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Scholz called Putin’s war a “Zeitenwende” — a turning point, or “watershed moment.” But as German speakers tried to explain, it’s larger than that. It’s akin to the dawning of a new era.

“It’s a very disorienting moment,” said Tyson Barker, head of the technology and global affairs program at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “But, at the same time, the public and the political class are all on board.”

Scholz’s announcement was reportedly a surprise even within his own governing coalition, but he received applause and a standing ovation in the Bundestag when he made these defense commitments.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion entirely upended Germany’s views of Russia, and of security, both its own and Europe’s. It is unprecedented, but this is also an unprecedented time — war and a refugee crisis in Europe that is unraveling the post-Cold War order.

“The images of democracy being thwarted, of a sovereign country being invaded, that’s what it took to wake Germany up,” said Rachel Rizzo, nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. “The question now is: how long does it stay?”

Hannibal Hanschke/Getty Images
People gather at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany, to protest against the ongoing war in Ukraine on February 27.

Why Germany’s about-face shocked everybody

Germany is reportedly going to send another 2,700 anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine. They’re reportedly shoulder-fired Strela systems, a Soviet-era model; old inventory from the East German armed forces.

The German government hasn’t officially confirmed the reports, and Der Spiegel reported that hundreds were in moldy boxes and basically unusable, but it seemed to symbolize — in a very on- the-nose way — how quickly Germany is trying to shed old norms.

Similarly unthinkable before last week was Scholz’s other major U-turn: the freezing of Nord Stream 2, a natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany agreed to after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Scholz, as previous governments had, initially defended the project as solely an economic one, despite long-standing pressure from allies that Berlin nix it. Germany did say Nord Stream 2’s future was on the table if Russia invaded, but they didn’t commit — that is, until Russia deployed troops for so-called “peacekeeping” operations in eastern Ukraine, and Scholz, just like that, paused the project’s approval process.

It shows just how much Russia’s invasion crushed long-held tenets, not just of Germany’s foreign policy, but possibly of how the country sees itself.

During the Cold War, starting in the late 1960s, West Germany pursued a policy of “Ostpolitik” — basically, Eastern policy — that sought to normalize relations with the Soviet Union. Those imprints have continued to the modern day, with Germany seeing itself as something of a bridge between Western allies and Moscow, trying to balance its commitments to partners while also trying to maintain good relations with Russia. That meant favoring diplomacy, trying to engage with Russia on multiple fronts, cultivating economic ties between the two countries like Nord Stream 2, and putting faith in these tools as the off-ramp to any conflict.

Germany was “really guided by this idea that European security could only be achieved with Russia,” Besch said. “And in his speech, Scholz has now called out Putin’s action, Putin’s Russia, as a threat to the European security order.”

What makes Germany’s policy shift such a big deal is the widespread political and public backing for it.

More than just pragmatism, Germans embraced a strain of pacifism in the post-World War II world. Experts said it’s important to separate a rhetoric and identity built around pacifism from the reality of Germany’s foreign policy — West Germany was the front line against Russia in the Cold War — which makes it, as Barker said, “a historiography that the Germans and the international community tell themselves about the Germans.” But even so, that perception and embrace of pacifism is still bound up in Germany’s national identity.

In 2014, after Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, NATO members agreed on a timeline for members to spend 2 percent of their GDPs on defense. Germany made the commitment, too, but it was mostly driven by outside pressure, specifically Germany’s allies, like the United States, (who asked sometimes nicely and sometimes less so). Germany still struggled to meet those targets, and was expected to spend about 1.5 percent of its budget on defense in 2021. Some of that lack of urgency came from the sense that the German public wasn’t into beefing up Germany’s defense, so politicians lacked the motivation to make the case for it.

“At the heart of it, there really has never been the sort of public support for strong defense posture. And therefore, no politician has really been the one to make that issue their own, and really push it forward,” Rizzo said.

The shock of Russia’s invasion upended that. Preliminary live polls conducted by Civey, a German polling firm, show clear backing for Germany’s new course. At publication time, one showed that 74 percent of respondents supported Scholz’s decision to invest €100 billion into the Bundeswehr, which included overwhelming majorities from parties on both the right and the left — including from the Greens (73 percent), traditionally the more pacifist party of the current governing coalition, to the Free Democrats (81 percent), traditionally fiscal hawks, but whose leader, Finance Minister Christian Lindner, has embraced Scholz’s plan to spend billions on defense.

Germany’s politics have a reputation for stability; from the outside, upending years worth of foreign and defense dogma doesn’t quite square with that. But Barker said that, in some ways, these kinds of dramatic turning points are part of Germany’s political tradition: an outside event has to come along and force Germany — or, at least its chancellor — to seize the moment. A recent example would be Europe’s refugee crisis, and former chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to welcome more than a million refugees.

So while there were forces pushing Germany in this direction, it took an event like Putin’s war to unleash it.

Barker likened it to pressure on a dam. “The threshold to break is much higher, much more difficult, much more intractable in Germany than other places,” he said. “But once it breaks, it’s like the floodgates open.”

Clemens Bilan/AFP via Getty Images
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz passes by a map of Ukraine during a visit to the Bundeswehr — the German armed forces — operations command in Schwielowsee, eastern Germany, on March 4.

Germany still has to figure out its military identity — and maybe Europe does, too

The big question now is: what does it all mean? At the very least, Germany will be supplying lethal aid to Ukraine as it battles Russia, something Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has continued to plead for from the West. It is also likely to mean that Europe can send more arms, since Germany makes a lot of them, and will no longer be blocking their delivery.

But there are still a lot of unknowns, big and small.

The war in Ukraine drove this massive decision, so experts are watching how deep and robust this change is, and what it might look like in practicality. As experts said, this investment is going to be a shock to the system. The armed forces were underfunded, but money itself is only one part of the equation; there are questions about what it even focuses on and about its military readiness. “Absorbing 100 billion euros in defense spending in a year is like drinking from a massive firehose,” Barker said. “I don’t know if the German military has the absorption capacity to take on that much modernization at once.”

As Besch said, Germany was already in the process of developing a new national security strategy, so the resources arrive at the right time. But Germany has to fundamentally grapple with the kind of military it wants to have, where it wants to invest money on strategy and equipment, and whether this is merely in response to Russia now, or if it will want to stay on this course in the longer term.

How Germany wrestles with this question may echo across Europe, and the trans-Atlantic alliance. Europe, too, has talked for years about establishing a security identity separate from NATO — what the nerds call “strategic autonomy.” Afghanistan added new urgency to this idea, as it reminded Europe of its dependence on the US for its own security. Germany’s overall reticence on defense, and the justified lack of desire to really invest there, always made the idea of a strong European security policy seem more theoretical than practical. But Germany’s latest decision is born from a sense that it, and Europe, isn’t really secure — and that may reshape how the continent approaches defense, even beyond NATO.

Myth No. 2: The oil and gas industry can quickly ramp up production to make a dent in prices

According to an op-ed in the Hill from Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), increasing oil and gas production is as easy as “flipping the switch.”

The White House would probably be pulling those levers if it could because Biden advisers have said they’d like to see more production. “Prices are quite high, the price signal is strong,” White House National Economic Council Deputy Director Bharat Ramamurti said in an interview. “If folks want to produce more, they can and they should.”

But oil companies have made it clear in earnings calls with shareholders that they don’t plan to produce much more, anyway. Remember that just two years ago the industry was in a complete free fall when demand crashed because of the pandemic. Banks sought government bailouts for oil investments that went under, and oil prices actually hit negative levels as producers grew desperate for oil to be taken off their hands.

Now oil and gas prices are climbing in the US because demand during the pandemic has bounced back faster than supply — the average price for a gallon of gas Friday was $3.84, the highest since September 2012. But these are still not historic highs. It’s more that, in the past decade, Americans have gotten used to cheap fuel. Crude oil is currently over $100 a barrel, similar to where prices were in 2014.

It’s possible prices will still climb, but that hasn’t changed companies’ calculations on production levels. “Whether it’s $150 oil, $200 oil, or $100 oil, we’re not going to change our growth plans,’’ Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield told Bloomberg Television. “If the president wants us to grow, I just don’t think the industry can grow anyway.’’ The largest US fracking companies reiterated in earnings calls in February that they intend to keep output roughly flat, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

In other words, now that companies are making handsome profits, they’re using that extra cash to reward investors and pay down debts, not invest in new production.

Myth No. 3: LNG exports will fix Europe’s problems and help US gas prices

Lawmakers and pundits have offered an overly simplified solution that the US can just make up that difference in exports. Columnist Karl Smith at Bloomberg Opinion argued, “Fracking may be America’s most powerful weapon against Russian aggression.”

But LNG exports don’t solve Europe’s or America’s energy challenges. In some ways, they exacerbate them.

To export gas to Europe, a facility first needs to convert it to liquified natural gas, which cools and pressurizes the methane so it can be shipped across continents. On the other end of the ocean, another facility must turn it back into gas for shipment via pipeline.

That’s a lot of infrastructure, which is impossible to scale up in enough time to make an impact on current prices. There’s one new LNG terminal that opened this year in Louisiana. On the European side, the LNG terminals are already at capacity. This isn’t going to help make up Russia’s supply of 40 percent of Europe’s gas either.

So it’s not particularly helpful or possible to boost exports to Europe, but it also wouldn’t help prices in the US.

Williams-Derry points to US exports of liquified natural gas as the primary reason for climbing prices. In 2015, Congress passed a law signed by President Obama that lifted the crude oil export ban in place since 1975, with the goal of reducing the glut of excess gas.

“The reason we’re experiencing higher natural gas prices right now is we’re exporting more,” Williams-Derry said. “It’s not that we’re consuming more. It’s not that we’re producing less. It’s that we’re exporting.” The chart shows how LNG exports have grown since 2016.

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Gas exports are rising since Congress lifted the oil-export ban at the end of 2015. The move was intended to boost profits, and now is responsible for rising methane gas prices.

There’s a reason the fossil fuel industry has been pushing so aggressively for new infrastructure. Jack Fusco, president and CEO of the largest LNG company in the US, Cheniere, welcomed the instability because of how it would boost the industry’s profits. In recent comments highlighted by Kate Aronoff at the New Republic, Fusco said, “But if anything, these high prices, the volatility, drive even more energy security and long-term contracting.”

Fusco’s argument underscores the real reason the industry is drumming the message about energy security. The more government investment in new infrastructure, the more multi-year contracts the industry can get, and the better the prospects are in the long term. Exports aren’t the simple fix for the US or Europe, but they are the best thing that can happen to the oil industry in the long run.

Myth No. 4: We can ignore climate concerns because boosting gas will counter dependence on Russia

In an op-ed for Fortune, American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers suggested the oil industry is ramping up production for patriotic reasons: “U.S. natural gas producers and exporters have mobilized to help ease Europe’s ongoing energy crisis,” he wrote, adding “as in World War II and other crises, America has Europe’s back.”

None of the suggestions Sommers suggest, like boosting LNG capacity, actually help in the immediate crisis. Sommers says himself this is a lesson for the long run.

In the long run, investing in fossil fuel infrastructure can seriously backfire by raising energy costs for Europeans and increasing reliance on Russian gas. LNG will always be the more expensive option because of its processing and transport. “By locking yourself into a gas-powered future, you’re locking in higher costs for the long haul,” Williams-Derry said. “There’s not a good alternative to Russian gas if you want to have inexpensive gas in Europe.”

“If you’re going to double down on gas, essentially, you’re doubling down on Russia,” Williams-Derry added.

Skyrocketing energy prices during periods of global instability is nothing new, but countries have still not learned that “part of what we’re seeing here is the cost of reliance on fossil fuels,” said Sam Ori, executive director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.

Clean energy isn’t a panacea either. “Once you’re in the [energy] crisis, it’s too late,” Ori noted. But Ori noted that the world will have to make choices anyway of how to respond to Russia. Countries will invest in new energy infrastructure. They will have to make a choice what kind of energy future to support. And there’s a real opportunity to break the cycle of instability.

But the US risks learning the wrong lessons. Sen. Manchin, who has voiced support for historic funding for climate and clean energy investments but blocked the passage of the original Build Back Better bill, has rallied for an all-of-the-above energy approach that boosts fossil fuels. “To continue to ask other countries to do what we can do for ourselves in a cleaner way is hypocritical,” Manchin said in a statement last week. Lobbyists from the US Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute are beating the same drum.

The biggest risk is if the US and Europe respond to this crisis by over-investing in the future of fossil fuels. Actions like building LNG terminals and approving new leasing don’t help in the short term when people are struggling to pay high bills. It doesn’t achieve energy independence. But it would lock the world onto a dangerous path for climate change.

“It was just a blanket bias against foreigners to favor Ukrainians and allow them to cross the border and access help first,” Asya, a Kenyan national who was studying medicine in Ukraine, told Vox.

A Black man with short hair leans against a wall clad in grey marble. He wears a yellow and blue jacket, and his face is obscured by his hand, which bears a large, rectangular ring. White people await a train behind him. Ethan Swope/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A Nigerian student covers his face, crying, after reportedly being told by Ukrainian officials at a train station in Lviv that he wasn’t allowed to leave for Poland.

And it’s not just an issue faced by Black refugees. There have been reports of Afghans being turned away, and advocates have shared narratives of Yemeni students facing extreme violence.

Diplomats and world leaders have spoken out against these incidents and cited global commitments the European Union must follow during times of crisis.

“We strongly condemn this racism and believe that it is damaging to the spirit of solidarity that is so urgently needed today,” Kenyan Ambassador to the UN Martin Kimani said Monday at the security council meeting.

But for many migration advocates and people trying to flee Ukraine, these difficulties reflect broader issues with how Europe treats migrants.

Race and geopolitics are playing a role in the scale of Europe’s response

It’s clear that race and identity have affected Europe’s response to this refugee crisis. At least one European political leader has stressed that they feel Ukrainians’ perceived whiteness, tendency toward Christianity, and “Europeanness” makes them more palatable than past refugee populations.

“These people are Europeans,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov said last week. “These people are intelligent. They are educated people. … This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”

Rhetoric like Petkov’s hasn’t arisen in a vacuum. It is very much a consequence of the 2015 arrival of Syrians — who, similar to Ukrainians, were fleeing an authoritarian leader destroying their country.

Between 2014 and 2016, millions of Syrians, North Africans, and others arrived in Europe. Some countries, though not all, initially welcomed them. Then- German Chancellor Angela Merkel arguably staked her political career on her decision to open her country’s doors; 1.7 million people applied for asylum in Germany in the five years after. But the influx of people — and the public debates over how to handle those Syrians — helped fuel the rise of populist, anti-immigration, euroskeptic, and far- right parties across Europe.

A bearded man in a dark jacket and a bright blue shirt holds a baby in a puffy pink and blue striped coat; a woman in a black hijab and grey sweater walks next to him. Both the man and woman are smiling. They pass groups of refugees, sitting in the dim light of a white walled shelter covered in graffiti. Andreas Gebert/picture alliance via Getty Images
Syrian refugees await aid in a shelter at the border of Austria and Germany in September 2015.

The rise of those parties not only led to Europe embracing a more nativist stance on migration but also struck fear in politicians who might have previously been more welcoming. Governing parties such as French President Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche have become hawkish on migration in recent years, and in 2020, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen praised Greece as Europe’s “shield” against asylum seekers and migrants.

To this day, migration remains politically fraught in Europe. It’s recently manifested in Poland deciding to deploy troops and construct a $400 million wall to repel predominantly Muslim asylum seekers at its border with Belarus. To complicate the situation, Belarus was accused of transporting those asylum seekers to the Polish border with false promises of easy passage as a means of antagonizing the EU over sanctions imposed in 2020. And Hungary has passed laws criminalizing support for asylum seekers and limiting the right to asylum; it’s also allowed police to automatically expel any unauthorized migrants — all measures predominantly affecting Muslims.

History and foreign policy are two other elements driving the disparate treatment of Ukrainians and non- Ukrainians. The so-called Refugee Convention, signed in 1951 by 145 nations, was initially meant to protect people who had been displaced as a result of World War II in Europe. But it became a weapon Europe used to fight the Cold War, as countries began to use it as a legal framework to absorb people who wanted to leave Soviet bloc countries.

“It became a way, from a political and moral kind of narrative, to project this idea of the West being better than the East,” said Nando Sigona, chair of international migration and forced displacement at the University of Birmingham.

The EU’s decision to absorb Ukrainians is a continuation of that idea. It allows Europe to position itself as a safe bastion for peaceful, democracy-loving people fleeing for their lives from a dangerous and authoritarian Russia.

But when it comes to refugees from other parts of the globe, Europe has become less interested in investing in resettlement. That’s because those refugees don’t do much to advance the continent’s geopolitical interests, Sigona said. Certainly, Europe wants to be seen as a benevolent power and leader on humanitarian issues. But accepting refugees from sub-Saharan Africa or Yemen doesn’t serve its objective of advancing the supremacy of Western-style democracies over the Russian political system.

“What we’re seeing with Ukraine now is very much a return to the Cold War kind of logic,” Sigona said.

Beyond the political considerations, there are also practical issues driving the European response to the refugee crisis. Neighboring European countries are the closest landing spot for Ukrainians who are fleeing, and those Ukrainians currently don’t have a country to go back to. Non-Ukrainians (in some but not all cases, given crises in countries like Yemen or Ethiopia) arguably do.

“We don’t really have another choice to respond to this crisis because these people are going to come to Europe,” said Camille Le Coz, a senior policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute Europe.

What’s next for non-Ukrainians fleeing the war?

All 27 EU member states have agreed to adopt a directive that instantly grants temporary protection to Ukrainian citizens and some others fleeing Russia’s invasion. It would give them the right to live and work in the European Union for up to three years without going through the EU’s long asylum process that has historically left thousands of refugees in limbo, as well as access to social welfare assistance, medical assistance, and childhood education.

The fate of non-Ukrainians is less clear, however.

A woman and child, both wearing heavy coats and pink hijabs, sit on a cot. The woman is speaking to another child, standing to her left, in a pink coat. In front of them, in a carrier, is a baby with a blue blanket up to their chin. Behind the family are rows and rows and of black cots, each with a pillow and a brown blanket. Beata Zawrzel/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
A family of non-Ukrainian refugees rests in a temporary shelter in Korczowa, Poland, on March 2, 2022.

The EU is not offering automatic protection to most of them. That’s partly because Poland, among several other member countries, does not want to host non-Ukrainians long term.

People who had long-term residency permits in Ukraine would be eligible for that automatic protection. But to otherwise qualify for protection, non-Ukrainians, including stateless individuals, must prove that they were legally residing in Ukraine and are unable to return to their home countries due to the lack of “safe and durable conditions.” It’s not clear how EU countries will determine what constitutes those kinds of conditions.

They could also apply for asylum through lengthy, traditional pathways, but there’s no guarantee that they will get it. And without legal status in the EU, they could potentially be forcibly returned to their home countries.

“For example, if you’re a Moroccan student, the idea is you go back home. If you’re an Indian student, you go back home,” said Le Coz. “But if you’re an Afghan refugee — because there were some Afghans who had sought refuge in Ukraine or have been evacuated there — it means you can seek asylum in Poland.”

The policy has left many non-Ukrainians unsure how to regain the opportunities they’d hoped Ukraine would provide. Ali Sadaka, a dentistry student from Lebanon who was studying in Kharkiv, was reluctant to halt his studies and return home.

“We didn’t want to stop. Most Lebanese students don’t have any other opportunities, mainly because our government won’t help us to continue here. There’s an economic crisis,” he told Vox.

And for nationals of countries currently involved in conflict, there’s been uncertainty as well. Though Yemenis should receive protection under the EU’s plan, the Yemeni Embassy in Poland posted a statement on February 26 implying that resettlement in the EU would be difficult. There’s been no further information since.

Ultimately, though, non-Ukrainian refugees “now have to figure out what they are going to do with their lives,” as Azal Al-Salafi, a researcher at Yemen Policy Center, told Vox. And they have limited time to do so.

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