Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. Today I'm in Berlin, her city full of politicians and government officials, including my guest today, trying to get to grips with a challenging new reality. For decades, Germany put its faith in a pragmatic business-first foreign policy, and that meant a

reliance on Russian energy supplies and increasingly a reliance on China's appetite for trade.

But today, after Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine and the rise in geopolitical tension between the West and China,

that level of reliance looks like a major strategic mistake. So where does Germany go from here?

Well, my guest is Social Democrat MP and State Secretary in the Economic Cooperation Ministry, Niels Annen.

His boss, Chancellor Olaf Schultz, promised a fundamental reset of Germany's strategic priorities

in the immediate aftermath of Putin's Ukraine assault.

But that requires decisive leadership and unity of purpose. Are those qualities evident in the

German coalition government today? Well, Niels Annen joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you. Pleasure. Well, it's great to be here. Let's start with the war in Ukraine. I think

there's no doubt that Putin's invasion of Ukraine

shocked Germany. Would it be fair to say it has also destabilized Germany? No, I don't think so,

but it certainly shocked Germany. Because a lot of our economic model was based on the assumption that we would continue using cheap Russian natural gas.

And it was also based in a kind of historic experience that although Russia was a competitor and an enemy in the Cold War,

it was always also an economic terms, a quite reliable partner. And I think that

was somehow seen as a constant policy. And we did not really realize that it's not the Soviet Union

anymore. It's a brutal, unpredictable dictator. You've just told me that one of your

key economic planks was taken away, that reliance on Russian energy,

and at the very same time, one of your geopolitical core assumptions was also put in the trash can.

I would put it to you that given those two elements, Germany is still trying to figure out where to go. Yeah, but you ask me about

whether it was destabilizing Germany, and my answer is clearly no. We here in Berlin just

overcame a very difficult winter. We were able in record time to substitute Russian gas and oil,

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