How the Russian threat turned Germany into Europe’s most important military

“I think it was more destabilizing for the Germans than it was for the British or the French, because the British and the French had a flag that united them and a sense of nation and history. But for postwar Germany, it was all about starting over. It was a rules-based order, however incomplete it was. In many ways, that was the basic tenet of German foreign policy. They were now seeing war in their east and west (with) the friends and allies and watchdogs they thought they relied on that were no longer there.