OPINION:
Last year, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that she would not seek re-election in 2021, she set about casting her political legacy in concrete. Part of that was hand-picking her successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, to take over as leader of the Christian Democratic Union party, to continue Mrs. Merkel’s policies.
Half of Mrs. Merkel’s legacy is the strength of the German economy, by far the most successful in Europe. The other half of her legacy is the contumacious refusal to support NATO and America’s efforts to help Europe protect itself.
Like many European elitists, Mrs. Merkel doesn’t like President Trump. She is a dedicated and outspoken opponent of his most important foreign policy moves, especially his cancellation of the 2015 nuclear weapons deal with Iran. (Germany was one of its signatories.)
During her speech to a European security conference in February, she sharply reiterated her criticism of Mr. Trump’s cancellation of the nuclear weapons deal with Iran, insisting that the deal was the best way to influence Iran’s behavior.
In that speech, she also criticized Mr. Trump’s plan to withdraw from Syria, his suggestion that we should withdraw from Afghanistan and Mr. Trump’s plan to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Weapons treaty with Russia which he has since accomplished.
Under Mrs. Merkel, Germany has continued to be one of the worst deadbeats of NATO. It grudgingly increased its defense spending this year to about 1.2 percent of its GDP, far short of the 2 percent baseline every NATO nation agreed to in 2014. Her defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, has said that German defense spending may not reach 1.25 percent of GDP by 2024.
NATO members’ defense expenditures, as a percentage of GDP, are tossed around frequently but are pretty abstruse. In practical terms, Germany’s defense parsimony translates into a nearly total lack of military readiness and capability.
According to the “Report on the Operational Readiness of the Bundeswehr’s Primary Weapons Systems” presented by the Merkel government to the lower house of the German parliament last June, the vast majority of Germany’s weapon systems are unavailable for training or deployment. The report said, for example, that none of Germany’s 16 submarines were deployable and only 39 of 128 Typhoon jets were operational.
Let’s not forget that the German army is unionized. In 2016, it had to pull out of a big NATO exercise because its soldiers had exceeded the number of overtime hours they could work.
In January, Germany cancelled its planned purchase of the American F-35 fighters, which could have substantially increased that nation’s capabilities.
All that adds up to the fact that Germany has intentionally made itself unable to meet the commitment of mutual defense that it is responsible for under Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. The responsibility for that is Mrs. Merkel’s.
Mrs. Merkel continues to champion the Nordstream gas pipelines that bring Russian gas to Western Europe. Her support for the pipelines is contrary to U.S. warnings that European dependence on Russian gas supplies could, in a crisis with Russia, result in reductions or cutoffs that would put irresistible political pressure on the using nations.
Mr. Trump has been arguing against the construction of Nordstream 2. Last year, Mrs. Merkel agreed to build German terminals to receive U.S. liquid natural gas, thereby reducing Russian leverage.
In a March 4 letter to several U.S. senators, German Ambassador Emily Haber wrote that any U.S. sanctions on Russia that might affect Nordstream 2 will cause cancellation of the construction of terminals to receive U.S. gas. Since then, there have been U.S. threats to sanction companies participating in the Nordstream 2 construction and counter-threats from Germany.
In January, Germany, Britain and France established financial mechanisms by which those nations and their companies can trade directly with Iran without involving U.S. dollar transactions and U.S. banks. This was accomplished specifically to end-run U.S. economic sanctions on Iran.
In mid-March, the German foreign ministry refused to disclose information it has regarding Iran’s efforts to purchase nuclear and missile technologies from European nations. That refusal apparently means that the financial mechanism established in January is working and that Iran is buying things that Germany, France and Britain shouldn’t be selling to them in any event.
Mrs. Merkel’s insistence on trading with Iran and Russia (along with Turkey’s perfidious conduct in re-aligning itself with Iran and Russia) have split the alliance into three factions: Turkey, alone in its alliance with Iran and Russia, Germany, France and Britain, which desire trade with Iran and Russia more than they desire to curtail either nation’s aggression, and the U.S., a lone voice for defense against Russia and Iran.
Mr. Trump has been repeatedly vilified for his statements regarding NATO’s member nations’ refusal to live up to their obligations. But he’s been consistently correct.
The temptation for Russian President Vladimir Putin to move against one of NATO’s Eastern European members such as Estonia — which used to be part of the Soviet Union — may be too great for him to resist. If Mr. Putin’s “little green men” invaded, and Estonia called on its NATO allies to defend it, Germany would be unable to respond.
It is unrealistic to believe that Mrs. Kramp-Karrenbauer will change Germany’s course from that Mrs. Merkel has set. That means NATO’s future may be very short-lived indeed.
• Jed Babbin, a deputy undersecretary of Defense in the George H.W. Bush administration, is the author of “In the Words of Our Enemies.”
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