The bizarre country of Germany

For years Tyler Cowen has been writing that Germany isn’t, nor has it ever been, part of the Western Alliance. The more the Ukrainian war plays out, the more I’m agreeing with him.

The argument runs that Germany was grafted onto the Western Alliance as an ad hoc tactic during the Cold War under Allied occupation. But Germany as a Western nation is something that exists on paper only.

The price of Cold War expediency is Germany and Turkey in NATO. We’ll see how far this hurts both NATO and the EU, as something approaching an updated Molotov-Ribbentrop pact has emerged between Germany and Russia — the interests of German industry trump everything else, even the very real security concerns of Central Europeans.

Then there’s the plain absurd as German Greens are opening coal power plants. One has to wonder how in bed the Greens were with the Kremlin to demand and greenwash a policy of complete energy dependence on Russian gas.

Now there’s a very real crisis on the horizon as Russia could pull the plug on gas to Germany. And remember when they laughed at Trump for predicting this very moment. Once the spasmodic kvetching over Trump is over, it may well turn out that he had some valid points about “Europe”, by which I think he meant Germany and France.

This is also highlighting the divide between the Atlanticists in Europe such as the UK, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Poland and the Baltics vs. Germany and France — two countries more self centered than even the grossest stereotypes of the US.

My prediction is that things will be interesting this winter, Germany is going to have to face a reckoning and either go all in on their renewed Molotov-Ribbentrop foreign policy or actually join the Western Alliance.