By Will Marshall, President and Founder of PPI.
Maybe Europeans are not from Venus after all. In a rare display of unity and resolve, they are pouring advanced weapons into Ukraine, expanding NATO, kicking their addiction to Russian gas and tightening the economic squeeze on Moscow.
With the reprehensible exception of Viktor Orban’s Hungary, our European allies seem determined to thwart Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutish attempt to dismember Ukraine if not erase it from the map altogether. To the surprise of many Americans, the creaky old transatlantic alliance is beginning to look like a strategic asset again.
Sweden and Finland, strictly neutral during the Cold War, are joining NATO. That’s confronted Putin with a new, 800-mile northern border with the defensive alliance he loathes and falsely claims poses an offensive threat to Russia.
But the most consequential shift in Europe’s dovish zeitgeist has occurred in Germany. Stung to action by Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine in February, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a “Zeitenwende” – turning point – in the quasi-pacifist drift of Germany’s post-Cold War diplomacy. Instead of the usual humanitarian aid, he promised to send Kiev weapons for self-defense and to boost Germany’s military spending by $100 billion a year.
