When she recently retired after serving some 16 years as Chancellor of Germany, I, along with legions of others, praised the leadership of Angela Merkel. I admired her integrity and intelligence, her compassion and competence, her temper, and her temperament. She was of course, like all mere mortals, imperfect. But her benefits so outweighed her deficits she stood out not only among leaders in Europe but among leaders worldwide.
One of her strengths was the steady way in which she managed her long relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Merkel was born in East Germany when it was still a member of the Soviet bloc. She was quite clear-eyed, then, about Putin, who happened to know Germany well. So, while Putin knew Germany – he had lived there for years and remained fluent in the German language – Merkel knew Russia. She spent the first thirty-five years of her life under its thumb.
Because of their shared history, each was assumed to have the measure of the other. For the decade and a half during which both led major European powers their relationship was cordial and civil, but also careful, cautious. Moreover, after the Kremlin tried to poison Putin’s fiercest domestic opponent (in 2020), Alexei Navalny, and after Merkel not only gave Navalny medical treatment but offered him political asylum (he accepted the former but rejected the latter), their relations cooled.
This did not, however, preclude Merkel from continuing to approve of the now famous/infamous Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. The project, while exceedingly expensive to build, and all along contentious, promised to deliver immense benefits to the German people. It would double the flow of gas into their country, making their use of energy far cheaper. So, while on the one hand Merkel had the temerity to take on Putin – in addition to providing succor to his archenemy, she took the lead in imposing sanctions against Russia for its annexation of Crimea – on the other hand she was stuck with what she had wrought. A business deal with Putin that promised to deliver immense benefits to both sides. The Russians would be paid handsomely for their gas; the Germans would pay far less at the proverbial pump.
As the crisis in Ukraine started to unfold, it was left to Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, who had just taken over as Chancellor, to suspend the Nord Stream project, likely forever. (Ironically, his happened just as the spigot was ready to be turned on.) For all Merkel’s even-handedness then, for all those years during which she tried to manage both Germany’s relationship with Russia and hers with Putin – between 2012 and 2020 the two leaders spoke 67 times, and they met on 34 different occasions – in the end she failed.
A year ago, U. S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Nord Stream 2 was a “Russian geopolitical project intended to divide Europe and weaken European energy security.” Nor was he the only American repeatedly to raise the alarm. None other than Texas Senator Ted Cruz has been sounding this gong for years, concerned that allowing the pipeline to be built would encourage Putin to act more aggressively.
Still, Merkel stayed the course. She stayed the course not only with a pipeline but with a leader whose murderous past was prologue to his murderous present.
Is there a lesson to be learned? Yes, there are two. First, those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. Second, no matter how clever a leader you are, never get into bed with another leader who has laid waster to a city – not to speak of two.