Soporific. Tedious. Platitudinous. Benumbing.
These pejoratives condemn former German Christian Democratic Union Chancellor Angela Merkel’s overweight 700-page memoir as not worth the price of admission. Merkel served 16 years as chancellor from 2005 to 2021 before voluntarily bowing out. The high-water mark of intellectual stimulation in her memoir is reached with Merkel’s forgettable, “We can do this” in referencing a flood of immigrants. The reader waits in vain for something as electrifying as President John F. Kennedy’s, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
Born in the communist German Democratic Republic and trained as a scientist, Merkel drifted into politics less because of deep philosophical convictions than faute de mieux. She was not at the barricades participating in the destruction of the Berlin Wall. She was not steeped in political philosophy, including separation of powers touted by Montesquieu and James Madison. She has little or nothing to say about Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg trials or the dynamics that gave birth to the Holocaust. Her understanding of human nature is Pollyannaish, refusing to accept Immanuel Kant’s dictum, “From such crooked timber as humankind is made nothing straight can be made.”
Merkel’s attempts to broker peace in Ukraine predictably proved fool’s errands. Thuggish Russian President Vladimir Putin ignites her anguish. But she is unable to suggest a superior replacement. Self-government and the right to march to your own drummer have been alien to Russia since time immemorial. Dictatorship is all Russians know and accept as superior to the alternatives. Alexei Navalny perished on that brute fact.
Merkel also neglects that NATO expansion up to Russia’s borders — akin to Nikita Khrushchev’s installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis — made Putin’s attack on Ukraine inevitable to prevent Russia’s encirclement by hostile powers entering her traditional sphere of influence.
Consider the following. The Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, ending any military threat to NATO members, which then numbered 16. Since then, while the Russian economy and military profile shrank, NATO mushroomed to 32 members creating an equivalent or greater threat to Russian security than the Cuban missile crisis posed for the United States.
Further, in 1990, the United States implicitly promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand forces eastward if East and West Germany were permitted to unite — a promise with a truncated shelf life. Additionally, on March 26, 2022, in Warsaw, Poland, President Joe Biden exclaimed with reference to Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” The United States had previously orchestrated regime change in Ukraine featuring Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and her memorable vulgarity, “F— the EU.”
Putin reacted like the United States reacted in the Cuban missile crisis amid the Soviet Union’s penetration of our traditional sphere of influence in the Caribbean and Central and South America. Remember the Roosevelt corollary to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine: The United States was saddled with the responsibility to preserve order and to protect life and property in all nations in the Western Hemisphere.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine equaled or bettered our instruction not only in the Western Hemisphere but elsewhere as in Libya or Iraq. Merkel understands none of this. She is bereft of ideas for ending the war in Ukraine. She is unable to conceive that Putin could retreat from Ukraine and proclaim victory if the United States withdrew from NATO, removed its troops and weapons from Europe and left the remaining 31 members to defend themselves if attacked without American training wheels. Without the United States, NATO would still eclipse Russia in economic and military strength. Russia is no juggernaut, as its quagmire in Ukraine proves.
Merkel also displays naivete over global warming. She chronicles countless international meetings and infinite hours over two decades in which countries repeatedly sally forth with meaningless pledges to plunge greenhouse gas emissions in order to forestall the species’ suicide. Nations, however, are not philanthropies. They act only in short-term self-interest. None have or will handicap economic growth and prosperity to diminish emissions in the hope that other nations will follow suit. Why should they? Other nations can do nothing and take a free ride on the nation that goes first with emissions reductions.
All this Merkel-like gnashing about global warming has accomplished nothing. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement will rise around 0.8% in 2024, reaching a record 37.4 billion tons of CO2, according to the 2024 Global Carbon Budget report by the Global Carbon Project. This is 0.4 billion tons higher than the previous record, set in 2023.
Merkel exemplifies the absence of inspiring leadership or statesmanship anywhere on the world stage. The commanding heights of power are populated by pedestrian thinkers as technology, including artificial intelligence, continues to outrace moral or philosophical wisdom. H.G. Wells observed more than a century ago, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
Has the race been lost?
Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website iswww.lawofficesofbrucefein.comand X feed is@brucefeinesq.
