Angela Merkel Is The Greatest Villain Within The Free World
By Chuck Warren
After Donald Trump won the 2016 race, the left-wing legacy media quickly forged a consensus: The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, had become the leader of the free world.
When Trump and Merkel first met the following year, James Rubin, a Democratic hack who was the Clinton administration’s State Department spokesperson, wrote, “The Leader of the Free World Meets Donald Trump.” He and his editors at Politico thought it was a clever headline; to be fair, it would have been had it not been a lie.
He was not the only one, and the joke was not even original to him. Practically every major left-wing media outlet ran a headline calling her the new leader of the free world.
Eight years later, Merkel has faded as a media darling. Honest journalists would admit—and some have admitted—that she is closer to a villain than a hero. But most journalists are dishonest. Instead, they have memory-holed Merkel and what they said about her altogether.
The biggest indictment of Merkel is her Ukraine and Russia policy. In 2008, President George W. Bush tried to get NATO to admit Georgia and Ukraine. It ultimately failed because Merkel opposed it. Today, both countries are under Russian occupation, something that would not have happened if Merkel had cleared the way.
After Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 and annexed Crimea by force, Merkel refused to support Ukraine or put pressure on Russia.
She refused to do something as simple as imposing sanctions on Russia. She used her influence on the European Union to prevent European sanctions on Russia. But when, a few months later, Russian-backed forces shot down a civilian airliner en route from Amsterdam and filled with European citizens, she was forced to do it. But it was not out of love for Ukraine but political pressure.
Right after the invasion, there was a debate within the U.S. government about military support for Ukraine. Everyone was in favor except national security adviser Susan Rice. Barack Obama himself was unsure but leaning against. He finally decided against sending military aid to Ukraine after a phone call with Merkel, who convinced Obama against supporting Ukraine.
One key reason that Merkel was so favorable toward Russia was her energy policy. Merkel notoriously shut down Germany’s nuclear reactors, with much fanfare from the left. This made Germany reliant on Russian gas and the Nord Stream 2 pipeline construction, which she gave the green light for in 2015, a year after the invasion of Ukraine.
Merkel’s last major act as a leader was getting an investment agreement approved by the European Union in 2020, vastly expanding trade with China, as the world had shut down because of China’s cover-up that caused the Covid pandemic. To its credit, the European Union would kill the agreement before implementation after Merkel departed the scene.
Merkel was no great leader, but she checked boxes. She especially became a left-wing darling because she was a woman. She was the left’s favorite kind of conservative: a left-winger who pretended to be conservative. She favored welfare and green energy at the cost of economic growth, destroying Europe’s output capacity.
Consider this: The U.S. economy has struggled with low growth since the financial crisis. In 2008, the U.S. and the E.U. had the same GDP. But despite our problems, America’s GDP has grown 100 percent, while Europe’s economy has grown 65 percent.
The left really fell in love with Merkel when she said the now-infamous line: “We can do this.” She was talking about admitting a million Syrian refugees to Germany. It turned out that, no, they could not do it. Instead, it caused the worst disruption of European politics since World War II, including putting the Brexit vote over the edge.
It was not just immigration. The upsurge of anti-establishment parties in Europe is also caused by economic grievances, like in the United States. The German labor force participation rate had already been dipping before Merkel. The policies Merkel championed, rather than encouraging work, provided welfare for those who could no longer find jobs. Even worse, the limited growth was concentrated in former West Germany, with the recently liberated East Germany stagnating.
If all this sounds familiar, it’s because that is also what happened in the United States during the same period. Merkel became a left-wing media darling in the United States because she was the New York Times op-ed page’s wet dream: pro-welfare, pro-green energy, dismissive of growth, pro-unvetted immigration, soft on Russia, soft on China, and only tough on Trump.
She left office with the Bundeswehr—the German military—a shell of itself, spending most of its budget on welfare instead of training and equipment. The leader of the free world did not have a military to lead, would not use her economic power to punish Russia, China, and Iran, and had destroyed Germany’s social fabric and Europe’s production capacity.
Since she has left office, Europe’s entire political project can be summarized to one line: undoing Merkel’s damage. Germany and France announced the restoration of nuclear energy to end reliance on Russian gas. The European Union is distancing itself from China. Germany has agreed to rebuild its military under the leadership of a real conservative whom Merkel had sidelined. And most importantly, America and Europe are helping Ukraine win against Russia, a reversal of Merkel’s policy. Last, Germany is moving away from green energy dreams in favor of economic growth.
In the first year of his administration, 2017, Trump signed a bill into law imposing sanctions on Nord Stream 2 and gave military aid to Ukraine, without which Ukraine would not have been able to defend Kyiv in 2022, much to Merkel’s chagrin.
Merkel, on the other hand, is still giving interviews defending her policies, especially on Ukraine and Russia—which Volodymyr Zelensky has critically responded to.
The left’s neoliberal, anti-growth, soft-on-dictatorships political consensus has been utterly discredited, and nobody did more to forge and implement that consensus than Angela Merkel, who ruled Germany and Europe for 16 years with an iron fist. She is the greatest villain within the free world, but the establishment tried to sell her to us as its leader.
Note: the opinions expressed herein are those of Chuck Warren only and not his co-host Sam Stone or Breaking Battlegrounds’ staff.