Here’s a partial list of the reversals announced: A week earlier, Scholz had already nixed the operation of a new gas pipeline called Nord Stream 2, which connects Russia directly to Germany and thereby circumvents Ukraine and eastern Europe. Up to that point, Scholz, his party and many other Germans had maintained the fiction that this project was a private-sector business deal with no geopolitical dimension. That delusion is buried, as is the pipeline.

Next, Scholz got fully behind the West’s decision to exclude several Russian banks from the SWIFT system for international payments — dropping any initial reluctance. The government also signed up to the whole long list of other Western sanctions against Russian institutions and individuals. The goal, several speakers made clear, was the complete economic, financial and political isolation of Putin’s Russia.

But that wasn’t the biggest surprise. That prize goes to the decision to finally send weapons to Ukraine for its self-defense. Throughout this crisis, Germany had stubbornly stuck to its position of not arming parties in war (which it has hypocritically ignored in other conflicts). Invariably, the explanations included lugubrious moral lectures about Germany’s historical responsibility as a former warmonger.