NATO was created in 1949 to (said its first secretary general) xe2x80x9ckeep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.xe2x80x9d

Putin has provoked Germany to do what various U.S. presidents have fruitlessly exhorted it to do: stand up. That is, to embrace diplomatic and military roles commensurate with its European centrality and economic vigor.

For decades, Germanyxe2x80x99s foreign policy had often been liberal, as Robert Frost defined a liberal: someone xe2x80x9ctoo broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.xe2x80x9d But in last Sundayxe2x80x99s emergency Bundestag session, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the left-of-center Social Democrats said goodbye to all that.

xe2x80x9cTo set boundaries for warmongers like Putin,xe2x80x9d Scholz announced 100 billion euros ($113 billion) to modernize Germanyxe2x80x99s military. Germany will at last meet NATOxe2x80x99s goal-cum-duty for members to spend 2% of gross domestic product on defense, a commitment tepidly avowed by, and not constraining for, most NATO members.

Germany, Scholz said, will build xe2x80x9cthe next generation of battle tanks,xe2x80x9d and might purchase U.S. F-35 fighter jets and xe2x80x94 Germany has been queasy about drones xe2x80x94 Israeli drones.

Two liquefied natural gas terminals will be built to receive LNG from the United States and Qatar, reducing Germanyxe2x80x99s current 55% dependence on Russian gas.

Germany, which is sending Ukraine missiles and armored vehicles, has ended its opposition to other countries transferring German-made weapons (howitzers from Estonia, rocket-propelled grenades from the Netherlands) to an active conflict zone.

In Scholzxe2x80x99s coalition government, the foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, is from the generally pacifist Green party. She said Germanyxe2x80x99s xe2x80x9c180-degree turnxe2x80x9d means xe2x80x9cleaving behind a form of special restraint in foreign and security policy,xe2x80x9d but xe2x80x9cif our world is different, then our politics must also be different.xe2x80x9d

The coalitionxe2x80x99s third party, the Free Democrats, stands for fiscal rectitude but called the increased defense spending xe2x80x9can investment in our future.xe2x80x9d Credit Putin for this epochal transformation.

Some people eager to propitiate Putin have suggested the xe2x80x9cFinlandizationxe2x80x9d of Ukraine. A 1948 treaty with Moscow lodged Finland firmly in the Soviet sphere of influence. But Pekka Haavisto, the current foreign minister of Finland (which is a member of the European Union but not of NATO), says of Finlandization: xe2x80x9cWe donxe2x80x99t recommend that path to anyone.xe2x80x9d And: xe2x80x9cIt is very important that NATO keeps its open-door policy, that Finland keeps the right to apply … and that is our position for Ukraine and Georgia as well.xe2x80x9d

In Sweden, too, NATO membership is being considered.

In 1910, almost 40 remarkably peaceful European years after the Franco-Prussian war, Norman Angell published xe2x80x9cThe Great Illusion,xe2x80x9d which became one of the first international bestsellers. His argument was that major wars xe2x80x94 those between developed nations xe2x80x94 would be prohibitively expensive, hence futile, hence unlikely. Wars had become too disruptive to be feasible in an economically interconnected world.

Stanford Universityxe2x80x99s president agreed: xe2x80x9cThe Great War of Europe, ever threatening … will never come. … The bankers will not find the money for such a fight, the industries of Europe will not maintain it.xe2x80x9d David Starr Jordan said this in 1913, the year before the beginning of, essentially, a 30-year European war.

Eleven decades after Angell wrote, the ever-thickening fabric of globalization still is insufficient to prevent all wars. It might, however, enable noncombatant nations to coordinate the inflicting of economic pain severe enough to force even a barely developed nation, such as Putinxe2x80x99s ramshackle Russia, to buckle.

Putinxe2x80x99s Russia might be, in President Barack Obamaxe2x80x99s dismissive estimation, a xe2x80x9cregional power.xe2x80x9d But its region is Europe. And as Dominic Sandbrook, the British historian, says, xe2x80x9cFixated on their own modernity, obsessed with the here and now, many Western politicians seem unable to grasp that at the eastern edge of Europe, history really matters.xe2x80x9d That they grasp it now is another of Putinxe2x80x99s self-wounding ricochets.

Daniel Yergin, in xe2x80x9cThe New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations,xe2x80x9d writes: xe2x80x9cIn 1976, the Leningrad Evening News reported that a previously unknown local xe2x80x98judoistxe2x80x99 had won a judo competitionxe2x80x9d and predicted that more would be heard about him. He was the 23-year-old Vladimir Putin.

One principle of judo is to turn an attackerxe2x80x99s force against him. This is what xe2x80x94 Newtonxe2x80x99s third law of motion applied to international affairs xe2x80x94 the 69-year-old Putin is now experiencing.