
[20:56] BURUMA: Yes, I think it has. But I think when German politicians make these statements about how things are going to fundamentally change, it's a bit like Macron talking about Europe having to make a big fist — and then nothing very much happens. But the fact that Rheinmetall and manufacturers in Germany are seriously beginning to put their assets into rearmament must mean quite a lot. Germany is probably still very divided between those who say we have to help Ukraine, we have to be more powerful and less dependent on the United States, and those who say, no, this is dangerous and belligerent and we should make a deal with the Russians — especially in the former East Germany. The latter opinion is probably still quite powerful, hence the rise of the AfD. There are other reasons for that too, but I think that's one reason.
THE NUCLEAR QUESTION: GERMANY
[22:01] DEARLOVE: But how seriously would you take the discussion in Germany of, for example, paying for some of the UK's nuclear defense? There has been this idea that somehow the French and British nuclear defense capability should become trilateral — not with the Germans developing it, but the Germans contributing to the cost. Do you think this is a realistic discussion?
[22:28] BURUMA: I would prefer to ask that question to you. What do you think?
[22:33] DEARLOVE: Actually, I think in the medium to longer term there's a definite possibility that things would go in that direction. I don't see Germany, despite the sophistication of its civil nuclear industry, becoming a nuclear power. That's a step too far. But I do see it maybe paying something towards a common European nuclear umbrella. I guess that's taking a 10-year perspective. This is not going to happen fast. A lot will depend on what happens in Russia, of course. And I think if one saw an increase in Russian aggression towards Europe, even if it's grey warfare and undeclared, there will be stronger arguments to go down this track.
[23:18] BURUMA: And presumably that's because the Germans would like to have some kind of control over the use of nuclear arms in the future, and not just leave it up to the French or the British.
[23:28] DEARLOVE: Absolutely. Because they're the key European power on the continent, and to be out of that game when there's a threat — let's say of a nuclear exchange in Europe — leaves them in a very exposed position.
JAPAN GOES NUCLEAR?
[23:41] BURUMA: I think — and this again is probably not in the next ten years — but the likelihood of the Japanese developing nuclear arms is greater than the Germans, because the Germans at least are still embedded in what's left of NATO, and the Japanese have no equivalent. And if the Japanese and the South Koreans — of course, let alone the Taiwanese — if they can no longer rely on the American nuclear umbrella, there will be a panic, and changing the constitution so that they can have their own nuclear bomb is by no means unthinkable. And they could probably make it by tomorrow if they wanted.
[24:26] DEARLOVE: There's no question that Japan could go nuclear faster than any other nation in the world. We've always assessed that they could develop a nuclear capability within 18 months, maybe less. But of course there are all sorts of reasons why that can't happen at the moment and why psychologically it's unthinkable. But I agree with you — if you had a breakdown of the security situation in the Pacific, that is a natural step for Japan to want to take, and to take it quickly.
JAPAN'S PUBLIC OPINION ON ARTICLE 9
[24:56] MCCANN: Shall we talk a little bit about the context for Japan right now? Because we've referenced Germany and I suppose the German psyche. Where is Japan? Where is the public attitude to Japanese defense right now, Ian? How do people feel?
[25:11] BURUMA: I think it is changing. The problem is that the people who wanted to revise Article 9 of the Constitution up until now have almost entirely come from the right — from the right wing of the Liberal Democratic Party. And that was unacceptable to most Japanese, partly because they like being a pacifist nation, but partly because it was the right that always argued that Japan should be able to change its constitution because it didn't really have anything to apologize for for in the past, what they did during the war. My argument has always been: things will only change in Japan once there is a change of government and similar arguments start coming from the center-left. That hasn't happened so far. But I do think that more and more people, especially people under 60, are beginning to think it's time for Japan to rethink the post-war order. So in opinion polls about revising the constitution, it's now closer to more than 50% of the people who might be sympathetic to it. So there is a change. And again, a lot depends obviously on what happens in North Korea and China, but a lot depends on the United States as well.
ARTICLE 9 EXPLAINED
[26:45] MCCANN: For people who may not understand this in the same depth that you do, can you just explain what Article 9 is, and when we're talking about revising it, what we're talking about?
[26:56] BURUMA: The constitution, which was written by Americans after World War Two, actually bans any kind of military force. Japan was not supposed to have any kind of army. And the Japanese were perfectly happy with that — most Japanese were sick and tired of war and sick and tired of being bossed around by military people. And people on the right who were very pro-business were happy for the Americans to take care of this while they rebuilt their industries and their wealth. The first people to regret the pacifist constitution of Japan were actually the Americans. It was Vice President Nixon — when he was Vice President under Eisenhower — who first said the Americans had made a mistake. And Americans of Nixon's persuasion would quite like the Japanese to revise their constitution. It was the Japanese themselves who then didn't want to do this. But a compromise was struck, and they have their so-called self-defense forces. At first it was called a police force, then a self-defense force, which is a fairly formidable army. But it couldn't use any kind of force outside Japan, and that too has been watered down a little bit under Prime Minister Abe, so that they can do a little bit more than just provide blankets and medical services. Article 9 still stands, and as long as Japan could depend on the United States, it probably would continue to stand for a long time.
JAPAN'S INTELLIGENCE SERVICE AND DEFENSE INDUSTRIES
[28:40] DEARLOVE: Takaichi has now put through legislation to create an intelligence service, which I think is a huge psychological step. I'd certainly been talking to the Japanese about this issue for quite a long time. So that's important. And the JSDF is in transition, as you say, from having been these local defense forces to being a proper military. But the intelligence re-creation is a new step, and it's going ahead — they're putting the various bits of government that did something akin to intelligence collection into a single organization. But what's actually happening with the JSDF? Because one of the issues which I always found surprising was that, given the sophistication of Japanese industry, they didn't really have an armaments industry, or if they did, it wasn't very good at building sophisticated kit. Where is Japan now in relation to that?
[29:40] BURUMA: Well, I would be bluffing if I claimed great expertise in this. But from what I've been reading, they are gearing up — Mitsubishi and others — to building more sophisticated stuff. And that started under Abe, who was her great mentor. He was really the one who began talking about this seriously, including having an intelligence service. There was quite a lot of opposition to it again, because of that Japanese and German allergy to having security services snooping on people — it brings back bad memories. And the fact that Abe was the grandson of a war criminal, essentially, whom he was always trying to defend, made it difficult. But I think Takaichi is popular, and I think she could be successful where Abe was not. So I think both in terms of developing an intelligence agency, beefing up the military, and producing arms that can now be exported to some extent — again, I think that goes back to Abe — does mean that they'll start producing better stuff.
JAPAN'S NUCLEAR ALLERGY
[30:56] MCCANN: You talked a little bit, Ian, about the nuclear question earlier. Can you give us a bit of context on how people in Japan feel about that? Whether they feel this tension about whether or not the United States would really be there for them, whether they are willing to wait out Trump, or whether there is really a demand now to rethink the position on nuclear?
[31:19] BURUMA: I don't think it's openly stated, and certainly even Takaichi wouldn't ever say that in a speech. There is quite an allergy — again for obvious reasons — against nuclear power. The idea of: we are a pacifist nation, we know what war is, we're going to show the world that there is a path to peace. And the symbol of that is of course Hiroshima, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So there is tremendous emotional opposition to nuclear armament. But they could take this attitude and feel even slightly morally smug about it, as long as the Americans took care of nuclear defense. But I think that could change very quickly, and I think Takaichi realizes it could change very quickly. The short-term tactic is to kick the can down the road and hope that Trump will be gone in two years and everything will be the way it used to be. But just as is the case in Europe, I don't think things will be the way they used to be. There is tremendous distrust of America now. You don't know who they're going to elect. To pretend that things will just go back to what they were, I think is very naive — and many Japanese, and no doubt Europeans, realize this.
THE AFD AND THE GERMAN FIREWALL
[32:51] DEARLOVE: Ian, can we go back to Germany? And in a way the question has a certain relevance in relation to Japan. If the firewall in German politics were to break down, and the AfD were to become so large that it forms the government, the whole question of German rearmament then takes on a rather different aspect if you view Germany within a European context. And obviously there will be intellectuals in France worrying about this aspect of European political direction. And similarly I think in the UK we would be pretty concerned if that were the case. The stability of the firewall remains rather important conceptually whilst Germany rearms, but it seems to me it's beginning to look very fragile. How do you interpret that?
[33:55] BURUMA: Yes, I think that's right. If Europe is going to have a stronger defense policy that is less dependent on the United States, that would depend very much on Franco-German cooperation, presumably, because they are the two main powers of the EU. France is nuclear-armed, and without full cooperation between French and German industries and so on, it would be very difficult to see how Europe could be a force on its own. One of the impediments to this is that the French don't necessarily trust the Germans, and they're certainly worried that Rheinmetall and other German manufacturers will start to dominate at the cost of French interests. But there is also this residual distrust of what could happen in Germany, what the Germans have done in the past, and a fear of too much German power. And I think it's a legitimate fear.
The dilemma in Germany politically — and it's not only true of Germany — is that you can have a firewall, but if the party that you don't want to have in government becomes too big and you simply gang up on them every time, that could make the political situation even worse, because the people who vote for these parties will feel excluded. It's not democratic. It'll undermine trust in democratic institutions and possibly make things even worse. I suppose the only thing one could hope for, if the AfD were ever to form a government — and they probably couldn't do it on their own, they'd have to have some kind of coalition — is that it would end up in a kind of Meloni-type situation where reality forces them to be a little more moderate and cooperate with other countries in the EU and Britain and so on.
LE PEN, AFD, AND THE AXIS OF POPULISM
[36:00] DEARLOVE: Just to follow up on that — you could have a Rassemblement National, Le Pen, AfD axis in Europe, which would make, politically and militarily, Europe look rather different at a crucial time for European security, including UK security. I think that is a worrying scenario.
[36:21] BURUMA: It's deeply worrying. What do you think would happen if such a thing came to pass and you had a right-wing populist government in France and in Germany and in the United States? How would that affect relations between Europe and the US? Because then you'd have three governments — the US and the two main powers of Europe — who would all be on the same wavelength.
[36:44] DEARLOVE: I think that's a very hard prediction to make. Clearly it would give momentum to Trump's views of Russia — I think that's the most worrying aspect. Maybe you would have a more unified approach to an aggressive China. But you're looking at an almost complete rejig of international security if you follow that through to its logic. I regard Trump largely as an aberration, and I think that after his presidency — I'm not saying US politics will return to the norm, they won't — but they'll certainly swing back into a place which is perhaps more acceptable to the Europeans than they are at present. I don't know whether you agree with that.
THE END OF PAX AMERICANA
[37:31] BURUMA: No, I think that is true. But I do think we're seeing the end of Pax Americana. Whoever gets elected after Trump, it's not going to go back to the sort of post-war deal that was struck, which also depended so much on the Cold War. And it's probably time that large and powerful countries like Japan, South Korea, Western Europe
[37:36] DEARLOVE: I definitely agree with that.
[38:00] BURUMA: took care of themselves more. It's not a healthy situation, this over-dependence on one country. And so in one way or another, Europeans and East Asians have to deal with this, whether it's Trump or anybody else.
[38:17] DEARLOVE: So that's the positive aspect of the end of Pax Americana — in that we become more self-reliant in terms of our own defense and we build alliances which are not US-dependent. Obviously in Europe, a military alliance between France, Germany and the UK would be highly desirable within the context of NATO. And we're going in that direction, but not fast enough.
HOW HISTORY STILL SHAPES GERMANY AND JAPAN
[38:40] MCCANN: Ian, just in the final few moments — There’s a lot of interest in the history and the context here. And I think we've covered the modern moment quite well. So if we can zoom out a little bit and talk just to end about the way that the history of these two countries influences them today, I think that would be a great place to wrap. Can you take us through how in Japan and in Germany the history of these two countries, their position in World War Two, their reaction after it — how much that still influences the decisions they are making today when it comes to defense and alliances and where they see themselves in the world?
[39:24] BURUMA: Well, I think there is still some influence in both countries, but it's certainly growing less and less. My generation — I was born in December 1951, so I was raised in the Netherlands in the aftermath of Nazi occupation, raised in the shadow of World War Two. Everything, our outlook on the world, is completely shaped by what happened in World War Two. I think people — my children and my grandchildren — are not affected in the same way. And I think that's true in Germany, I think it's true in Japan. There is even a reaction among people of school age in both countries who are getting tired of being told that they should feel guilty for a past that is very remote to them.
As I said earlier, it's especially the younger generation in Japan that is much more open to revising the pacifist constitution. It shows that we cannot rely on war memories and slogans like never again and so on to influence policies for very much longer. West Germany was different from East Germany — guilt and taking responsibility for the Nazi past was much more promoted in West Germany than in East Germany. And the rise of the AfD, of course, is not exclusively East German, but it's strongly East German. And so that also is diluting the effect that World War Two has had on public opinion for several generations.
THE AFD'S EXPLOITATION OF HUMILIATION
[41:16] MCCANN: How is the AfD using Germany's history to its own advantage — using it as a narrative?
[41:21] BURUMA: I think they're very consciously promoting the notion that Germans should be proud of their history. And as one of them once said, the Holocaust was just a speck of bird droppings in a long and proud and glorious history. People should stop dwelling on the past — and that is popular with a lot of people, and especially again with East Germans who were also made to feel, after the end of the Cold War, made to feel inferior to West Germans. So there is a strong sense of humiliation in those who were left behind in East Germany. The brightest and the best hightailed it to the West very quickly. And those who stayed behind feel humiliated.
And humiliation is the most dangerous ground, I think, for politics anywhere. It leads to resentment, to a thirst for revenge, etc. We know that from the aftermath in Germany of World War One. We know it in many, many different countries. And I think that is being exploited by the AfD very effectively — that sense of humiliation.
JAPAN: NO AFD EQUIVALENT
[42:41] MCCANN: And is there anything similar in Japan?
[42:43] BURUMA: No, I would not say so. I don't think that the Japanese are in a tremendously resentful mood. Japan has been dominated ever since the war — unlike South Korea since it became a democracy — has been dominated by one conservative coalition party, one conservative party, really. And that's bad in the sense that you need changes of government for a democracy to function in a healthy way. In some ways it's been good because they absorbed like a sponge all those bad aspects of right-wing politics — the revanchism, the resentments, the xenophobia, etc. So there isn't really an AfD in Japan. There are people whose thinking might be close to the AfD, but they're inside the Liberal Democratic Party. And I think that's the difference with Germany.
ONE DECISION TO WATCH
[43:38] DEARLOVE: The only point I would like to make is I think the importance now — particularly to the UK — of our bilateral relations with both Germany and Japan. Japan is clearly a favored partner if one looks almost anywhere else in the world post-Brexit. So that relationship has developed significantly. The other thing about Germany is the potential for a closer military relationship, a bilateral relationship — which we've always had, ironically, with France since the end of World War Two. The militaries get on extremely well, but not so much with Germany. But at the same time, what concerns me about Germany is, as we've already discussed, the instability of its internal politics. Merz arrives in power, looks like a great prospect, but is already in a very weak position politically and struggling to stay afloat.
[44:40] MCCANN: Ian, we always close on this podcast by asking a version of this question to our guests. And I suppose the one for you is: what is the one decision that you are watching out for regarding Germany or Japan's military buildup? What's the moment that in your mind — in the next couple of days, weeks, months, or maybe even years — that people should be aware of?
[45:03] BURUMA: I can't really think of anything in the next few days or months or weeks in those countries. I think my mind really is on what's happening in Brazil. That's hugely important to the entire American continent and might have consequences outside as well. But in Germany, it's the question of how long Merz will last.
[45:15] MCCANN: Throwing a curveball.
[45:28] MCCANN: That is definitely something that we will keep an eye on here on the podcast, and no doubt our listeners will too. Ian, it's been great having you on. Thank you so much for your time.
[45:36] BURUMA: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
[45:38] DEARLOVE: Thank you very much.
POST-INTERVIEW DISCUSSION
[45:39] MCCANN: Well, Sir Richard, I learned quite a lot in that conversation, I have to say. I didn't live through this period of history, obviously. I've learned it from books, I've learned it from being in school. But I found that a really engaging discussion, which I suppose sets a lot of context for what's happening now. What stood out for you?
[46:00] DEARLOVE: I think it was refreshing, as you say, to sit down and talk about bigger picture stuff rather than day-to-day events. I know we started off with a day-to-day event — the issue of the arrest of my former colleague who headed the BND. I think it's so important to consider these strategic shifts politically in countries as important as Japan and Germany, and try to plug those into global politics and understand what the consequences and the significance might be. And I think Ian isn't only a journalist — he's much more than that, he's a historian. So in fact we were having a different quality of discussion with him, which I found enlightening and important.
I was born in 1945. So in terms of what we were talking about, I'm very familiar with a lot of the content. In fact, very familiar — because much of my career oriented around issues like post-war Germany and then the anomalies in our relationship with Japan, and why Japan was important but couldn't be a global political player because of their constitution. So all of that I'm very familiar with. But I think to do a podcast on the emerging differences and why this is so important is very apposite at the moment. And what came out — which I think is a really important point — is the pressure on countries like Japan, Germany, South Korea not to rely on the United States any longer, and for them to start developing not just their independence as global political players, but their military and intelligence capabilities as well.
[47:59] MCCANN: Yeah, I thought that too. There were a couple of things that really stood out for me. I'm always interested in this idea that countries retain this sense of guilt about the decisions of previous generations — and how long you should or can hold on to that feeling of having done something wrong. And to hear Ian talk about how, in both countries really, but maybe to a greater extent in Germany, there is a feeling that actually it's time to stop feeling guilty now. This was not our decision. It was not our fault. And how that drives politics, especially when you come to talk about the AfD, but more generally too. And the idea that humiliation is the most dangerous kind of politics — that really struck a chord with me. I'm always interested in how the psyche of a nation drives its decision making. But also, from both of you, the notion that Japan is the country most well equipped to develop a nuclear weapon — and if it chose to do that, it would be able to within a pretty short timeframe. I think that then makes the question of President Trump and America, and where America decides to put its power and its heft and its might, into a very different and quite worrying context.
[49:15] DEARLOVE: And Japan sits beside China. The whole issue of future foreign affairs is how to accommodate China and create a relationship, an international relationship, where security functions in a positive manner. And Japan is going to be an absolutely key player — partly because of its industrial power, partly because of its geopolitical position, and partly because, as we've discussed, it's changing very fundamentally in its attitude — its way of positioning and influencing on the world stage.
[49:53] MCCANN: Yeah, it's found its place in the world. Maybe not quite in the same spot as Germany yet, but maybe not a million miles away either. Great episode. Hopefully you enjoyed listening to it as much as we enjoyed talking — and we always hope that that's the case. Thank you very much for listening today. You can join us every Thursday for new episodes, or you can subscribe to One Decision on YouTube so you won't miss anything at all. And you can leave us comments there if you'd like to, or you can email hello@onedecision.com — we read all of them and we do love to get your thoughts. There is more on onedecision.com too if commentaries and explainers are your thing. I'm Kate McCann. I was joined by Sir Richard Dearlove for this episode. Thank you very much for listening.
