Putin Has Already Caused a Revolution in Germany
In a historic session of the Bundestag, the German government bids adieu to decades of naivete.
The world has changed, and the chancellor takes the podium.
Photographer: Hannibal Hanschke/Getty Images
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.