There she was again, six months after exiting the German chancellery. Relaxed but pensive after long walks on blustering Baltic shores listening to "Macbeth" on audiobook, Angela Merkel had so much on her mind, so much she wanted to explain for posterity. But she didn’t come to offer apologies or mea culpas.
Reflecting on decades of interactions with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Merkel said she’d always known that commerce and dialogue alone wouldn’t turn him into a good neighbor. But what was Germany supposed to do: Ignore the largest country on its continent?
She grasped early on, she recalled, that Putin “hated” democracy and wanted to “destroy” the European Union, which he viewed as a gateway drug to NATO membership for former Soviet Republics like Ukraine, which he considers part of Russia’s — and therefore, his own — sphere of influence.
Merkel conceded that the NATO compromise of 2008 was far from ideal. She had blocked the alliance from starting the long process of making Ukraine and Georgia members, convinced that such a step would have provoked exactly the type of war that Putin is waging now. Besides, she recalled, Ukraine was not yet the country of heroes it has become, but a corrupt place run by oligarchs that many NATO allies wouldn’t have been ready to defend.
The compromise, as she helped hash it out, was to declare that Ukraine and Georgia could join NATO someday, just not now. That left Ukraine disappointed, and Putin livid nonetheless.
Merkel denied that her response was too soft when Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. After all, Russia was kicked out of the Group of Eight, making it the G-7 again. And she helped keep the EU united in first passing, and then renewing, sanctions against Russia. It would have been worse, she said, if some countries had forged ahead with tougher measures, but ended up splitting Europe and the West, which is what Putin wanted and still wants.
And Germany’s army? The country began cutting its defense spending before her time, but much of the demilitarization that its allies have long criticized happened on her watch. And yet, she countered, her party was the only one that wrote the NATO goal of spending 2% of gross domestic product on defense into its platform. Besides, she did increase military spending in recent years. More wasn’t possible with her coalition partners and the public mood at the time.
Again and again, Merkel returned to the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015. Those were the talks in which she and the president of France, hosted by the leader of Belarus, moderated between Putin and Ukraine’s leader at the time. The result wasn’t pretty. Ukraine had to make big concessions over its eastern parts, the so-called Donbas, in return for a cease-fire that would never really be observed.
And yet, Merkel insisted, these Minsk agreements bought Ukraine valuable time — time it was able to use to prepare for the real Russian onslaught this year. Her heart always beat for Ukraine, she said, but she had a duty to work with the reality on the ground. And Minsk restored calm, at least briefly.
Thoughtful and articulate as she was on this theater stage, she made me think of Neville Chamberlain, and more so the longer she spoke. He was the British prime minister who in 1938 met with Adolf Hitler in Munich, to secure what he hoped would be “peace in our time.”
At that time, the Nazi leader had already remilitarized the Rhineland and annexed Austria, and was preparing to swallow Czechoslovakia, claiming that its ethnic Sudeten Germans were threatened by “annihilation.” The echoes should have been audible already in Minsk, after Putin had assaulted Georgia, Crimea and Donbas.
Merkel, like Chamberlain, may therefore go down in history as the embodiment of the democratic world’s “appeasement” of a tyrant who — with hindsight — could never have been appeased. Intelligent and sophisticated politicians both, Merkel and Chamberlain will be remembered as going wobbly when they should have drawn a line, as being weak when they should have been strong. In history lessons, Merkel in Minsk will be paired with Chamberlain in Munich.
And yet this verdict of hindsight needs an asterisk. What appears obvious today was far from clear at the time. Hitler might, conceivably, have stopped in Czechoslovakia, without going on to Poland, and then the rest of Europe and Auschwitz. Putin, plausibly, could have sought to rebuild Russia’s reputation and economy rather than turning his country into an international pariah. He might have died or been ousted. Even Merkel couldn’t have foreseen how isolated, physically and mentally, he would become.
Diplomacy isn’t wrong just because it sometimes fails, Merkel reflected on stage. Overall, she said, she has no regrets, because she couldn’t have tried harder to prevent the tragedy that is now unfolding.
Exactly one year ago, I profiled the then-outgoing chancellor of 16 years, calling her legacy “post-heroic.” That adjective looks even more apt today. And yet, at the time the balance of her achievements was positive. She had been a leader of small steps, but above all a reassuring chancellor who, through successive crises, held together Germany, Europe and sometimes the West. Her meekness and accommodation toward Russia — and China — were no more than footnotes in a multi-chapter tome on leadership.
Putin inverted that narrative, and thus Merkel’s legacy. The footnotes are now the title. Whatever her reasons at the time, Merkel, like Chamberlain, now stands for appeasement. Her most unforgivable failure was that — if she already understood the threat from Putin as she claims — she did not explain the danger to Germans and Europeans. By not communicating, she left the continent unprepared.
