Over Christmas I took a long stroll in the snow along with my wife, a proud West Berliner, through the “No-man’s Land” along the former path of the Berlin Wall, erected over 50 years before. We walked from our apartment near Frohnau train station—formerly the end of the line before East Germany—along der Mauerweg through fields and farmland until Stolpe, a small village in Brandenburg. The topic of conversation was the Wall, reunification, and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The dominant narrative in the West has always been that the fall of the wall and collapse of the Soviet Union marked a final victory of Western democratic capitalism over communism. However, for many citizens of the USSR—and especially guardians of the state such as Vladimir Putin—there were no great upheavals, no mass protests of discontent, no tanks or revolution in the streets in cities outside of Moscow. Nothing had changed in their lives and no one had asked them. They simply woke up without the country they had long been exhorted to fight for, work for, and love. That memory is still there today.

There is also still a great deal of Ostalgie—nostalgia for East Germany—among those who grew up there. East Germans enjoyed a higher standard of living than anywhere else in the communist bloc. Some today would take it back; others do not go that far, but offer that they had less worries then.  Most West Germans are obligingly accepting of this, but less so of the “solidarity” tax citizens of western regions have paid for decades for the redevelopment of the former-East. Most do not discuss the matter out of politeness. When the topic is broached, the passionate responses make it easy to see why.

That the West should suggest a wall—the “Ukraine Wall”—be built in Europe is not only short-term in outlook, but plain cowardice. Will we really allow an Iron Curtain to slowly ascend over Ukraine?

The West may have come out on top in the Cold War, but it never truly vanquished the East and could never banish it from memory. This week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov suggested at the Munich Security Conference that the legal basis of German reunification was questionable. It has also long been part of the Russian narrative that the West broke a promise not to expand NATO eastwards. Much of Russia’s patently false argument for its response in Ukraine stems from supposed broken promises and encroachments by the West, the EU, and NATO.

In her continual quest to be “Chancellor of all the Germans,” Angela Merkel offered no response to Lavrov’s suggestion that the country she leads may lack legitimacy, but she was willing to insist that there is no military solution to Russia’s war in Ukraine. This is certainly true in Germany’s case. Besides a generally dovish national sentiment and a constitution that prevents offensive military action, her government has purposefully allowed the Bundeswehr to fall into a woeful state of disrepair. Merkel is always the first in diplomatic negotiations to tip her hand that force will not be considered. For Germany, military action is not only off the table, it never made it on.

A New Munich Moment?

In Munich the Chancellor was unable to answer how she would stop Russia without a military solution if diplomacy failed. Others have made suggestions. Eminent University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer argued in the New York Times that arming Ukraine would escalate tensions and cause Russia to act even more recklessly, reminding us that Russia has nuclear weapons and is protecting “a vital strategic interest.” Stephen Walt of Harvard echoed this sentiment in Foreign Policy. Mearsheimer suggested something that many academics and policymakers have also offered as a solution to the troubles in Iraq—create a “buffer state”, an idea that keeps coming back despite research by Tanisha Fazal and others that buffer states are historically most likely to die. The idea would allow Ukraine to be divided between Moscow and Kiev as a buffer between the EU an