Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, German Chancellor

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, February 07, 2025

 

It’s safe to say that the foreign-policy-focused writers here at National Review have not been big fans of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It’s subtle, but headlines like “Ms. Merkel’s Ignorance,” “Merkel’s Nord Stream 2 Hypocrisy,” “Angela Merkel, America’s Ally (Apparently),” and “Her Inner Brezhnev” offer a hint that we at NR were a wee bit perturbed by her decisions during her tenure.

 

The rest of the world has finally caught up to our skepticism; last year, a headline in The Economist declared, “Merkel’s legacy looks increasingly terrible.”

 

Just about every big decision taken by Mrs. Merkel now seems to have resulted in Germany—and often the entire European Union—ending up worse off. Geopolitically she left the country with a now-famous trifecta of dangerous dependencies: unable to defend itself without America, struggling to grow without exporting to China, relying on Russian gas to keep its industry going. The report card on the economy is if anything more damning: 16 years of muddling through with no reforms has left Germany once again the economic sick man of Europe.

 

A Financial Times columnist recently called her “the most damaging European leader since 1945.” (That sounds like a harsh criticism, but let’s face it, the competition for “Worst German Chancellor of All Time” is really fierce.)

 

Merkel recently published her autobiography, and as the Wall Street Journal reported, it somehow left people even more steamed about her record:

 

Angela Merkel wrote a 736-page memoir to secure her crumbling legacy. The effort is backfiring.

 

Her new book, “Freedom”—published in late November in nearly 30 languages—is riling up even some of her most ardent supporters, in part because Merkel declines to consider that any of the policies of her four-term chancellorship, from 2005 to 2021, might have been misguided.

 

“Much pride, little self-reflection” was the headline that the powerful German state broadcaster ARD, the key media platform of Merkel’s time in power, put on its capital bureau’s report on the book’s launch. Merkel’s own political heirs in the Christian Democratic party say that publicity around the memoir is damaging their current election campaign.

 

One of the lesser-known odd facts that I’ve been trying to shoehorn into the thriller series is that the East German Stasi tried to recruit a young Angela Merkel; in her telling, they offered, but she turned it down.

 

Now, in light of Germany’s belated realization that for 16 years they had a chancellor who consistently weakened them while strengthening Russia’s leverage over them, former NSA counterintelligence officer John Schindler asks a really thorny question: How certain can anyone be that Merkel turned down any offers to work on behalf of Russia?

 

First, there are Stasi files that mention Merkel, yet they are not available to the public. Per German law, this implies that Merkel wasn’t an informant, rather a Stasi target, perhaps only indirectly. Knabe also observes that, in addition to the Stasi files known to have been destroyed as the DDR collapsed, the MfS shredded 15,000 bags of secret files, most of which have never been reconstructed. Any Stasi file on Merkel could possibly be hiding there. . . .

 

Although the KGB considered East Bloc spy services like the Stasi to be their junior partners, Soviet intelligence regularly recruited citizens of those countries to spy for them. The KGB during the later Cold War ran what it termed PROGRESS operations against Eastern Europe, mainly to assess dissent against Communism. Some of these agents were declared to partner services like the Stasi, but many were not. If Merkel was approached by the KGB to assess her willingness to collaborate with Moscow, the MfS might never have been informed.

 

Even if Merkel didn’t accept the KGB’s offer to collaborate, just as she claims she rejected the MfS pitch in 1978, the mere fact that there’s a secret file on her in Moscow lurking in a spy archive somewhere would give Germany’s chancellor something to fret about. Here the strained personal relationship between Merkel and Putin offers tantalizing hints. The Kremlin strongman delighted in making Merkel appear uncomfortable before the cameras. In an infamous 2007 incident in Russia, Putin brought his big Labrador Retriever to a meeting with the German chancellor, who is terrified of dogs. Merkel appeared visibly frightened and intimidated while Putin smirked. Years later, Putin claimed he didn’t mean to terrify the German leader, it was a misunderstanding.

 

Some might look at the story of Putin, Merkel, and the dog and conclude that Putin wouldn’t treat a Russian asset that way. Others might interpret it as a reminder to Merkel who has the leverage in the relationship.

 

Which scenario is less disturbing, that for more than a decade and a half, the woman leading Germany kept making decisions that strengthened Russia because she was secretly allied with the Russian government, or that she kept making those decisions because she actually thought they were good ideas?

 

Keep in mind, Merkel’s predecessor as chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, became Putin’s top lobbyist in Germany, working for the Gazprom energy company. This is the worst cooperation between Germany and Russia since . . . okay, I guess the bar is pretty high in that category, too.