Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has transformed Germany’s faux pacifism

If you had any sense of history and found yourself near the German Bundestag in Berlin on Sunday, you could have heard the sound of an explosion. It wasn’t a physical one, like the blasts of the bombs Russian President Vladimir Putin is lobbing at the brave people of Ukraine. It was instead the detonation of two or more decades of naive, misguided and often hypocritical foreign and defense policy.

In a special session of parliament, Chancellor Olaf Scholz dispatched nearly every dogma Germans — notably including his own party, the Social Democrats — have stubbornly clung to for a generation to the chagrin of their allies in NATO and the European Union. 

And it wasn’t just the chancellor. After him, one speaker after another rose to find similarly clear and moving words — from the center-left Greens and center-right Free Democrats in Scholz’s coalition to the Christian Democrats in opposition. Let the world take note: Owing to Putin’s naked aggression, Germany has changed almost overnight. …

Even more surprisingly, Scholz and his cabinet announced a pivot in defense policy overall. For years, the country’s allies have berated Germany for skimping on its army, to the point where it could barely defend its own territory or be of much use to allies in a pinch. Now the government wants to set up a special fund worth 100 billion euros ($112.7 billion) to re-equip the military.

It also promises to boost defense budgets going forward, at long last taking aim at the NATO-wide target of spending 2% of GDP. The often infantile German debate on whether to banish American nuclear warheads from German soil appears to be canceled. …

A second point of naivete the speakers confessed to is the faux-pacifism that’s pervaded German thinking on world affairs for many decades, but especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Armed conflict, in this narrative, was banished from the continent (with unfortunate exceptions in the Balkans) and from the European zeitgeist. Dialogue and rules had allegedly replaced deterrence and national interests as means and ends of policy. 

Bunk, bunk and bunk, Scholz and other orators acknowledged in so many words. The way to stop a bully like Putin is with strength — only then do talks make sense. That used to be an un-German martial notion. It could now become the new mainstream.