The fall of the Iron Curtain and an ever more integrated global economy opened new opportunities and markets, particularly in the countries of the former Eastern bloc but also in other countries with emerging economies, especially China. Russia, with its vast resources of energy and other raw materials, had proved to be a reliable supplier during the Cold War, and it seemed sensible, at least at first, to expand that promising partnership in peacetime.

The Russian leadership, however, experienced the dissolution of the former Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and drew conclusions that differed sharply from those of leaders in Berlin and other European capitals. Instead of seeing the peaceful overthrow of communist rule as an opportunity for more freedom and democracy, Russian President Vladimir Putin has called it “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” The economic and political turmoil in parts of the post-Soviet space in the 1990s only exacerbated the feeling of loss and anguish that many Russian citizens to this day associate with the end of the Soviet Union.

It was in that environment that authoritarianism and imperialistic ambitions began to reemerge. In 2007, Putin delivered an aggressive speech at the Munich Security Conference, deriding the rules-based international order as a mere tool of American dominance. The following year, Russia launched a war against Georgia. In 2014, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea and sent its forces into parts of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, in direct violation of international law and Moscow’s own treaty commitments. The years that followed saw the Kremlin undercut arms control treaties and expand its military capabilities, poison and murder Russian dissidents, crack down on civil society, and carry out a brutal military intervention in support of the Assad regime in Syria. Step by step, Putin’s Russia chose a path that took it further from Europe and further from a cooperative, peaceful order. …

The world must not let Putin get his way; Russia’s revanchist imperialism must be stopped. The crucial role for Germany at this moment is to step up as one of the main providers of security in Europe by investing in our military, strengthening the European defense industry, beefing up our military presence on NATO’s eastern flank, and training and equipping Ukraine’s armed forces.

[I’m not sure this is avoiding a cold war rather than recognizing the one that has been in play all along with Vladimir Putin. — Ed]