May 9, 2022 — Standing on the viewing platform in Red Square, President Vladimir Putin observed the military parade commemorating the 77th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. This Victory Day, he had reason to be especially proud of his country.

Earlier that week, a group of 150 Russian special forces — bearing no insignia and disguised like the “little green men” who had occupied the Crimean peninsula eight years prior — had slipped into the tiny neighboring Baltic state of Estonia. Seizing a government building in Narva, a city on the border with an ethnic Russian majority, they planted a Russian flag on the roof and promptly declared the “Narva People’s Republic.” In a statement released to international media, leaders of the nascent breakaway state announced they were “defending ethnic Russians from the fascist regime in Tallinn,” Estonia’s capital. Most of Narva’s Russian-speaking citizens looked upon the tumultuous events with passivity. Ever since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, they suspected something like this would eventually happen.

In the months leading up to the incursion, Kremlin-backed television networks — widely watched by Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority — had beamed inflammatory reports about an impending Estonian “genocide” of ethnic Russians, much as they had warned of a similar phantom “genocide” allegedly perpetrated by the Ukrainian government against its own Russian-speaking population years earlier. Tensions reached a climax in March when Russian media accused an “Estonian fascist gang” of kidnapping an ethnic Russian teenager. Agents of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) in Narva were aware from the very beginning that the boy had actually died in an alcohol-induced accident after falling off a bridge. But such facts need not get in the way of a pretext, which came in the form of an ethnic Russian leader in Narva calling for Moscow’s “fraternal assistance” in staving off an incipient pogrom.

Within an hour of Russian Spetsnaz forces commandeering the administrative building in Narva, the Estonians rushed into action. Approaching the outskirts of the city, the Estonian army announced that if the men did not exit the premises with their hands above their heads, Estonian officers would enter and clear the structure by force. Yet it immediately became apparent to all involved that this was an idle threat: Over the course of the previous evening, 25,000 Russian soldiers had amassed on the eastern side of the Narva River, along with 200 tanks and 50 attack helicopters. took Western intelligence agencies completely by surprise. American spy satellites ought to have detected any Russian troop movement along the borders of one of its easternmost NATO allies, yet Moscow, having gained access to Washington’s European communications network, was able to mask its maneuvers. (Edward Snowden, on whose chest Putin had pinned a Hero of the Russian Federation Prize in 2018, had seen to that.)

By the time Tallinn realized what was happening, there was little a force of several hundred Estonian soldiers could plausibly do. And since U.S. President Donald Trump had ordered the removal of all U.S. forces from the Baltic States in 2019 — his demand that NATO members “pay” for American protection oblivious to the fact that Estonia was one of the handful of countries meeting the alliance threshold of spending 2 percent of its GDP on defense — that his move into Estonia might set off an automatic American “tripwire.”

With no ability to repel an impending, full-scale Russian incursion on its own, Tallinn immediately appealed to its NATO allies. At a hastily assembled meeting of the North Atlantic Council in the alliance’s Brussels headquarters, the Estonian representative stated that Russia’s actions constituted an act of war and therefore required the alliance to implement Article 5 of its founding charter, mandating that an attack on one member amounts to an attack on all. This was the moment of truth.

Despite countless speeches over the years by Western leaders attesting to the inviolability of NATO’s borders, Putin knew such promises were hollow. He had read the polls indicating that majorities in leading NATO countries to allies threatened by Russia. The Kremlin had also exploited the openness of Western societies by orchestrating an assiduous, years-long, covert campaign to fund European political parties, media, think tanks, and nongovernmental organizations committed to undermining public support for the Atlantic alliance. This sowed discord across Europe and further sapped the will of its populations to protect liberal values by force of arms. Trump’s repeated impositions of conditionality on the alliance’s mutual defense clause also suggested weakness to Moscow.

The campaign had worked even better than Putin hoped. While it was expected that some countries on NATO’s western periphery, like Spain and Portugal, would be more circumspect about enlisting in military conflict over a tiny member state on the other side of the Continent, in fact, the strongest opposition to invoking Article 5 came from none other than Europe’s predominant political and economic power: Germany.

Such a state of affairs would have been improbable less than a decade earlier, when the stable “grand coalition” government of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD) led Europe in confronting Moscow over its revanchist foreign policy. Yet German politics entered a new era after the 2017 federal election, when the CDU suffered the greatest defeat in its history. Merkel’s 12-year run as chancellor had been second in longevity only to that of Konrad Adenauer and her former mentor Helmut Kohl. But the fateful decision she made in September 2015 to open Germany’s doors to an unlimited number of Syrian refugees — a move initially welcomed by most Germans, eager to bask in the theretofore unknown glow of international admiration and gratitude — would be her undoing. Proving that, in politics, good intentions matter less than consequences, the chancellor’s policy of humanitarian unilateralism emboldened a right-wing populist uprising across the continent.

When WikiLeaks impresario Julian Assange, still ensconced at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, published an email exchange between German government ministers appearing to massage the costs associated with resettling migrants, seized the opportunity. Its leaders bashed Merkel as a “traitor to the people” in connivance with the lügenpresse, or “lying press,” terms that had not been used in Germany since the Nazi era. In a move unprecedented for an American president, Donald Trump inserted himself into the German electoral campaign, attacking Merkel repeatedly for her migrant policy and calling on the German people to vote her out of office. With the quiet assistance of White House counselor Steve Bannon, the newly launched Breitbart Deutschland amplified Trump’s criticisms with incessant, and often factually wrong, stories about “migrant crime” all illustrated with a doctored image of Merkel’s trademark “rhombus” hand gesture splattered in blood.

At the September 2017 federal elections, the AfD broke new ground in postwar German politics when it became the first party to the right of the Christian Democrats to enter the Bundestag winning 20 percent. With the electorate fractured among seven parties, the SPD — which had distanced itself from Merkel’s pro-migrant position and won a plurality of the vote — formed a government with Die Linke, (“the Left”), and the ecologist Greens as junior partners, forming Germany’s first “red-red-green” coalition. “Angela Merkel’s migrant policies ruined her country and her career. AUF WIEDERSEHEN, LOSER!” President Trump tweeted upon the chancellor’s resignation.

So. it was that Sahra Wagenknecht became Germany’s foreign minister. A Marxist true believer, she had joined the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in 1989 just months before the East German dictatorship collapsed. While many of her more opportunist peers had seen the writing on the (literal and proverbial) wall, leaving the SED and positioning themselves for a post-communist political future, Wagenknecht remained loyal to the faith.

The coalition agreement reached by the new German government endorsed an increase in the minimum wage to 25 euros per hour; gay marriage, tax, and pension increases; major defense cuts; and a reversal of most of the liberal labor market and spending reforms instituted by former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. One of its most popular moves (after granting Edward Snowden asylum) was its cancellation of basing agreements with the U.S. military. That was a decision warmly welcomed back in Washington where President Trump saw no purpose in a forward-deployed American military. Over the strenuous but irrelevant objection of the remaining handful of trans-Atlanticists in the Bundestag, the U.S. Army, stationed in Germany since the end of World War II, completed its phased evacuation by 2019.

Absent American forces in Europe, NATO was essentially a dead letter. At the North Atlantic Council’s emergency session to discuss the Estonian crisis, the German representative (a 75-year-old former Stasi officer) began his remarks by voicing sympathy for the plight of the country’s Russian minority, whom, he said, “faced official discrimination and exclusion” at the hands of the Estonian authorities. Though the violent takeover of government property was of course “unacceptable,” the lack of Russian insignia on “separatist” uniforms as well as Putin’s strenuous denial of any Russian involvement rendered application of Article 5 “reckless and irresponsible.” Furthermore, given the history of Estonian “bellicosity” toward Russia, the possibility that the entire event was a “provocation” designed to “drag Europe into war” could hardly be ruled out.

Following the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was highly unlikely that the leaders of the flabby and decadent Western democracies would ever be able to convince their citizens to undertake another serious military operation, let alone one aimed at stopping Russia. Moscow had improved its image in many Western capitals with its Syrian machinations, convincing many of its indispensability in fighting the Islamic State. Also hovering over the entire discussion was the fear that Russia might drop a tactical nuclear weapon in the Baltic region if NATO defended its subjugated member. As far back as 2000, Putin, had lowered the threshold in Russia’s military doctrine such that any “aggression utilizing conventional weapons in situations critical to [Russia’s] national security” — and not just threats to Russia’s “existence” — could trigger a nuclear first use.

Fearing for their own hides, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania insisted that Washington meet its security commitment to a fellow alliance member and redeploy troops to the Baltics bilaterally. The betrayal of Tallinn, they insisted, “amounted to another Munich.” But President Trump refused. Following a series of short, carefully worded speeches by each of the assembled delegates, the NATO Secretary General called for a vote on invocation of Article 5. The “nays” had it, 4-21, with only the two other Baltic States and Poland siding with Estonia.

Putin smiled to himself as he remembered , when, staring at all those perplexed faces lined before him in the grand Bayerischer Hof Hotel, he declared that Russia would no longer allow itself to be humiliated. How they cringed! What was it that Merkel had said about him during the Ukraine operation? That he lived on “another world”? That he had replaced “understanding and cooperation” with “the law of the jungle”? Well, he showed her who was boss.