Angela Merkel has served formal notice that she will lead the German wandering away from the American alliance.
.. The Soviet Union offered to withdraw the troops that then occupied eastern Germany and to end its rule over the occupied zone. Germany would be reunited under a constitution that allowed the country freedom to choose its own social system. Germany would even be allowed to rebuild its military, and all Germans except those convicted of war crimes would regain their political rights. In return, the Allied troops in western Germany would also be withdrawn—and reunited Germany would be forbidden to join the new NATO alliance.
.. Again and again through the Cold War they would probe for ways to split Germany from the West, and especially from the United States. They probably came closest in the early 1980s, when millions of Germans marched in the streets against NATO nuclear missile deployments
.. it was the George W. Bush-Gerhard Schroeder split over the Iraq war in 2003 that definitively ended German deference to American leadership.
.. Merkel ignored Obama’s pleas to reflate the German economy after the financial crisis of 2008 and the euro crisis of 2010. The Snowden revelations—including exaggerated claims that the United States had tapped Merkel’s ubiquitous personal cellphone—poisoned the mood even more deeply.
.. Since the war, German politics has been founded on two fundamental commitments: to liberalism at home; to Atlanticism abroad.
.. So long as the Germans most hostile to the U.S. alliance espoused various shades of fascism and communism, then the mighty German middle would cling determinedly to the U.S. alliance as a bulwark of stability and liberalism.
.. Polls show that German confidence in the United States, already lowered under Obama, has collapsed under Trump to a level barely better than Putin’s Russia.
.. Join those words to Trump’s ostentatious refusal to endorse NATO’s famous Article 5, the guarantee of mutual defense, at the NATO summit, and it’s hard to imagine that the messaging of Trump’s first trip could have been more perfect for Vladimir Putin if he’d written the script himself.