Merkel and the German mindset

Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review that German Chancellor Angela Merkel

...insisted that Germany views the democratic United States as not much different from autocratic Russia and Communist China: Urging Europe to present a united front in the face of Russia, China, and the U.S., she said, “They are forcing us, time and again, to find common positions.” And Merkel concluded that therefore Germany must find “political power” commensurate with its economic clout to forge a new independent European path.

In other words, in the calculus of the supposedly sober and judicious Merkel, the democracy that saved Europe twice from a carnivorous Germany — and Germany once from itself and once from becoming a Soviet vassal — is now similar to the world’s two largest authoritarian dictatorships, nations that not so long ago murdered respectively 30 million and 70 million of their own citizens. And how odd a sentiment for someone who grew up in Communist East Germany, a nightmarish state whose collapse was largely attributable to the Reagan-era effort to bankrupt and roll back the Soviet empire.

Perhaps imagine something akin to Donald Trump’s traveling to Munich to address a hard-right audience of Alternative für Deutschland members — and then winning their applause by systematically attacking Merkel’s disastrous solar and wind energy policies, disastrous open-borders immigration dictates, disastrous subversion of NATO by her deliberate reneging on past promises on defense investments — and then, without saying the word “Merkel,” calling her an abject liar for breaking her promises. The irony, of course, is that the supposedly reckless Trump, who is not shy about replying in kind anywhere in the world to ad hominem attacks from various foreign officials — would probably not fly to Germany to attack Merkel in a partisan setting in the way the supposedly stateswoman-like Merkel just did at Harvard. And if Trump had done so, the media — and the German — response would have been unhinged furor.

...Why the angst? A skeptic might note that an America that is for the first time pushing back on Germany’s refusal to meet its NATO requirements, that leaves the Paris climate accord and the Iran Deal, that complains about asymmetrical German trade and tariffs, and that is at odds with Germany’s role in global illegal immigration would naturally offend German sensibilities, which have long assumed an acquiescent United States.

...There are many reasons that Germany might not like Donald Trump’s America. Germany certainly does not approve of American fracking or its abandonment of the Iran deal and the Paris climate accord. Trump is too close to Israel for Germany’s comfort. Trump has an old-fashioned view that allies especially should practice trade reciprocity, and that what would not be tolerated with an enemy should certainly not be indulged with a friend. Trump’s idea of sovereignty and the need for a secure border is at odds with Merkel’s instance that eastern and southern Europeans follow her own disastrous immigration debacles. Trump then, in Al Czervik style, sees no reason not to point out these obvious contradictions between Merkel’s soaring humanitarian rhetoric and Berlin’s often quite selfish and provocative commercial, political, and financial policies.

But true to past form, Germany antipathy may also persist because America at this late date simply was not supposed to have the world’s most dynamic economy, or to have become the world’s greatest oil and gas producer, or to have achieved a virtual monopoly on high tech, social media, and the Internet, or to have remained the essence of the NATO alliance that still subsidizes German security — or to have dared to ask for reciprocity among friends and demanded it with rivals.

After all, the idea that America is not supposed, or should not be able, to do many things (fill in the blanks) has been baked into the German mindset for nearly 150 years.

Read more here.