A Lesson From Germany

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has been negotiating a lot of potential business deals with Vladimir Putin. His administration has discussed lifting sanctions, including on Moscow’s flagship government investment fund; in some cases, that’s already happened.

What’s going on? Some see favoritism toward an autocrat Trump has seemed to admire (and an attempt to lower U.S. fuel prices before midterm elections tomorrow.) The administration argues that it’s all part of a broader effort to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

For me, as a German, it’s all a bit of a déjà vu. When I was Berlin bureau chief a few years ago, I wrote a lot about Germany’s longstanding policy of trying to influence Russian behavior with business and energy deals. Even after Moscow invaded Crimea, Berlin approved another major gas pipeline. The policy was abandoned only after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Today, I write about the lessons of Germany’s failed Russia policy for the Trump administration.

Trump’s Ostpolitik

First, there was the potential Lukoil deal.

Last month, my colleagues reported that the Trump administration wanted a U.S.-led consortium to buy the international assets of one of Russia’s biggest energy companies.

Next, the administration waived some U.S. sanctions to buy Russian diesel and leaned on Europe to resume buying Russian gas. Then we learned that it considered a proposal to buy Russian technology to gain access to and liquefy natural gas in Alaska.

Now, it’s exploring yet another concession: lifting sanctions on Russia’s flagship government investment fund.

Trump wants to end the war in Ukraine. He has repeatedly tried and failed. His latest approach, spearheaded by the two businessmen who are his main negotiators — Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law — is aggressively focused on offering Putin economic incentives.

Witkoff and Kushner have argued that the prospect of doing business with the West could persuade the Russian president to compromise in Ukraine.

So far, however, it’s not working. Putin is happily banking all of the concessions while not making any of his own.

The idea of tempering Russia’s behavior with economic incentives isn’t new, nor is it inherently implausible. In fact, it’s the approach Germany took for decades, with, at least for a while, meaningful success.

But it stopped working for Germany for the same reason most experts think it won’t work for the United States now: There are things Russia cares about more than business deals.

Ostpolitik

Until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there was a shared belief in Germany — embraced by a long succession of chancellors, industry leaders and the public — that a Russia bound by trade would have too much at risk to enter into a conflict with Europe. Doing business with Russia, the thinking went, was a win-win: It would make Germany safer and richer.

That policy had its origins in the Cold War, when the West German government ushered in a new policy of engagement with the Soviet Union that became known as Ostpolitik. Ostpolitik was a broad philosophy that included other aspects of the relationship, too — diplomacy, cultural contact. But one of its defining pillars, which only grew in importance over time, became known as “Wandel durch Handel,” or “change through trade.”

I spoke to Liana Fix, who wrote a book about Germany’s evolving Russia policy. Ostpolitik helped build trust between the two sides, particularly during the Cold War, she said. The gas pipelines constructed from the 1970s onward might have made the end of the Cold War more peaceful.

But at the time, gas deals were accompanied by deterrence. “The other piece of it was missiles pointing at Moscow,” Fix said.

That changed after the Cold War. A reunified Germany cut military spending. At the same time, it intensified its business and energy ties with Moscow.

Initially, there was a belief that these ties would help transform post-Soviet Russia into a liberal democracy, Fix told me. But even when Germany’s political establishment became disillusioned with Putin, it still held on to the belief that mutual interdependence would make it too costly for him to step out of line.

It kept believing this after the invasion of Crimea in 2014: Angela Merkel persuaded Barack Obama not to ship arms to Ukraine and instead approved Nord Stream 2. Germany had leverage over Russia, the thinking went, precisely because it was buying so much Russian gas.

The opposite turned out to be true. It was Putin who restricted the flow of gas, in 2021. The next year, he invaded Ukraine.

Lessons from the past

The U.S. does not share Germany’s tortured history or, for that matter, a continent with Russia. And it will never be strategically dependent on Russian gas in the way Germany was until very recently.

But if Trump’s goal is to end the war, one thing the German experience shows is that Putin is motivated by things other than business deals. This has been an incredibly costly war for Russia and Putin has shown that he’s prepared to pay the price.

Not everyone agrees about why Putin invaded Ukraine. Some, like Stephen Walt at Harvard, argue that what incited Putin was the offer of a path toward NATO membership extended to Ukraine in 2008. Walt pointed me to the memo the U.S. ambassador to Moscow at the time, William Burns, sent to Washington that year, warning that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).”

“From knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests,” Burns wrote.

Others, like Fix, say that even in the absence of that offer, Putin’s longstanding imperial ambitions in Ukraine mean he most likely would have invaded anyway.

But people with very different views of what is motivating Putin still agree on one thing: business deals won’t be enough to lead him to give up. And worse, they could enable and embolden him.

The later years of Ostpolitik might be better remembered not for the ways Germany influenced Russia, but for the ways Russia influenced Germany. Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a personal friend of Putin’s, earned millions promoting Russian energy interests. (Read Putin’s man in Germany, my post-invasion interview with Schröder here. It’s a profile of him, but also of Germany’s Russia policy.)

Now it’s the Trump administration that’s talking to Russia about energy deals. The consortium seeking the multibillion-dollar Lukoil deal includes an American investor who is a Trump donor, Middle Eastern business executives with ties to Witkoff and Kushner, and an arm of the U.S. government itself.

For more: When will Russians finally be fed up with the war? My colleague Valerie Hopkins asked some of them what they thought.

If you have questions about how Russians view the war, send them to us here.

U.S. MIDTERM ELECTIONS

Final campaign stops

Trump was traveling yesterday to Iowa and Kansas, two conservative states that have turned into Senate battlegrounds for his Republican Party. In Michigan, a Democratic congresswoman endorsed the Republican Senate candidate. We have live updates.

Democrats are hammering Trump for starting a war with Iran and imposing tariffs that have driven up prices, while Republicans are insisting the fundamentals of the economy are stronger than before they took power two years ago. Pocketbook issues are top of mind for many voters.

Young men swung to Trump in 2024, but polls show they are now moving away. My colleague Sabrina Tavernise went to Michigan for a closer look at the shift. Watch her video.

We’re making our U.S. politics coverage free in The New York Times app through the Nov. 3 election.

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