THE QUIET EUROPEAN
THREE DAYS AFTER RUSSIA ORDERED troops into Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stood before the Bundestag, the federal Parliament in Berlin, and addressed the lawmakers in a special Sunday session. “Feb. 24, 2022, marks a watershed moment in the history of our continent,” he said, calling the Russian invasion a Zeitenwende, an epoch-changing event.
Scholz, who had taken office only a couple of months earlier, met this historic moment with a response that would overturn decades of military policy—and with it, a crucial part of postwar German identity. He announced a €100 billion plan to boost the country’s notoriously depleted armed forces, promised to end reliance on Russian fossil fuels, and, for the first time since the Second World War, declared Germany would send weapons to a conflict zone. “The issue at the heart of this is whether power is allowed to prevail over the law,” Scholz told his Parliament, “or whether we have it in us to set limits on warmongers like Putin.”
Exactly what those limits should be—and how quickly Germany should impose them—has been the subject of fierce debate in the two months since. For decades, Germany has been an economic powerhouse with a military that lagged behind, embracing pacifism in atonement for the Holocaust and other devastations it caused in the 20th century. With his Zeitenwende speech, Scholz presented a road map for Germany to emerge as a true global power—with a military to match. “We have to be strong enough. Not so strong that we’re a danger to our neighbors,” Scholz says, during an April 22 interview with TIME, his first with a major English-language publication since the start of the war. “But strong enough.”
The announcement of this new era for Germany was met warmly by allies around the world, many of whom had complained about Germany’s hesitancy in the run-up to the invasion. And though the speech
