Prima facie, it may seem German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s inexperience in world politics showed in his first appearance at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday when he was dismissive about a remark by Russian leader earlier in the week at a joint press conference with him in Moscow that the events that unfolded in Ukraine’s eastern regions amounted to “genocide.”

Scholz mockingly said, “Putin is coming to argue that in Donbass there is something like genocide, which is really ridiculous, to be very clear on that.” What prompted Scholz to step onto that minefield he only knows. There was deliberateness in his performance.

Perhaps, Scholz thought it made excellent politics in front of all those powerful American politicians present in the audience in Munich to mark his distance publicly from Russia at a time when the U.S. media has been lampooning that Germany is no longer a western ally.

Surely, Scholz would know there is a taboo about the word “genocide” slipping out of the lips of a German politician. It harks back to Nazi Germany. On a rough estimation, the major genocides carried out by the Nazis alone add up to 16,315,000 victims. Germany is the world champion on this blood-stained chapter of human history, unlikely to be ever surpassed.

Scholz’s gaffe will not end here. It is overnight dovetailing into the current crisis between Russia and the West. Ironically, Scholz may have unwittingly ended up drawing attention to Moscow’s concerns over a humanitarian catastrophe brewing in Donbass, where millions of Russians live. Moscow is going to present to Scholz full documentary evidence of the genocide that Putin had referred to.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Saturday, “My message to counterparts at the German Foreign Ministry is this: In connection with statements by Chancellor Scholz, we will present evidence concerning mass graves in this region for the German leadership to study closely.”

Zakharova disclosed that these materials have already been shared with Washington, but Moscow kept them out of public domain intentionally since their content is “unbearable.” To be sure, Scholz has a challenging week ahead.

Why is all this happening? For a start, Germany’s involvement in the Ukraine question itself is highly controversial. Germany actively promoted the unrest in Ukraine in late 2013 to push then President Viktor Yanukovich to hurry through his country’s EU accession. German intelligence encouraged street protests in Kiev while Berlin did the arm-twisting, which ultimately forced Yanukovich to agree to hold mid-term elections to test people’s will.

Germany, France and Russia backed such an approach as the best way out of the stalemate. However, within forty-eight hours of that deal, protests took a violent turn in Kiev’s main square and agents provocateurs working for western intelligence deployed snipers at vantage points to attack the security forces.

To cut a long story short, the Ukrainian security apparatus collapsed, Yanukovich fled the country and an anti-Russian leadership emerged in Kiev with the street power of extreme nationalist forces led by neo-Nazi elements.

The bottom line is that Germany had a hand in destabilising Ukraine. The events in Ukraine expose the propaganda lie that its foreign policy offensive serves the interests of democracy and freedom. In reality, the Berlin government is working with an opposition movement whose leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok of the neo-fascist All-Ukrainian Union, or “Svoboda.” (Tyahnybok said recently that Russia would have to be “dismembered” and divided into “20 nation-states”!)

Germany played a similar dubious role in negotiating the Minsk Accords. The Steinmeier Formula proposing special status for the separatist region is a compromise path named after the present German president, but Berlin subsequently retracted from its obligation to navigate the regime in Kiev to implement the accord. Possibly, Germany heeded American wishes.

This being the sordid backdrop, the big question is: What is Germany really up to?

The heart of the matter is that Germany is back on the path of militarisation for the third time in the past century. The vaulting German ambition is once again surfacing, first articulated by then the Foreign Minister and current President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in a Bundestag speech — and in a speech at the Munich Security Conference — in late January-early February 2014 to the effect that Germany was “too big and too important” to confine itself any longer “to commenting on world politics from the sidelines.”

Steinmeier declared that due to its economic power and geographical location in the centre of Europe, Germany bore a special responsibility in regard to world affairs, adding, “We recognise our responsibility,” and, while Germany would serve as a catalyst for a common European foreign and security policy and the use of military force was only a last resort, it could not any longer be ruled out!

That was the moment of truth in German history. Germany was bidding farewell to its post-World War 2 self-diminution in foreign and security policy. Interestingly, the German Defence Minister at that time was none other than Ursula von der Leyen, the staunchly pro-American — and notoriously anti-Russian — head of the EU Commission presently.

German militarisation is simply not possible without tacit U.S. encouragement stemming out of geopolitical considerations — Washington’s containment strategy against Russia. As in the past with Nazi Germany initially, American corporations are taking part in German re-armament, supplying German companies with everything from raw materials to technology and patent knowledge. This is happening thanks to a a complex network of business interests, joint ventures, cooperation agreements, and cross-ownership between American and German corporations and their subsidiaries.

In the American calculus, Germany is an economic powerhouse and is the only credible European power today that can potentially checkmate Russia in terms of history and geography and geo-strategy. Unsurprisingly, meddling in the Russian-German relationship has been Washington’s approach throughout.

Germany is playing a brilliant game of hedging. It is heavily dependent on Russia for its vast market, massive natural resources and energy supplies, and, therefore, adopts a “win-win” attitude in the bilateral ties. However, Germany cannot and will not jeopardise its trans-Atlantic bonds, either. Atlanticism remains as the core of German strategies.

Bundeswehr is right in the forefront of the NATO’s aggressive buildup against Russia. German Minister Christine Lambrecht told Spiegel last week that a rapid and massive increase in defence spending is needed to prepare the German armed forces for a possible war against Russia. An additional €37.6 billion is reportedly being planned as defence spending to prepare the German military to fight full-scale wars.

Any whichever way the U.S.-Russian tensions pan out — or, get protracted — Germany hopes to be the net winner. It may seem an audacious hope, but is a realistic expectation. The Ukraine crisis marks Germany’s return to the centre court of European security as a superpower. France, UK, Italy etc. stand much diminished and belong to a junior league. Germany senses that its hour of reckoning is at hand. The U.S. once again encourages Germany as its principal European partner.

If Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary-General, were alive today, he might revise his famous 1949 remark that the alliance’s goal was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Instead, he might say, looking ahead, that NATO would aim to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans out and about.”

The new German coalition government headed up by Chancellor Olaf Scholz is only one week in power but already the signals are pointing to Berlin being more amenable to U.S.-led NATO hostility towards Russia.

The “traffic light” coalition (based on party colours) comprises the Social Democrat Party led by Scholz in partnership with the Greens and pro-business Free Democrats. Scholz gave an inaugural address to the Bundestag this week as the new chancellor having replaced Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats after her 16 years in power.

Following Merkel’s reign, which was hallmarked by stability and her dominant personal style, all eyes will be on the new government in Berlin and its impact on transatlantic relations. Scholz, who is relatively unknown, and his administration could hardly be met with a more challenging time given the heightened tensions between, on the one hand, the U.S.-led NATO military alliance and the European Union, and on the other, Russia.

Berlin’s new foreign minister Annalena Baerbock (who takes over from Heiko Maas) brings to her post a more vociferous, critical position towards Russia. Baerbock, a leading Green lawmaker, announced this week that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany is being put on hold due to alleged Russian aggression towards Ukraine. The pipeline was already being held up since completion in September by an industrial certification process. But now Baerbock has introduced a geopolitical factor to cancel the project. Before her ministerial post, she was known as a trenchant critic of Nord Stream 2, opposing it because she provocatively claimed, it allowed Russia to “blackmail Europe”, and also apparently on environmental grounds. Ironically, the alternative to Russian gas supply would be the import of American shale gas which is more expensive and dirty owing to its environmentally destructive extraction method. In her latest Nord Stream 2 pronouncement, the German foreign minister is sounding remarkably like U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in linking the project’s future to tensions over Ukraine and putative Russian invasion plans.

Baerbock has also been a long-standing advocate of expanding NATO eastwards and of closer transatlantic ties with the United States.

This eastward expansion of the military alliance is exactly what has caused apprehension in Moscow which views the bloc as threatening Russia’s national security from the potential for advanced positioning of nuclear missiles on Russian borders. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has urged U.S. President Joe Biden as well as British and French counterparts to implement legal guarantees to safeguard Russia’s security. Those guarantees would include a prohibition on NATO’s further eastward expansion to include membership access for former Soviet republics Ukraine and Georgia.

With Baerbock as Germany’s top diplomat, it is likely that Russia’s concerns will be given short shrift. As the strongest political force in the European Union, a more hardline German policy will ramify across the entire EU and reinforce the position of Russophobic members like Poland and the Baltic states.

As for the new chancellor, 63-year-old Scholz was formerly the finance minister in Merkel’s last coalition government. That administration was robustly supportive of the Nord Stream 2 partnership with Russia. Under Merkel, Berlin rebuffed Washington’s objections to the pipeline saying that it was a sovereign matter for Germany. Scholz himself had in the past spoken out against American meddling over Germany’s energy policy. The Biden administration appeared to respect Berlin’s independence on the issue by dropping threats of sanctions against participating companies. That background might suggest that the chancellor’s office would hold Baerbock’s foreign ministry in check.

However, the recent escalation of tensions over Ukraine fuelled by Washington’s claims that Russia is planning to invade the country has hardened Germany’s stance towards Moscow, in particular on the issue of expanding economic sanctions as “severe consequences” for alleged Russian aggression. Moscow has repeatedly dismissed the U.S. claims of invasion plans, but disconcertingly Germany and the rest of the EU have gone along with Washington’s narrative, accepting dubious American “intel” as if good coin, reminiscent of the WMD propaganda leading up the war on Iraq. That paradigm shift suggests a premeditated, orchestrated objective for the U.S. The Europeans have been suitably suckered into the ploy. And, at last, the Nord Stream 2 project is within target of Washington’s policy torpedoes.

In his address to the Bundestag this week, Scholz called for “constructive dialogue” with Russia to “stop the spiral of escalation”. He also called for “mutual understanding”. That may sound like an enlightened policy of diplomatic engagement. But then, disappointingly, Scholz vowed that Germany would “speak with one voice with our European partners and transatlantic allies”. That means Berlin is henceforth deferring to the position of Washington and Kiev in terms of determining response to the accepted narrative of “Russian aggression”.

Whatever the shortcomings of Merkel – she was no radical critic of Washington – but she at least was capable at times of exerting a modicum of independence. Her unwavering support for Nord Stream 2, for example, despite American pressure. Also more recently, it has emerged that Merkel reportedly blocked supplies of NATO weapons to Ukraine much to the annoyance of the Kiev regime.

Olaf Scholz does not come across, at least so far, as a strong leader. His mealy-mouthed talk about “sharing one voice” with the U.S. and “partners” like Ukraine, as well as his ready acceptance of spurious allegations about Russian aggression, indicate that the new Berlin government will be a pliable tool for Washington’s policy of hostility towards Russia.

Historically, it is ominous that the first German overseas military action since 1945 occurred in 1999 under an SPD-Green coalition. That was when Germany joined in the NATO bombing of Serbia. These parties are coalition partners again at another crucial time for Europe.

If there is a new traffic light in Berlin it’s showing no stops for further U.S. and NATO aggression in Europe.