Merkel’s Medal

Last month, Angela Merkel (remember her?) was awarded Germany’s highest civilian honor, the Grand Cross of Merit first class, special issue. It has only been awarded to three people, all former chancellors. The first was Konrad Adenauer, in many ways the father of post-war West Germany, the second was Helmut Kohl, who, for all his faults, ensured that Germany was reunited in 1990, and the third, despite doubts among her own party, has gone to Angela Merkel.

To Merkel, the chancellor, who, a Brezhnev of sorts, presided over a long period of stagnation, who bungled the refugee crisis, who mishandled the euro-zone mess and the threat of Brexit, who wrecked her country’s energy system, and who left Germany dangerously dependent, firstly on Russia and then, adding an extra layer of strategic stupidity, on China.

Yes, that Merkel, the Merkel whom the Economist (a magazine that, with exceptions, has switched from being a champion of classical liberalism into becoming a mouthpiece for a peculiarly condescending form of Davos technocracy) described as the “indispensable European.” On the approach of Merkel’s departure from office, the magazine doubled down:

If the rest of Europe is nervous over Mrs Merkel’s departure, it is because she has made herself the indispensable European: brilliantly briefed, invested in personal relationships, and possessing almost superhuman negotiating stamina.

The phrase “the rest of Europe” is doing a lot of work there.

To Time magazine, Merkel was a person of the year. The Financial Times felt the same way. And the two were hardly alone.

But, writing in the Spectator in April, Jawad Iqbal took a more jaundiced (and distinctly more reasonable view):

[Merkel] was, for a time, anointed the anti-Trump and, in the words of no less an authority than the New York Times, “the liberal West’s last defender.” It turns out this was wishful thinking masquerading as political insight.

That Merkel was a woman only added to her appeal to the Gutmenschen.

Iqbal:

She was often lauded as the only adult in the room, possessing unrivalled diplomatic skills and empathy, qualities deemed missing in many of her male counterparts on the world stage.

Indeed that’s how the narrative went, but although Merkel’s political talents were remarkable, her diplomatic skills amounted to little more than an ability to cobble up quick fixes such as those ultimately underwritten by German money and Ukrainian dead.

Iqbal:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put paid to such Merkel worship. Her wilful blindness or ignorance — perhaps both — when it came to reading Putin’s motives and dealing with Russia ranks as postwar Germany’s gravest foreign policy error.

Merkel ignored the growing evidence of Putin’s repression, including the murderous silencing of political opponents.

So much for empathy.

She appeared indifferent to Russian corruption and the country’s role in spreading disinformation. All that appeared to matter was access to cheap Russian gas. Long term strategic issues such as Europe’s security came a distant second.

This short term opportunism remained the case even after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014: Germany’s largest gas storage facilities were sold to Russia’s Gazprom regardless. It left Germany vulnerable and heavily dependent on Moscow for energy supplies. In 2020, it was estimated that Russia supplied more than half of Germany’s natural gas and about a third of all the oil that Germans used to heat homes and run factories. The Putin regime was quick to exploit this energy dependency as leverage in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.

Even before that, in weighing the risks of an invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Putin would have come to the conclusion that this dependency meant that Germany’s reaction (and, by extension, the EU’s reaction) was something that he could safely ignore when deciding whether to go ahead. And go ahead he did. His calculations turned out to be correct. Moreover, despite warnings from the U.S., NATO’s secretary general, and various Eastern European countries, Berlin agreed to the continued construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipelines. If they had come into operation, Germany would have become even more dependent on Russia.

Bojan Pancevski, writing in the Wall Street Journal, saw this scramble for Russian gas as connected to Merkel’s reacceleration of Germany’s retreat from nuclear power. Indeed it was, and it was made more urgent still by Germany’s equally irrational climate-driven push toward unreliable renewables.

Given the increased leverage that Germany’s growing dependency on Russian gas gave the Kremlin, a substantial increase in German defense spending might have seemed appropriate, but no.

Pancevski:

[Defense minister Annette] Kramp-Karrenbauer . . . opposed Nord Stream 2 and tried in vain to rebuild Germany’s depleted armed forces. Her push to meet a NATO target of spending 2% of gross domestic product on defense, agreed upon after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, was blocked by the chancellery, Kramp-Karrenbauer said. . . .

Merkel’s role in shaping NATO policy toward Ukraine goes back to 2008, when she vetoed a push by the Bush administration to admit Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance, said Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official and presidential adviser on Russia.

Merkel instead helped to broker NATO’s open but noncommittal invitation to Ukraine and Georgia, an outcome that Hill said was the “worst of all worlds” because it enraged Putin without giving the two countries any protection. Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 before marching into Ukraine.

After Putin first attacked Ukraine, Merkel led the effort to negotiate a quick settlement that disappointed Kyiv and imposed no substantial punishment on Russia for occupying its neighbor, Hill added. “No red lines were drawn for Putin,” she said. “Merkel took a calculated risk. It was a gambit, but ultimately it failed.”

Given all this, it’s hardly surprising that in 2022 Putin decided he could risk a second attack on Ukraine, a calculation (to be fair) doubtless made even easier by America’s humiliating scuttle out of Kabul the previous year.

Meanwhile, Merkel had essentially repeated the mistake she had made with regard to Russia in her dealings with China.

Iqbal:

Her handling of China, another autocracy with illicit territorial designs over its neighbours, is arguably just as big a strategic error. Here too Merkel aggressively pursued trade with Beijing, regardless of the wider consequences. It certainly paid off in the short term: China became Germany’s biggest trading partner, trebling its share of German exports — but at what long term strategic cost?

German manufacturers are now dangerously reliant on China for at least part of their supply chains. This closeness to China comes despite growing international concerns over Beijing’s human rights record and its increasingly bellicose attitude towards Taiwan.

I’ve written a bit about this here, here and here. The consequences won’t be pretty.

For her part, Merkel contends that she has nothing to apologize for.