On February 27, 2022, three days into a war nobody in Berlin had planned for, Olaf Scholz walked into an emergency session of the Bundestag and used a word that would end up defining his chancellorship more than anything else he did in it. Zeitenwende, a turning point. He put a number on it too: more than €100 billion for the Bundeswehr, a promise to keep defense spending above 2 percent of GDP from then on, and the reversal of a policy Germany had held since the 1960s against sending its own weapons into a war zone. Germany, he said, meant to become “the guarantor of European security that our allies expect us to be.” The word got voted Germany’s word of the year. Not many chancellors write the headline for a speech they’re still living inside four and a half years later.

The postwar arrangement Scholz quietly retired that afternoon had a name too, coined by NATO’s first secretary general: keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. It worked for seventy years. Scholz didn’t say so out loud, but the third clause of that old formula was the one he’d just rewritten.

What he promised has mostly shown up. The constitutional debt brake no longer applies to defense spending. Another €500 billion is committed through 2035. A new conscription law is meant to take the standing army from 180,000 soldiers toward 260,000, with a 200,000-strong reserve behind it. None of that was guaranteed in 2022. A lot of governments announce turning points and then spend years failing to........

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