Germany has been slow to reassess its place in the world

THERE IS A crack of howitzer fire and a plume of smoke from above the birch trees, then silence falls on the milky winter afternoon in Pabrade, close to Lithuania’s border with Belarus. “There come the Marders!” cries Lieutenant-Colonel Bösker of the Mechanised Infantry Battalion 371 of Germany’s Bundeswehr as four light tanks roll out of the forest. Their job is to lure the enemy into the line of fire of the Leopard heavy tanks, which issue a series of earth-shattering booms. All this action, the lieutenent-colonel explains, is purely defensive: “The point is to slow down the enemy and buy time for political talks.”

The exercise, codenamed “Winter Wolf”, is part of NATO’s “enhanced forward presence” (EFP) in Poland and the Baltic states, a response to Russian aggression in the region. In each of these countries a “framework nation”—in Lithuania’s case, Germany—leads a multinational battalion charged with deterring Russian interference. Until recently such a deployment close to the Russian border would have been unthinkable. The post-war German constitution ruled out any combat deployments of the armed forces, a prohibition that was lifted only in 1994. Between the end of the second world war and 2002, when Germany joined the war in Afghanistan, the number of Germans killed in combat was precisely two. Mr Trump complains that Europe’s largest economy still falls well short of NATO’s target for defence spending of 2% of GDP. But as the Lithuania mission shows, the country is now more engaged.