WASHINGTON — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brazen and unprovoked assault on Ukraine is fast turning his fears of a more resolute Europe, and potentially expanded NATO alliance, into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
NATO has come together behind stiff economic sanctions against Moscow. Finland and Sweden, after decades of neutrality, have signaled a new interest in joining the alliance while more autocratic members of the defense pact have excoriated Moscow.
And in an effort to shore up Ukraine’s defenses, the European Union for the first time will finance the purchase and delivery of weapons, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Sunday.
In short order, Europe’s leading powers have shifted into a position of heightened defensiveness toward Russia.
“We have to realize that we are now faced with a new normal for our security,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Sunday in an interview on CNN, noting the beefed-up NATO troops’ presence in its eastern countries and weapons deliveries to Ukraine. “This is just the beginning of the adaptation that we need to do as a response to a much more aggressive Russia.”
On Sunday in Berlin, Germany’s new Chancellor Olaf Scholz delivered a rousing speech to parliament declaring that the country would spend more than 2% of its GDP on defense — Putin having accomplished what former President Donald Trump sought for four years, and President Barack Obama before him. Scholz also announced a special 100 billion euro fund to upgrade the country’s army, a fundamental shift by Europe’s most powerful nation after a long stretch of limited military spending in the decade following the European debt crisis.
Describing Russia’s war on Ukraine as “a turning point in the history of our continent,” Scholz told lawmakers, “it is clear that we need to invest significantly more in the security of our country.”
Constanze Stelzenmüller, a Germany expert at Washington’s Brookings Institution, called the speech “Germany’s Nixon to China moment,” a reference to then President Richard Nixon’s pivot from anti-communist hawk to taking his historic trip to China.
Similarly, Scholz’s speech was all the more significant coming from a Social Democrat, one known for fiscal austerity who came of age at the end of the Cold War, a time when many believed democracies were ascendant and would remain so.
“Many Germans mistook the fall of the Berlin Wall as a validation of their method, and they have hung on to that belief well beyond the point that it started being proven out of date otherwise by events,” Stelzenmüller said. “This is the end of that illusion, and the beginning of a new era in German foreign policy, and that is really a historic moment.”
Since taking office in December, Scholz, who served as finance minister to former Chancellor Angela Merkel, had seemed reluctant to take a firm stance toward Putin, given how reliant Germany’s economy is on Russia. But war breaking out in Europe has in short order altered security calculations and stiffened its leaders’ spines.
Scholz’s speech came as the EU also announced it would bar Russian planes from EU airspace and expel Russian state-owned media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik from all 27 members of the European bloc.
“Just like President Putin has unified Ukraine against him and against Russia, President Putin has also unified the NATO alliance,” former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor, who also served at NATO, told SiriusXM radio.
Part of what has helped toughen resolve among European leaders like Scholz, as well as France’s Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was their realization of how blatantly Putin lied about his intentions in Ukraine. He claimed to their faces until the last minute — and even now as his troops have mounted an amphibious assault and are sweeping into the north of Ukraine — that he has no intention of invading the smaller neighbor.
“They were doing direct head of state diplomacy, and Putin lied to them,” said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a risk assessment firm in New York.
