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Members of the Bundeswehr in front of the vaccination station at the Stuttgart Clinic
Photo: Marijan Murat / picture alliance / dpa
Conservatives, it is said, are pessimists about life and progress.
It may be so.
But if you really want to be optimistic about the coming weeks, you definitely need rose-colored glasses.
Even if you really don't want to believe it anymore in the 21st century and actually can't either: The big war is possible in Europe, and it is near.
Americans, NATO and Russians are still talking to each other, but reports are showing that there are increasing signs that Russian diplomacy has been "booted out" and that Putin is solely dealing with his security apparatus.
Make Russia great again
has been his goal for a long time.
Preferably as big as the USSR once was.
What the EU member states are today, the Russian leadership calls "orphaned territories," as if they weren't states, but deserted, ownerless land.
So if Vladimir Putin really lashes out with his 100,000 troops in Ukraine, who's to say where he'll stop?
If Russian troops overran a neighboring state in whole or in part, downright old-fashioned in a land war, who would then still be safe in Europe as far as the Atlantic?
Against such scenarios, Corona would suddenly look like a cold, at least politically.
Then we will no longer talk about vaccination but about conscription in Germany.
Provided, of course, that the new Federal Chancellor would consider it appropriate to speak out on a larger scale in an emergency.
I'm not quite sure.
Even if I'm not one of Annalena Baerbock's biggest fans: I can only wish the new Foreign Minister luck and skill for her trip to Kiev today and then to Moscow.
Your foreign policy motto "dialogue and hardness" will certainly be tested, unfortunately by a very tough Russian foreign minister, who was already his country's ambassador to the UN when Ms. Baerbock was still at school, as the "Süddeutsche" wrote.
But seriously: The new minister is embarking on her most difficult path to date, and SPD celebrities trip her up wherever they can.
It's not just a lack of assistance.
There is sabotage.
Objectively, the federal government doesn't have much to do, the best you can do with the Bundeswehr is to frighten Luxembourg, and US President Joe Biden preferred to hold the talks with the Kremlin about Europe's security without the Europeans at the table, and therefore also without Germany .
Biden facing Putin is certainly better than if it were Donald Trump, whom the Kremlin chief ate a few times for breakfast.
But talking over the heads of the Europeans like that, even Trump couldn't have done it any uglier.
What the federal government currently has in its own leverage is the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Vladimir Putin is interested in it because it stabilizes Russian gas revenues and, in a first step, makes Ukraine obsolete as a transit country for an alternative pipeline. The latter fits in well with the current military steps that could make the Ukrainian state itself “obsolete”, i.e. “superfluous”.
Mind you: You can't blame the new federal government for having only one (medium-sized) trump card in its hands with Nord Stream 2.
That she willingly gives it up herself, but very well.
Like SPD parliamentary group leader Mützenich earlier, the new SPD Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said last week that Nord Stream 2 "should not be drawn into this conflict".
It seems to me that the other way around it becomes a shoe: what or who should be able to escape from this conflict, as comprehensive and fundamental as it is?
It's about sovereign statehood within undisputed borders, the core of a peaceful Europe, there's absolutely nothing that can't be »not drawn in«.
SPD general secretary Kevin Kühnert would still like to see the pipeline go into operation in a kind of legal peace, because it has to be good sometimes.
Even in the public discussion about the Russian troop deployment, he apparently sees a malicious attempt to incite international conflicts "in order to bury projects in this way that have always been a thorn in one's side."
If it weren't so snotty, it would be cute.
Unlike the foreign minister, the SPD chancellor is also of the opinion that gas and pipelines have nothing to do with Ukraine or its imminent demise.
Maybe that's why he's leaving the public field to the former SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who expressly says so, pocketing his Russian royalties and still getting away with it.
I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories, really, but I'd like to know if the former and the new chancellor share a skeleton in the closet. It's getting harder and harder every day to explain the whole thing differently, but I won't give up hope.
Because despite all the winter pessimism, I am listening to the true parliamentary poet of these days, Robert Hölderlin, who says: "But where there is danger, the saving power also grows." And Ms. Baerbock rehearses "dialogue and hardness" first with the big coalition partner.