Germany increases military profile in Europe

SESTOKAI, Lithuania — A vermilion-colored locomotive slowed to a halt, its freight cars obscured in the blinding snow. A German captain ordered his troops to unload the train’s cargo. “Jawohl!” — “Yes, sir!” — a soldier said, before directing out the first of 20 tanks bearing the Iron Cross of the Bundeswehr, Germany’s army.

Evocative of war films, the scene is a sign of new times. Seven and a half decades after the Nazis invaded this Baltic nation, the Germans are back in Lithuania — this time as one of the allies.

As the Trump administration ratchets up the pressure on allied nations to shoulder more of their own defense, no country is more in the crosshairs than Germany. If it meets the goals Washington is pushing for, Germany — the region’s economic powerhouse — would be on the fast track to again become Western Europe’s biggest military power.

Any renaissance of German might has long been resisted first and foremost by the Germans — a nation that largely rejected militarism in the aftermath of the Nazi horror. Yet a rethinking of German power is quickly emerging as one of the most significant twists of President Donald Trump’s transatlantic policy.

Since the November election in the United States, the Germans — caught between Trump’s America and Vladimir Putin’s Russia — are feeling less and less secure. Coupled with Trump’s push to have allies step up, the Germans are debating a military buildup in a manner rarely witnessed since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Perhaps nowhere is the prospect of a new future playing out more than here in Lithuania — where nearly 500 German troops, including a Bavarian combat battalion, arrived in recent weeks for an open-ended deployment near the Russian frontier. The NATO deployment marks what analysts describe as Germany’s most ambitious military operation near the Russian border since the end of the Cold War.

As Germany grows bolder, outdated imagery is roaring back to life through Russian propaganda. Yet in Lithuania, a former Soviet republic now living in the shadow of Russia’s maw, the Nazi legacy is seen as ancient history. To many here, modern Germany is a bastion of democratic principles and one of the globe’s strongest advocates of human rights, free determination and measured diplomacy.

“I think U.S. leadership should be maintained, but also, we need leadership in Europe,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Raimundas Karoblis said. Noting that Britain is in the process of breaking away from the European Union, he called Germany the most likely new guarantor of regional stability.

“Why not Germany? Why not?” he said.