During the Trump presidency, Angela Merkel was puffed up into something she wasn’t based in large part on the idiotic calculus that Trump was a bumptious nationalist and therefore the opposite — namely, a boring cosmopolitan — was what the world needed. Since then, it’s become more obvious how irresponsible and self-serving Germany was, and is.
From a New York Times article on the struggle to maintain aid to Ukraine:
Most of that flow has come from America.
But material support for Ukraine from Europe has faded. The total of new commitments of military and financial aid from six of the largest European countries decreased in May and dropped sharply in June, according to an analysis by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
In July, the last month for which data was available, none of those countries — Britain, Germany, Poland, France, Italy and Spain — made any significant new pledges.
“We were surprised that aid basically went to zero, especially from the big European powers,” said Christoph Trebesch, the institute’s director for international finance and macroeconomics and the head of the team conducting the analysis. . . .
Analysts say that Germany in particular has fallen short, in spite of its earlier rhetoric.
Markus Kaim, a senior fellow for international security at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said he and other analysts were at first “totally surprised” by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s pledge to significantly raise military spending to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” and to eventually eliminate the country’s dependence on Russian energy.
But the policy changes since then have been less dramatic, he said.
Critics say the German government has not done enough to help Ukraine. A particular sticking point is Germany’s refusal to send Leopard 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine. Mr. Scholz and his government ministers have said that the German military’s arsenal was too depleted to send heavier equipment and that they do not want Germany to be the first country to send modern Western tanks to Ukraine.
Germany announced a 100 billion euro ($113 billion) increase in defense funding this year. Even so, it will not reach NATO’s goal of having each member spend at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product on its own defense each year, a target Mr. Scholz vowed to meet, according to a forecast by the German Economic Institute, a think tank based in Cologne.
In other words, par for the course.