10/29/2015 -
Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com
Germany's political stability and economic sway have until
recently earned Chancellor Angela Merkel unprecedented global influence and
power.
Postwar Germany has become the financial powerhouse of Europe and
a model nation. Give credit to German hard work and competency for the
country's continuing economic miracle.
Less appreciated is how Germany also brilliantly exploited the
lucrative in-house trade framework of the European Union market -- along with
nearly seven decades of subsidized defense from an American-led NATO.
The result is that Germany alone now determines the fiscal future
of the nearly insolvent southern European Union nations on the Mediterranean.
Germany was also the self-appointed broker between Vladimir Putin
and the apprehensive EU. Merkel supposedly has watered down Putin's military
ambitions by seducing Russia with lucrative German trade.
In addition, Germany positioned itself as the moral voice of
Europe. In penance for an aggressive past that had nearly wrecked Europe on
three occasions, it became the loudest critic of supposed U.S. imperialism.
By the 21st century, German media, politicians and intellectuals
had superseded their French counterparts as America's most vocal European
critics -- from the Iraq war to eavesdropping by American intelligence
agencies.
In terms of tough leadership, Germany's iron lady, Merkel, had trumped
even the reputation of Britain's late former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
In world opinion, Merkel was deemed just as decisive as Thatcher, but with a
far stronger global hand to play and with a more popular embrace of social
justice.
In sum, the new post-Cold War Germany was evolving into the leader
of the West, especially during the American recessional from world affairs
orchestrated by President Barack Obama.
No more. In just the last six months Germany in general, and
Merkel in particular, have imploded.
Merkel's
disastrous decision to open the borders of Germany -- and with them Europe's as
well -- is proving both selfish and suicidal.
Hordes of
migrants are swarming into Europe. Merkel's naivete cannot be dressed up in her
professed humanitarianism, given that many of the migrants are young, single
men from the Middle East who pour into Europe not as political refuges but as
opportunists eager for European social largesse.
Aside from
the costs, and the religious and social tensions that hundreds of thousands of
young unemployed Muslim males will create in Europe, there are lots of other
hypocrisies in the German migrant situation.
Germany was far tougher in its fiscal negotiations with kindred
European nation Greece than it has been with Middle Eastern migrants.
Merkel logically lectured Greece that its reckless borrowing could
not be allowed to undermine the European Union. But isn't that selfishness
similar to what Germany is now doing? With Merkel urging other European nations
to take in waves of migrants and thereby inviting a flood of refugees across
the borders of its neighbors, Germany's far poorer neighbors will bear much of
the cost.
Then we come to the recent scandal of Volkswagen rigging the
emissions system of its diesel engines to hide their inordinate pollution
levels -- another totem of various German contradictions.
Germany has lectured most of the world about the West's excessive
carbon footprint. For a quasi-socialist state, it strangely cared little that
by shutting down coal and nuclear power plants, and subsidizing the inefficient
generation of wind and solar power, it burdened its own working classes with
spiraling energy costs.
Merkel would have done better to get off her green high horse,
quit lecturing others and do a better job of auditing Germany's own auto
industry, whose exports flood the world.
Germany has bragged of its compassionate capitalism -- a mix of
private enterprise and paternalistic statism that supposedly checks the
exuberance of cowboy profit-seeking and better redistributes the largesse more
equably among the population.
But the Volkswagen cheating reminds us that statist capitalism is
more, not less, likely to encourage corporate law-breaking than a supposedly
selfish American strain of free-market economics. Competition, a more
transparent and independent media, and an adversarial rather than partnered
government do a better job of checking corporate outlawry.
Who or what might eventually deter the territorial ambitions of
Russian President Vladimir Putin? Germany has become the most powerful of the
European nations largely by creating a lucrative Eastern European trade empire.
The former nations of the Warsaw Pact and many of the breakaway republics of
the former Soviet Union sell resources to the German economic juggernaut. In
exchange, they buy German consumer and industrial goods -- and expect German
leadership and protection from an aggressive Putin.
But profits can outweigh German principles. Apparently, the only
deterrent that may stop Putin from invading more countries is not watered-down
German trade sanctions, but American troops flown into Germany's backyard from
more than 3,000 miles away.
The Greek-German debacle, the migrant mess, the Volkswagen
cheating and the Putin aggression remind us that too often Germany's professed
good intentions are eclipsed by German self-interest -- an all too familiar
experience.
