Berlin needs to let Vladimir Putin know that it can resist his gas supplies and that it is willing to pay more for NATO’s military defense.
“Suppose they gave a war, and nobody came?” went a 1960s antiwar slogan. Stell Dir vor, es ist Krieg, und Keiner geht hin is the German version. It’s still popular in Germany, a country of peaceniks. Germans’ defeat in World War II and subsequent reeducation by the Allies stripped them of any enthusiasm for war or military things.
