(bold added)

A key part of the explanation is of course horror at the Russian invasion, and the destruction and atrocities that have resulted. This cannot however be the sole explanation. After all, both Ostpolitik and the construction of the Soviet gas supply network took place at the height of the Cold War, while East German border guards were shooting down fellow-Germans trying to flee to West Berlin, and while the Soviet Union was invading and occupying Afghanistan.

...a narrative has taken hold and been accepted by most of the establishment, whereby previous German governments should be ashamed of their attempts to promote good relations with Moscow, and in particular of the way that they made the country dependent on Russian gas.

This narrative has been assiduously promoted by Washington, by Poles and other East Europeans, and by the German Greens, who were not in government when these decisions were made and find this accusation a convenient stick with which to beat the other parties.

There is an easy answer to this accusation — but it is one that the German establishment (and indeed Western establishments in general) cannot make, for it would involve accepting the degree to which they were previously engaged in deceiving their own populations.

The establishment of Soviet gas supplies to Germany obviously preceded the fall of the Soviet Union and the expansion of NATO into eastern Europe. Leading experts and former officials, including Helmut Schmidt in Germany, warned that NATO expansion was likely to lead to war. The German government, like other European governments, however told its people that NATO expansion was essentially risk free — because if they had they addressed these risks and proposed in consequence a radical reduction in Russian gas supplies, with resulting steep rises in energy prices, a majority of Germans would most probably have turned decisively against NATO expansion.

Thus after the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 (which followed closely on NATO declaration of a commitment eventually to admit Georgia and Ukraine), I asked a former member of the NATO Secretary General’s staff whether NATO had had any contingency plan to defend Georgia in the event of war. He told me that not merely was there no plan, but also that no plan had even been discussed.

When I expressed incredulity, he explained that since Western publics had been assured that the expansion of NATO involved no risk of war, any official at NATO headquarters who suggested that it did would have been branded as an opponent of enlargement, and their careers would have suffered accordingly.

Aware of the danger of war in Ukraine, but afraid either to demand sacrifices and an acceptance of risk from German voters, or to defy Washington and split Europe by standing firmly for compromise with Russia, a succession of German governments took the path of least resistance: continuing dependence on cheap and plentiful Russian gas together with continual acquiescence to U.S. policies that they had been warned were extremely likely to lead to conflict.

The bitterly ironic result is that a combination of German policies founded firmly in political cowardice has now led Germany into the greatest dangers it has faced since the catastrophe of World War II.