How should the German government respond to terrorist attacks?
Germany should treat terrorism as a crime, prosecute it through courts, and keep emergency powers time-limited and specific.
Schmidt's 1977 Mogadishu operation shows that decisive force can resolve a crisis without dismantling the state. Machiavelli agrees: one sharp action, stopped, is not the same as permanent emergency rule. But Arendt's warning is grounded in German history. Weimar's Article 48 was used occasionally, then routinely, then fatally. Each invocation made the next easier.
Locke and Ibn Khaldun close the argument from opposite directions. Locke holds that detention without trial negates the compact the state was built to protect. Ibn Khaldun adds that surveillance and profiling fracture the social solidarity that makes a state hard to break. The RAF wanted Germany to suspend itself. A response that outlasts the crisis gives them that victory on a delay.
Confidence summary: Strong convergence on the criminal-justice framework as baseline; genuine split on the conditions under which executive pre-emption is legitimate.
1. The core argument
The most uncomfortable insight from this council is not that Germany must balance security and liberty. It is that the RAF understood the German state better than some of its defenders did. The terrorists' strategic aim was to provoke a republic into suspending itself. A government that responds to that provocation with detention without trial, routinised surveillance, and expanding executive prerogative does not defeat the attack. It completes it, on a longer timetable.
That said, the council does not endorse paralysis. Schmidt's 1977 record is unambiguous: decisive, bounded force resolved the Mogadishu crisis in hours and the Rechtsstaat survived. The lesson is not that force is illegitimate. It is that the specific act, authorised through constitutional channels, stopped when it was done, is categorically different from the creeping normality of emergency governance. Germany should prosecute terrorism through courts, keep any special powers explicitly time-limited, and measure every response against a single question: does this strengthen or erode the thing being defended?
2. How each member frames it
Helmut Schmidt insists on something the reasoning card compressed into a slogan: resolve is not opposed to constitutional order, it is the precondition for it. A Rechtsstaat that cannot act ceases to be a state. What the card could not fit is his candid acknowledgement that Mogadishu was also a political gamble. Had GSG9 failed, the constitutional argument collapses with the hostages. His deeper claim is therefore probabilistic: a government with trained capacity and clear legal mandate will act faster and better than one that has been hobbled by procedural hesitation. He would reject expanded surveillance powers not on principled grounds but on practical ones. Broad intelligence dragnets, in his reading, produce noise, not intelligence.
Hannah Arendt does not argue that Schmidt was wrong at Mogadishu. She argues that the "legal residue" of the Schleyer crisis deserves harder scrutiny than the military outcome. Her card named the RAF's trap. The fuller version of her thinking is darker: the trap works even when the government wins the military confrontation, because each crisis normalises the institutional apparatus assembled to fight it. She would ask, specifically, whether the contact bans imposed on RAF prisoners' legal counsel in 1977 left a precedent that outlasted the crisis. That is where Weimar enters her argument: not as a direct parallel, but as a demonstration that constitutional erosion travels through law, not around it.
Niccolò Machiavelli makes a distinction the card could not fully unpack. He separates the RAF from citizens with political grievances, placing them instead in the category of those who attack the state's monopoly on force. This matters because his license for decisive action is not a general license. It applies to existential threats to the republic's structural integrity, not to ordinary criminal dissent. His boundary condition is explicit: cruelty used once, stopped, is categorically different from permanent emergency rule. He would have no patience for indefinite detention, mass surveillance, or the apparatus of a security state that feeds on its own threat assessments.
John Locke enters the argument at the point where Schmidt's logic reaches its limit. The compact theory is not a procedural nicety. It is the load-bearing structure of the state's claim to obedience. Once a government detains without trial or suspends due process beyond the duration of the immediate threat, it has broken the compact on which its authority rests. Locke's harder point, one the card had to omit, is that this is not merely a moral claim. It is a practical one: a state that governs by exception trains its citizens to expect exception, which eventually makes the exception harder to reverse than the original threat.
Ibn Khaldun reframes the entire question from legitimacy to durability. His Damascus analogy is sharper than the card could convey. What Timur revealed was not whether the city's government was just, but whether its internal cohesion was real. The Federal Republic in 1977 had strong asabiyya. Ethnic profiling and mass surveillance would have spent that asset on a short-term security gain. His warning for 2026 is specific: if Germany's counter-terrorism response is perceived by Muslim communities as directed at them rather than at a defined criminal threat, the social fracture that results is harder to repair than any individual attack.
3. Where the council agrees
The most surprising point of agreement is that all five members accept the legitimacy of force. Arendt and Locke, the two most often cited as restraining voices, do not dispute Schmidt's right to authorise Mogadishu. Their objection is temporal and institutional, not principled. Emergency powers are acceptable; the problem is that they rarely end.
Beyond that, all five agree on three specific claims. First, terrorism must be prosecuted through courts, not managed through indefinite executive detention, because the alternative corrodes the state's own justification for authority. Second, any special powers the government assumes must be explicitly bounded by duration and scope, with sunset clauses that require positive renewal rather than passive continuation. Third, the social cohesion of the polity is a strategic asset, not a soft concern. A counter-terrorism policy that fractures solidarity between communities weakens the state's actual capacity to detect and prevent attacks. These are not anodyne points. The third in particular contradicts the instinct, visible in several post-2001 European responses, to treat security and social integration as separate policy tracks.
4. Where the council splits
The genuine split is over sequence: does executive action precede constitutional justification, or must it always operate within pre-authorised legal limits?
Schmidt and Machiavelli hold that in a genuine crisis, the executive must act and account for it afterward. The republic that waits for procedural clearance while hostages die has already made a choice, and it is the wrong one. Arendt and Locke hold that this sequencing is precisely the mechanism through which constitutional orders erode. "Act first, justify second" is a principle that accumulates its damage across administrations, not within a single crisis.
Neither side is wrong. Schmidt governed through a specific, acute emergency with a specific, bounded operation. Arendt and Locke are describing the drift across decades. The line between them is not about Mogadishu. It is about what Mogadishu licensed for the governments that followed it.
5. For a policymaker to decide on
The council cannot resolve whether Germany should legislate expanded pre-emptive detention powers for terrorism suspects, with judicial oversight and a five-year sunset clause, or rely entirely on existing criminal procedure, accepting the operational constraints that imposes. The first option gains speed and flexibility; it risks normalising exception. The second option preserves the Rechtsstaat intact; it may leave the government slower than the threat. That trade-off depends on the current threat assessment and on how much institutional trust in judicial oversight actually exists. Only you can weigh those.