Peace is Their Profession

Germany's foreign minister appears to have misunderstood the purpose of NATO, which is now engaged in a large-scale provocation in the Baltic states. Lots of toys are being played with, including jets, warships, tanks and armoured vehicles, and Britain and the US are standing shoulder to shoulder as ever; so there is almost no chance at all of anything going catastrophically wrong. Nevertheless, Franz-Walter Steinmeier is worried that NATO military exercises - "a symbolic tank parade on the alliance's eastern border" as he rather hurtfully put it - could worsen security rather than improving it, which would obviously be a Very Bad Thing for all those chirpy wog-bombers with their ever-open beaks. Vladimir Putin, for his part, has urged co-operation and search for compromise: an approach which was discredited as long ago as 1990, when Germany re-unified and immediately joined NATO in democratic defiance of the fiend Gorbachev's plea that it remain neutral.