They’ve been mostly fantastic since 2022 but there needs to be a sober assessment of how we got here. Those leaders were in the Oval Office pressing and flattering an American mediocrity to do the thing that (for once) is both right and in our interest. It’s embarrassing to be here.
The flip side of this is that a continent of close to 500 million, with an advanced and larger economy than the U.S., two declared nuclear powers, and a border with Russia is in the pathetic position of needing the United States to deal firmly with Russia in defense of a European neighbor. There have been islands of clear-headedness but prior generations of German, French, and Italian leaders smirked down their noses at the Poles and Balts while they pursued gas deals and feckless aid-based diplomacy. They got high off their own supply; the EU really is a garden but they came to believe they could make the rest of the world one too and neglected good walls, fences, traps, and weed killers.
It is my belief that Merkel will go down as the most disastrous German chancellor except for that one guy. She could have gotten with the program and let Ukraine and Georgia join NATO in 2008 when Russia was weak. She could have torn up the Nordstream 2 deal and kept her nuclear plants running. She could have used her formidable role to push Europe to invest in defense and cohesion. She could have done literally anything aside from letting Russia solve its Syria adventure by flooding Europe with migrants that Russia then weaponized to empower the AfD.
She did none of that and did so in the most obnoxious, smug, self-satisfied, moralizing way possible. And all the while let partners engage in feckless nouveau-Ostpolitik while laying down cover for people like Berlusconi to pursue less noble engagements with the Russians.
So yeah, I celebrate their coming even at the eleventh hour and am beyond furious at our government. But they got themselves here.