In an emergency, military action is also necessary “to protect our interests, for example free trade routes”.
For this sentence, the then Federal President Horst Köhler had to take so much public criticism in 2010 that he announced his resignation.
A German frigate is now sailing in the Indo-Pacific.
If Koehler's statement were to fail today, the majority would probably shrug the shoulders rather than disapprove.
Even if opinions in Germany about military operations differ widely (which was probably exacerbated by the Afghanistan crisis in August), it cannot be denied that the world and its rule-based order have changed dramatically since 2010.
It is no longer as flat and free as the American journalist Thomas Friedman predicted in 2005 in his book "The World is Flat" as a result of digitally available data anywhere in the world with the consequence of a global job market.
Instead it has become more uneven and unfree.
Win-win scenarios
Goods markets have been separated by import tariffs, export barriers and other obstacles. Autocratic and populist regimes are enjoying increasing support and are setting themselves apart from Western democracies. These draft countermeasures. The EU is working on an instrument to ward off economic coercion (anti-coercion) on the part of other countries should the international legal process in disputes be exhausted. Political rifts hinder global technology transfer in the information industry. Global supply chains are checked for their durability in the face of political conflicts and their compatibility with the social and ecological ideas of the industrialized countries, and shortened if necessary. Many countries require companies to invest in them rather than delivering to them,in order to follow the political guidelines there. Even refugee flows are being instrumentalized for political purposes, currently in Belarus and Turkey.
In the past ten years, national economic interests and their protection with geo-economic means have replaced trust in open markets and win-win scenarios. On the one hand, this takes place through classic foreign trade policy in the form of trade and investment agreements and strategic foreign trade promotion. On the other hand, economic measures are increasingly being taken to achieve political goals. The number of sanctions imposed has increased sharply over the past decade. Strategic investments, such as China's New Silk Road Initiative, but also control over currency reserves and trade surpluses are increasingly evident. Geo-economic means are by no means limited to trade policy,they also extend to technology and investment policy, finance and currency policy, and energy and raw materials policy.