Germany is finalizing deals to sell €1.4 billion (us$1.89 billion) worth of patrol boats to Saudi Arabia and €1 billion ($1.35 billion) worth of submarines to Egypt, according to reports published in the German press.

Neither of these deals is particularly remarkable—apart from one fact. Ahead of Germany’s elections last autumn, Germany’s left-wing Social Democrat Party (spd) made its opposition to Germany’s arms sales a major campaign issue. It promised to fight sales to regimes it considered authoritarian—such as Saudi Arabia, or Egypt under its current military rule.

Now the spd is part of the government. The party’s former leader, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is Germany’s foreign minister. The coalition has only been in office for a matter of weeks, and already there are reports of Germany selling billions of euros’ worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The offer to sell 100 patrol boats for €1.4 billion to Saudi Arabia is not new—Bild am Sonntag reported on it last February. Then on February 3 of this year, Spiegel Online reported that the German government was offering export credit guarantees for the deal—a promise to reimburse the manufacturer if Saudi Arabia fails to pay up.

Then on February 4, the Local reported that Germany is “weeks away” from selling two U-209 diesel submarines to Egypt. Germany already agreed to sell Egypt two of these submarines in 2011 for €920 million ($1.25 billion). With four of these submarines, Egypt will be able to maintain permanent submarine patrols.

The fact that the spd has been forced to compromise shows how important these arms sales are to Germany’s strategy. Germany has been using them to build up an alliance of nations opposed to Iran. Egypt currently looks like a promising candidate for this club, but Germany is being cautious. In 2011, it said it would not deliver Egypt’s submarines until 2016, as it waited to see how the Arab Spring unfolded.

Germany is now the world’s third-largest arms seller—though it is a long way behind the world’s top two exporters, the U.S. and Russia.

Germany may shift the type of weapons it sells—giving boats to a repressive regime is much less offensive than selling them tear gas, for example. But the relationships Germany is building here are too important to its strategic interests to be easily discarded. As America retreats from the world, Iran and the Middle East are becoming Germany’s problem.

For more on the strategy behind German arms sales, read our article “Next in Line, Please.”