Germany needs to rethink its balance of hard and soft power if it is to reinforce its global role as the conditions for projecting soft power rapidly deteriorate.

Since reunification in 1990, Berlin has cultivated a distinctive niche in international relations: focused on soft power and non-coercive influence, it has prioritised development cooperation, scientific diplomacy and economic interdependence as functional substitutes for power politics. Within this framework, Germany has seen itself as a Zivilmacht—a ‘civilian power’—a benign middle power that, through diplomacy, development and defence, invests in regional and global institutions to provide global public goods.

Its leadership in climate diplomacy and its position as one of the world’s largest providers of official development assistance clearly reflect this role. This liberal-institutionalist foreign policy toolkit suited the early decades of the post-Cold War era and helped consolidate Germany’s position as one of the world’s leading economic and political powers. Yet this success also reinforced a self-image grounded in values that Berlin considered benign and superior—often presented with a heavy-dose of moralism.

Although the Zivilmacht concept remains valid—global public goods still depend on providers and defenders that act collectively and consensually—it is  amid renewed great-power rivalry. For German civil power to retain its influence, its liberal-institutionalist core must be complemented by harder, more realist components.

In other words, hard power provides the resonance chamber that allows for effective soft-power projection in today’s geopolitical constellation. Other middle powers, such as Britain and France, learned this lesson long ago.

For Germany’s political elites and civil society, however, it entails a profound renegotiation of the values and interests that underpin its foreign policy. In this context, the war in Ukraine has effectively opened the door to a genuine turning point in German defence policy—christened Zeitenwende by chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022.

In the face of illiberal coalitions and authoritarian groupings, Germany’s defence investments should also be seen as a contribution to global burden-sharing within NATO, enabling other allies to focus more on the Indo-Pacific. These efforts also function as alliance signalling, showing solidarity with NATO’s regional partners, reinforced by a greater, though not more aggressive, presence of German armed forces.

Examples include the 2024 Taiwan Strait transit by the German Navy frigate Baden-Württemberg, and the 2025 participation of German airlift and paratrooper units in exercise Talisman Sabre alongside Australia, the United States and 16 other countries. The German Navy will continue to deploy ships to the Indo-Pacific, though presence does not mean permanence: the armed forces’ priority remains reinforcing NATO’s eastern flank, in close cooperation with Poland, the Baltic states and Nordic countries.

Despite its shortcomings, the Zeitenwende marks a critical milestone in German foreign policy, with the potential to revitalise German hard power not only within the European and Atlantic frameworks but also globally, possibly amplifying the reach of Germany’s traditional soft power.

But this realist rethink must take a genuinely global perspective. It requires redefining Germany’s alliances, complementing traditional partnerships—based on shared values within the G7 and other democratic frameworks—with more transactional ties to like-minded states in other regions, particularly the Indo-Pacific, where many stakeholders of the liberal international order are concentrated.

Although Germany cannot offer cooperation frameworks equivalent to AUKUS—under which the US transfers nuclear-submarine technology to Australia—this new approach demands a rethink of foreign-policy instruments and a more pragmatic lens: redesigning development, science and technology, and arms-export policies to offer more attractive cooperation in partners’ priority areas. Many of these lessons must—and indeed are beginning to—be integrated into NATO’s and the European Union’s broader strategic rethink.

The idea of strategic solidarity within a wider West also offers a useful guide for German trade policy. The most promising areas for cooperation with other European countries lie in critical materials, trade and technology. Given China’s economic weight in the Indo-Pacific and the EU’s dependence on Chinese intermediate goods for achieving technological autonomy, the EU’s free-trade agreements with regional partners such as Singapore, South Korea or Japan—and soon also Australia—no longer appear primarily as expressions of shared democratic values, but rather as pragmatic tools of geoeconomic de-risking.

These agreements contribute to the West’s economic, technological and, ultimately, military resilience. They should also include greater defence-industrial cooperation with countries seeking partnerships for military modernisation. This would at the very least require a liberalisation of Germany’s arms-export policy.

Major non-NATO allies such as Japan and Australia deserve far greater attention from Berlin and Brussels, as they stand on the front line of great-power competition. This, in turn, requires a more pronounced German hard-power base—militarily effective, globally deployable and cooperative. That means embedding it within alliance structures and international partnerships.