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 was quietly retiring 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 now exempts defense and security spending above 1 percent of GDP. Germany has also created a separate €500 billion fund for infrastructure and climate investment. A new military service law is meant to take the standing army from 183,000 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 turn.
Where Germany hasn’t caught up is timing. General Inspector Carsten Breuer has said the Bundeswehr is working on the assessment that Russia could be capable of launching a large-scale attack against NATO territory from 2029, and the Bundeswehr has been quietly building around that number rather than hoping it’s wrong. Up to 1,000 wounded soldiers a day is now a planning assumption, a figure that would put enormous pressure on Germany’s military medical system, so civilian hospitals are being written into the plan. In March, the Bundeswehr ran Medic Quadriga, its largest and most complex medical exercise in decades, practicing exactly that, moving the wounded from a simulated front line back into Germany and distributing them to civilian hospitals. Old barracks across the former West Germany, closed for decades, are being reopened to house the recruits the new law will produce. None of this is what a country does when it thinks it has years to spare.
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It isn’t what the neighborhood looks like either. Early one morning this month, sirens went off across eight regions of Estonia because a drone had crossed the border from the southeast. A month earlier, a drone loaded with explosives turned up at Leipzig airport, in Germany itself, prompting the interior minister to say the country had reached “a new level of danger.” None of these were attacks exactly. They were closer to knocking, repeatedly, on doors up and down the same street.
Then there’s what’s being said out loud. On September 13, Poland’s foreign minister told a conference in Kyiv that NATO’s roughly 2,500 aircraft in Europe gave the alliance a real edge, and that if Russia attacked, “we would defeat Russia quite quickly.” Two days later, Kremlin aide Nikolai Patrushev answered that Poland would “cease to exist within two or three days” if Warsaw tried it. Around the same window, NATO’s Rutte was in Berlin repeating something he’s said for over a year: that if China moves on Taiwan, Beijing may ask Moscow to open a second front in Europe just to keep NATO’s attention split. He’s called this the most dangerous period Europe has faced since 1945.
And on September 18, in the middle of all that, Germany’s first F-35A was formally presented to the German government in Fort Worth. It had already flown, ten days early, on September 8th, as if the ceremony were a formality the aircraft couldn’t be bothered to wait for. The jet will train in Arkansas before settling permanently at Büchel, the one German base still cleared to carry American nuclear weapons, a job the Luftwaffe’s aging Tornados have held since the 1980s and can’t hold much longer. Thirty-four more are coming behind it. This is what a Zeitenwende looks like once the speeches are over: a tail number, a paint job, a runway in Texas.
The timetable now matters as much as intent.
Scholz named the turning point before almost anyone else in Europe would say it out loud. The one thing his speech from that afternoon in the Bundestag never got to answer is the only question that matters now: does Germany finish turning before 2029 gets here?
