In the wake of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s departure from the German Chancellorship, her successor, Olaf Scholz, inherits a Germany which has been lacking in strategic vision and an acute foreign policy for a considerable amount of time. Maximilian Terhalle asks, can Chancellor Scholz provide this vision for his country, and imbue NATO and the EU with a coherent and unified foreign policy in the face of threats from China, Russia, and a divided ‘West’?
Download the PDF:
Can Chancellor Scholz Save the West?
Read online:
This was published on 26 January 2022.
About the author
Maximilian Terhalle is a Visiting Professor in Practice at ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ IDEAS. In 2021, he completed an IISS Adelphi Paper on “The Responsibility to Defend: Re-thinking Germany’s Strategic Culture” (with B. Giegerich). Following the German federal election in September 2021, Maximilian will adopt the Adelphi Paper as his starting point to further elaborate on the geopolitical state of European security in the transatlantic context, within which China’s strategic power has figured as the most impactful, yet least understood, external factor. During his two-year stint at ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ IDEAS, he will continue to consult with senior MPs in Berlin. In 2019-20, Maximilian served as a Senior Adviser for Strategic Affairs to the UK’s Ministry of Defence. His spell at the MoD presents the most recent part of a series of almost 12 years he has spent abroad doing policy work, conducting research and teaching in the US, China, the UK and Egypt since 2000.