Monk

Germany re-elected Angela Merkel to head the government, which sounds like run-of-the-mill background news, hardly anything worrisome, when we still have Middle East wars running hot and America’s financial system tottering on mountains of debt and empty promises, but Roger Cohen of the New York Times gives us some colorful and provocative background on the more subtle shifting of German politics, relating how Germany is really coming into its own since reunification, and is starting to hang out with a rougher crowd:

This Germany is more nationalistic, more evenly poised between Washington and Moscow, cool to the point of disinterest about the European Union, self-absorbed and self-satisfied, dutiful but unenthused about the NATO alliance.

None of this should suggest that Germany will turn its back on the United States, the E.U. or NATO, the three cornerstones of its post-war success story. But they will not have the emotional hold they had.

Indeed, I heard more intellectual excitement over Russia and the broadening German-Russian relationship than over Obama’s America. Germany is Russia’s largest trading partner. Russia is Germany’s 10th largest. A kind of moral complicity — two large nations that made big historical mistakes — binds them.

Of course, there is also the jealousies and wariness that comes with being neighboring big countries. Germany and Russia were hardly good friends during the twentieth century, and one would expect those pressures to reassert themselves. Nevertheless, this is another angle on the fundamental story of how America is shedding its influence, and how this country is going to have to learn to accept being only one big country in a world of disparate powers, rather than being a superpower and the world‘s policeman. Although some non-Americans may be a little happy about this transformation, one cannot help but feel that the world is only becoming a more uncertain and dangerous place because of it, and there is that unnerving sense that almost anything can happen, one thrilling calamity or an other. This is not to say that America has been a great and ideally beneficent steward over world affairs and the aspirations of men over the past sixty to seventy years, and power and wealth does corrupt, but there are lesser and greater evils, and we may learn more of this before long.