Now that Putin has made muscle-flexing his main form of diplomacy – not merely in Ukraine and the Baltic states, but also in the Balkans and the North Sea – it has fallen to Germany to shape Europe’s response. The motive today is not to defend ethnic Germans abroad – their expulsion in the millions in the 1940s ended that particular concern – so much as the more laudable desire to preserve the values of a democratic EU against the new authoritarianism from the East.