The stakes here are very high. If Germany doesn’t step up and lead, Europe will fragment, decline, and fall under the sway of Russia. Germany needs to rearm in a serious, vigorous way — it needs to spend at least 4% of its GDP on the military, not 2%, and it needs to become the biggest provider of armaments to Ukraine. This will require some economic sacrifices in the short term — higher deficits, and some cuts to welfare spending — though as Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick point out, a rearmament program could actually boost the German economy substantially in the long run.