ERLIN—Friedrich Merz has been in office as Germany’s new chancellor a matter of weeks, and already he has the German capital aflutter with worry about the increasing danger of a third world war. More to the point, while Germans are fearful of such a prospect, the Russians are warning of it.

In a series of recent remarks, notably on German television, Merz has stopped just short of stating that he intends to authorize supplies of German-made ballistic missiles to Ukraine and to do so without imposing restrictions on the Kiev regime’s use of them to attack Russian territory. This is a tripwire for Moscow, as Merz cannot possibly fail to see. There are reports, notably from a Moscow television news presenter and blogger, Ruslan Ostashko, that Taurus missiles have already been shipped from Schrobenhausen, the Bavarian town where the Taurus is manufactured, and that Kiev now awaits authorization from Berlin to use them.

Quoting a source “in Zelensky’s office,” Ostashko reported that BND and MI6, the German and British intelligence services, have overseen the Taurus shipments. But this is a highly sensitive matter and there has been no official confirmation of Ostashko’s report. He may be reproducing the sort of purposeful leaks hawks commonly use to manage public opinion and avoid controversy while recklessly leading a nation closer to a war. The Kiev official may intend to encourage German momentum on the Taurus question. These practices were routine in Kiev and Washington, for instance, as the Biden regime raised the quantity and sophistication of the matériel it sent the Ukrainians after it provoked the Russian intervention three years ago. But at this fraught moment the provenance or veracity of these reports can neither be confirmed nor discounted.

The Merz government’s caution is especially important if the chancellor is to foment hostilities with Russia as he plans without his fractious coalition government collapsing. “There are no longer any range restrictions on weapons delivered to Ukraine,” he declared on German television May 26, “neither by the British nor the French nor by us — nor by the Americans.” After a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in Berlin two days later, Merz announced that Germany will finance production of long-range weapons in Ukraine — again, with no restrictions on their use. He and the Ukrainian president are shortly to sign an extensive arms agreement, it was also announced.

Merz is salami-slicing, as the expression goes. But even planning to deploy the Taurus is a daringly provocative escalation of Germany’s involvement in the West’s proxy war against the Russians. It is the most powerful of the ballistic missile systems available in the West. With a range of 500 kilometers, 310 miles, it is capable of reaching Moscow from Ukrainian territory, and the Ukrainians would need German personnel to operate these systems. Germans would also supply targeting data from a location, not yet known, in Germany.

This is why Merz’s predecessor, Olaf Scholz, refused to send the Ukrainians Taurus missiles. It is why Merz speaks often and forcefully of backing Ukraine without limits on the use of German-supplied weapons while stopping a coy shade short of naming the Taurus. It is why, every time the chancellor hints with a heavy hand that he will soon authorize Taurus shipments to Kiev, the Social Democrats, Scholz’s party and Merz’s coalition partner, make a public statement that official policy on the Taurus question has not changed. To the extent public opinion matters to Merz, German voters are decisively opposed to Taurus deployments in Ukraine.

All this is also why putting the Taurus on Ukrainian soil has Moscow in something of an uproar. It would be hard to overstate the gravity Russians attach to this question. Andrei Kartapolov, who heads the defense committee in the Duma, warned on May 29 that Russia could retaliate if Germany ships the Taurus to Ukraine, and his is one of many voices suggesting a strong Russian response. In an opinion piece the previous day on the Russian news network RT, its longtime editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, suggested Russia should attack Berlin if Germany sends does not occupy a place in the hierarchy comparable with Kartapolov’s, but she gives a good idea of what is on many Moscow minds now.

■

As you may have noticed, President Trump has been carrying on lately about Russia’s recent drone-and-missile attacks on Ukrainian towns and cities. “What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me,” he remarked on his Truth Social digital bullhorn the other day, “lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!”

Trumpian bluster, of course. But it prompted this response on “X” from Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and for an interim the Russian president: “Regarding Trump’s words about Putin ‘playing with fire’ and ‘really bad things’ happening to Russia, I only know of one REALLY BAD thing — WWIII. I hope Trump understands this!”

Another measure of the temperature in Moscow.

Trump, you’ll also have seen, is under enormous pressure from various quarters, notably but not only from Capitol Hill Democrats, liberal media, and longtime Republican hawks such as Senator Lindsey Graham, to drop all thought of a negotiated settlement in Ukraine and join Merz and other European leaders as they impose yet more sanctions on Russia. Trump’s outburst was intended more for these people than anyone in Moscow. The argument being pushed at Trump is that as Russia continues waging war in the absence of a ceasefire, it is proof Moscow does not want to negotiate for peace.

Everything is upside down at this point — everything in the official Western narrative, I mean.

Dmitry Medvedev warns of the danger of a global conflict, and you can read now — a tiresome old trope, this — that Moscow has threatened to start World War III. On Wednesday Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, proposed June 2 for the next round of peace talks with Ukraine, again in Istanbul. In the coming week he is to announce Moscow’s detailed proposal for talks toward a settlement of the conflict. But no, the Russians want only more war.

Merz and other European leaders stand for peace but impose new sanctions on the Russians. And there is the Taurus deployments, by all evidence to begin as soon as Merz judges the political coast to be clear.

Ask yourself: Why would Merz and his “centrist” colleagues in Paris and London war-monger and sanctions-monger — this with a notable measure of urgency — just as talks between Moscow and Kiev show the first glimmer of promise in three years?

I see no difficulty with this question. The West has lost the proxy war the U.S. and its European clients provoked in February 2022 — this is now patently so — and in a state of desperate denial there is a prevalent compulsion in the Atlantic alliance to prolong it beyond, well beyond, the point it makes any sense whatsoever. Donald Trump’s sin — well, among his many, but that is another story — is his refusal to go along with this craven charade.

Friedrich Merz just made the charade more dangerous.

O.K, the Gulf of Mexico will remain so named, and the Government Publishing Office on North Capitol Street in Washington can stand down: The “Gulf of America” idea is no longer much of a kick.

In the same line, Greenland will remain a Danish possession. Canada will still be called Canada, and Canadians can continue to think of themselves as gentler and more courteous than the nation of yahoos on their southerly border.

Only a few weeks ago there were those among us who anticipated the demise of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the course of this spring. No, NATO’s future is secure; its grand headquarters in Brussels will not be turned into a hospital, as some people, possessed of the old “irrational exuberance,” foretold in the Trump regime’s early days.

Ditto the European Union: If anything, the technocrats in Brussels and the central bankers in Frankfurt stand to gain power as the Continent drifts into its version of neoliberal authoritarianism.

And the Deep State: not going anywhere, this sprawl of invisible, undemocratic power. The headquarters building of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a few blocks from the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue: No again, Trump’s people will not turn it into an exhibition hall dedicated to institutional corruption.

The Trump White House doesn’t say much about these sort of things these days. They were all fun, but fun things become un-fun when, like windup toys, they stop going along as the springs go slack.

True enough, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, the C.I.A. propaganda front The New York Times insists on describing as a producer of “independent journalism” — Jeez, I mean really — may be headed for the Museum of Cold War Artifacts now that Trump is defunding it. But I am in wait-and-see mode on this one.

When distractions wear out, there must be new distractions. This is the Trump regime’s m.o., you see.

We’re now reading about Trump’s plan for a hyper-technologized missile shield system he is calling Golden Dome. This is all about satellites in space, hundreds of them, and advanced rockets that will activate when enemy projectiles are detected.

Trump’s people put the cost of Golden Dome at $175 billion, which means the true cost will be some multiple of this figure. The Congressional Budget Office says $500 billion is more like it. Trump promises to get this done in three years. Defense technology people say this kind of thing will take two decades to develop.

I have in mind the old Strategic Defense Initiative, the “Star Wars” debacle of the Reagan years. I am interested only in how long it will take for Golden Dome to prove another irresponsible fantasy and how much money will be wasted between now and then.

His Second Term So Far

How shall we think of Donald John Trump now that he is a few months in office and the lay of the land comes clear? Who is he? What makes him tick, as the old cliché goes?

The drift among those who make America run and will go along with anything so long as it is profitable, is that there is no denying, rejecting or subverting Trump this time around. You have to sidle up to the man — dinners at Mar-a–Lago, Oval Office sessions, and so on — to make it these next four years.

This turn in thinking has been evident since the 2024 campaign season. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg went to Mar-a–Lago to dine with Trump and all the liberals gasped? The chief executive at Meta proved merely the first to put his forehead to the palace floor.

You can generally count on the liberal cliques, especially the corporatists out in Silicon Valley, to get it wrong. During his first term they did everything they could think of to subvert Trump. Those who once tried to sink his ship now clamber up to the first-class deck.

This is upside down. Trump had a few sound ideas —decommisioning NATO, ending the forever wars, a renewed detenté with Russia — during his first attempt to be president. Now he trades in idiocies and cannot get done the only good idea — better ties with Russia — that remains from his first term.

A few months into his second four years Trump proves a dangerous figure in all sorts of ways — dangerously stupid, dangerously incompetent, dangerously erratic, dangerously distracted — and so must be subjected to damage control to the fullest extent.

Courts of law already prove key to this imperative. A coherent “movement” in the 1960s sense of this term appears out of the question — Americans seem too atomized, privatized, and alienated for any such thing to materialize — but let’s not forget that the 1960s were unimaginable during the 1950s.

There is no knowing what Trump will say or do Tuesday based on what he says or does Monday. He once wanted to get America out of its wars of adventure and altogether out of other nations’ business. Now he boasts that a $1 trillion budget for the military-industrial complex is on the way.

It is time, plain and simple, to give up the thought that anything good is to come out of the next three and a half years.

I have come to three different ways to reckon with how one might best understand who the occupant of the White House truly is such that one’s expectations of our 47th president remain in line with reality between now and Jan. 20, 2029.

It is possible to be 78 and still count as a hyperactive child. Trump demonstrates this to my satisfaction, anyway.

Think of a child on Christmas morning, flitting from one toy to the next, maybe fascinated briefly even by the boxes they came in. Everything’s a mess in no time.

Now think of Trump’s record these past four months — Greenland, the Gulf of America, I-just-had-an-excellent-call-with-Vladimir-Putin, Putin-is- absolutely-crazy, etc.— and ask yourself how much difference there is between the two.

There is the question of a democratic society, even one that was collapsing long before Trump came along.

I look at Trump and cannot help but think of a World War II correspondent named Mark Gayn, improbable as this may seem. Gayn covered Tokyo after the surrender and described what he saw during the Occupation in his book Japan Diary (William Sloane, 1948).

Apart from a brief experiment early in the 20th century, the Japanese had no experience of democracy — no experience, no understanding of it, no idea how it worked. In the autumn of 1945, Gayn observed with acuity, many Japanese consequently thought democracy meant “you can do whatever you want,” as he put it. A certain social and political chaos resulted in the Occupation’s first months.

This, too, is Trump. Trampling the Constitution, which I doubt he has read, ignorant or abusive — or both — of principles such as checks-and-balances, storms of executive orders that may as well begin, “I want…”

This is a man with no evident idea of the limits governing the president as well as the rest of us. “I can do whatever I want” appears to be his operating principle.

Contempt for Expertise

If you look at Trump’s cabinet — Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi among the most obviously unqualified — you have to conclude Trump holds experts and the notion of expertise in near-total contempt.

This is true of Trump himself, of course: he who can end a war in 24 hours, he who can bring manufacturing back to the United States — he who altogether can make America great again.

True enough, experts deserve much if not most of the malice and mistrust Trump expresses in behalf of many, many people. This is because a goodly proportion of them, having discarded all thought of disinterest, have long abused their capacity to influence policies and events in the cause of their own or someone else’s gain.

This is the last of four reports on Germany in crisis. The preceding parts of this series are here, here, and here.

DRESDEN—When Friedrich Merz is formally named Germany’s next chancellor on May 6, it will be a significant event and a nonevent all at once. The war-mongering Merz will lead the Federal Republic down a path we — joining what seems a majority of German voters — must all oppose.

Merz, pouncing immediately after the much-watched elections in February, has already made the nation’s future direction clear. The date we need to think about is not May 6. It is March 18, when a vote in the Bundestag confirmed what was by then bitterly evident: Germany’s postwar democracy is failing; a sequestered elite in Berlin now proposes to set the nation’s course irrespective of voters’ preferences.

March 18, a Tuesday, was the day the German parliament removed a constitutional limit on government debt. This marked more, far more, than an adjustment in Germany’s famously austere fiscal regime. It was the day lawmakers approved, in effect if not on paper, new defense spending of €1 trillion ($1.3 trillion). This was the day the Federal Republic voted to remilitarize. It was the day those purporting to lead Germany decisively repudiated a political tradition worth defending and determined to return to another tradition — one the nation seems, regrettably, never able to leave entirely behind.

The particulars of the 512 to 206 vote are plain enough. The law on federal borrowing, in place since the 2008 financial crisis, is very strict: It limits debt to 0.35% of GDP — roughly a tenth of what the European Union allows members. But Berlin has been restive within this limit for years. It was an internecine fight over the “debt brake,” as it is called, that caused the collapse last autumn of the none-too-sturdy coalition led by the wayward Olaf Scholz. The Bundestag vote removes the brake on public borrowing allocated to military spending above 1% of GDP. As is widely acknowledged, this formula implies that expenditures could exceed the €1 trillion commonly cited.

While the Germans have been near to neurotic about official debt since the hyperinflation of the Weimar days a century ago, the Bundestag has voted Germany past this paranoia in favor of another one. The nation’s neoliberal “centrists” — who now declare themselves very other than the center of anything — have just told Germans, Europeans, and the rest of the world that Germany will now drop the Social Democratic standard the nation has long held high in the service of a wartime economy with its very own military-industrial complex.

It is well to understand this as a political disaster whose import extends far beyond the Federal Republic. Indeed, it appears to mark the end of an era across the West. And it is a blow to anyone entertaining hope that we might achieve an orderly world beyond the rules-based disorder that now blights humanity.

The authors of this transformation are those parties that have negotiated a new coalition in the weeks since the Bundestag vote: Merz’s Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union, the CDU’s traditional partner, will enter into an odd-but-not-so-odd alliance with the Social Democrats, the SPD. The Grünen also voted for expanded military spending, but the Greens, along with the SPD, were roundly discredited in the elections of Feb. 23 and will not serve in the new government. I have met not a single German who will miss them.

All of these parties carry on incessantly about the authoritarianism of their opponents — this as they join to inflict an era of centrist authoritarianism on Germany’s 83 million people. They are more or less hostile to prevailing concerns among voters — the questions that moved the percentages in favor of the opposition in the elections. These include the Scholz government’s calamitous management of the economy, a too-liberal immigration policy (which has hit the former East German states hardest), Berlin’s undue deference to Brussels technocrats, Germany’s participation in America’s proxy war in Ukraine and, not least, the severe breach in Germany’s relations with the Russian Federation.

Russophobia has been evident for years among Berlin’s governing elites — if not in the business class and elsewhere. This, too, now takes a turn in the most wrong direction. There is only one argument, too obvious to name, for rearming a nation that has famously restricted its military profile for the past eight decades. Merz rushed through the March 18 vote with uninhibited crudity — evidently to preclude substantive debate. He will now lead a government of compulsively anti–Russian ideologues who will tilt Germany disturbingly in the direction of the aggressions of the two world wars and the divisive hawkery of the Cold War decades.

This is now on paper. After weeks of negotiation, the conservative CDU and the nominally-but-no-longer Social-Democratic Party, the SPD, made public their coalition agreement on April 9. Here is an extract from the section headed “Foreign and defense policy”:

Our security is under greater threat today than at any time since the end of the Cold War. The greatest and most direct threat comes from Russia, which is now in its fourth year of waging a brutal war of aggression against Ukraine in violation of international law and is continuing to arm itself on a massive scale. Vladimir Putin’s quest for power is directed against the rules-based international order….

We will create all the conditions necessary for the Bundeswehr to be able to fully perform the task of national and alliance defense. Our aim is for the Bundeswehr to make a key contribution to NATO’s deterrence and defense capability and to become a role model among our allies….

We will provide Ukraine with comprehensive support so that it can effectively defend itself against the Russian aggressor and assert itself in negotiations….

There is some code in this passage, easily enough legible. The new coalition is preparing the German public, along with the rest of the world, for the deployment of German troops abroad for the first time since World War II. As noted in the first piece in this series, the Bundeswehr began moving an armored brigade into Lithuania on April 1, a week before the coalition disclosed the terms of its accord. This is the front end of the new German military posture: There is likely to be much more of this to come.

There is also the notion of Germany as a role model for the rest of Europe. This comes straight from Merz’s side of the coalition, in my read, given his ambition to carry not only Germany’s banner but also the Continent’s. There is, indeed, a power vacuum in Europe, made more evident since the Trump administration signaled its lapsing interest in the security umbrella under which the United States has long allowed Europeans to shelter. Merz and his new political partners are right about this.

How odd to look back now — now, as Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine ends in ignominious defeat—and think of that cornucopia of propaganda spilling out of what I called during the early months Washington’s “bubble of pretend.” Take a few minutes to remember with me.

There was the “Ghost of Kyiv,” an heroic MiG–29 pilot credited with downing six, count ’em, six Russian fighters in a single night, Feb. 24, 2022, two days after the Russian intervention began. The Ghost turned out to be a fantasy confected out of a popular video game.

So crude, the early Ukrainian propaganda, so rank.

And then, shortly to follow, we had the heroes of Snake Island, 13 Ukrainian troops who — trumpets and drums here — defended a Black Sea islet to the death. It turned out this unit had surrendered, and the posthumous medals of honor President Volodymyr Zelensky awarded them with great flourish were neither posthumous nor deserved.

This corny nonsense, slathered on as thick as frosting on a wedding cake, went on and on such that The New York Times could no longer pretend it didn’t exist. I do not care for journalists who indulge in self-reference, but allow me these sentences from a piece published a couple of months into the conflict:

“After railing against disinformation for years, the Times wants us to know, disinformation is O.K. in Ukraine because the Ukrainians are our side and they are simply ‘boosting morale.’

We cannot say we weren’t warned. The Ghost of Kiev and Snake Island turn out now to be mere prelude, opening acts in the most extensive propaganda operation of the many I can recall.”

Prelude, indeed — prelude to a war so malignly reported it was soon impossible for readers and viewers in the Western post-democracies to see it (which was, after all, precisely the point).

And prelude, let’s be careful to note, to the probably fatal collapse of foreign correspondence among Western media, the Times and the BBC well in the lead in my estimation, but with many pilot fish swimming beside them.

By the end of that first year of the war — last reference to columns past here — I reckoned there were two versions of the Ukraine conflict: There was the war suspended in an opaque solution of cloudy rhetoric and the war taking place in reality.

And now, as we come out the far end of this debacle, the delusions and illusions remain just as they have been throughout. The U.S. and its puppet regime in Kiev have decisively lost the war they provoked but no, there is no speaking of a defeat.

There is no calling the victor in this conflict the victor and certainly no accepting that victory — the real world intrudes here — gives the victor the upper hand in setting the terms of a settlement. As to these terms as Moscow repeatedly articulates them, if you study them they are thoroughly reasonable and to the benefit of both sides but must never be spoken of as such. If they are Moscow’s terms — the golden rule — they cannot by definition be reasonable.

Most of all, there is no acknowledging the cynical sacrifice of Ukrainian lives somewhere in six figures in a cause that has had nothing to do with their well-being and certainly nothing to do with the democratization of their country.

And most, most, most of all, there cannot be and must not be any lessons learned from this wasteful disaster. The imperative is to go on to the next one.

The Ordering of Obfuscations

The mis– and disinformation soon got heavier-going after those first months of outright silliness, and, so far as I could make out, this was when the propaganda pros in Washington and London took over from those amateurs in Kiev.

The “Russian massacre” in Bucha over the last couple of days of that first March was not at the hands of Russians — persuasive evidence of this — but the never-happened brutality of retreating Russian soldiers is now fixed in the official record and the collective memory of those who still allow mainstream media to mesmerize them. [A U.N. report was ambiguous about who was responsible for the Bucha killings but blamed Russia for executing civilians in the Kiev region.]

Among my favorites in this line occurred later in 2022, when the Armed Forces of Ukraine was shelling the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant on the east side of the Dnieper River.

But because the A.F.U., the good guys, could not possibly be reported as indulging in so reckless an act, it had to be — straight across Western media, this— that the Russians were risking a nuclear meltdown by bombarding the plant they guarded and occupied and within which there were Russian detachments and a lot of Russian matériel.

Let us be clear as to what lies behind all this chicanery. Before all the obfuscation of the progress of the war in Russia’s favor these past three years there was the obfuscation of its causes.

I am so weary of the word “unprovoked” in accounts of this conflict I could… I could write a column about it. Ditto the notion that it began in February 2022 and not in the same month eight years earlier, when the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kiev set off the regime’s daily attacks on its own people in the eastern, Russian-speaking provinces, causing of the order of 15,000 casualties.

At issue here are questions of history, causality, agency and responsibility. The U.S. and its clients in Kiev and the European capitals have erased the first and denied the latter three.

The reason Westerners have not been given a clear view of the war is that they must not develop an understanding of why it began. Start to finish and no exceptions, the good guys must always be the good guys and the bad guys always the bad.

How’s that for the Western powers’ idea of high-end statecraft in the 21st century? Shall we call it un–Realpolitik?

Undercutting Peace Talks

Recent rounds of talks notwithstanding, in my read this purposely constructed distance from reality is likely to make an enduring settlement — at the mahogany table, not on the battlefield — difficult and perhaps impossible. This stands to doom the lives of who knows how many more Ukrainian and Russian men and women.

Russia’s conditions — chief among these a new security framework in Europe, de–Nazification and a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO — are deserving of negotiation, as I have already suggested. But, the bubble of pretend having never burst, any suggestion of this in Washington or anywhere else in the West is marked down as “echoing Putin’s talking points.”

It is infra-dig, no other term for it.

We find in consequence various new delusions abroad in the West. Volodymyr Zelensky, understood at last as the punk of the piece, carries on as if Kiev, the loser, has the power to set the terms of settlement talks with the victor .

The Europeans, having supported Ukraine for years and now promising to continue this support, are working on a “peace plan” whereby they would change uniforms, so to say, and require Russia to accept them as keepers of the peace on Ukrainian soil.

This is the third of four reports on Germany in crisis. Part 1 of this series is here and Part 2 here.

BERLIN— I return briefly to those singular moments when Olaf Scholz stood next to President Joe Biden at a press conference on Feb. 7, 2022, after concluding private talks in the Oval Office. This was the occasion when Biden declared that if Russian forces entered Ukrainian territory—as he was by this time confident they would have no choice but to do—“then there will no longer be a Nord Stream II. We will bring an end to it.”

Take a moment to view the video record of this event. What do we see in those two men? Let us consider their demeanor, their gestures, their facial expressions, what each said and left unsaid, and read what we can into them. I read a 77–year history.

In Biden we have a man calmly matter-of-fact as he states his intention to destroy the expensive industrial assets of the country represented by the man next to him. We note his perfect aplomb, the dismissive wave of his hand, as he puts on full display his indifference to a close ally’s interests and, indeed, sovereignty.

I have until recently attributed Biden’s astounding coarseness as he stands with Scholz to the gracelessness that has marked the whole of his, Biden’s, political career. But I reflect now, as I think of this occasion in the light of all that preceded it, there is another way to judge it: After decades of overweening dominance within the Atlantic alliance, Biden saw no need any longer to disguise America’s hegemonic prerogative. Indeed, in the C–SPAN recording linked above we see the face of a man who takes malign pride in this exercise of raw power.

For his part, Scholz stood at a separate lectern, per protocol, and said nothing in response to Biden’s remark. His demeanor, Scholz’s, indicates he was neither surprised nor angry. He seems, rather, resigned, apprehensive, faintly regretful, faintly submissive. In his face we read the apprehension of a soldier who has just accepted his commanding officer’s baleful battle plan. My guess is he was also wondering what in hell he would say to his government and to Germans on his return to Berlin.

The best way to understand this very pregnant occasion, which has to count as unique or very nearly in the annals of trans–Atlantic diplomacy, is to look backward and then forward from it.

What a long span of time lay between the Germany of the early 1980s, Helmut Schmidt’s Germany, and Olaf Scholz’s Germany, the Germany that fairly cowered as it stood on a dais with America 40 years later. Schmidt, a Social Democrat given to Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, had stood with other Europeans to defend Germany’s interests against President Ronald Reagan’s blunt attempts to impose America’s Cold War disciplines. Scholz, a Social Democrat of a very different kind, was not inclined to defend Germany against Joe Biden even when its very sovereignty was at issue.

How did Germany come to this? I grew convinced, after some days’ reporting here, a city the Iron Curtain long divided, and more time elsewhere in Germany, that Cold War and post–Cold War politics do not of themselves give an answer to this question. No, as I found often during my decades as a correspondent, one must resort to psychology and culture fully to understand politics and history, the latter being in some measure expressions of the former.

■

The Allies’ plans for the nations they vanquished in 1945, which in a brief time amounted to America’s plans, were never short of ambition. At the Potsdam Conference, a few months after the fall of the Reich, Churchill, Truman, and Stalin divided Germany into four occupation zones: Britain, France, the U.S., and the Soviet Union would administer one each. Berlin was in the Soviet zone but was similarly divided. Millions of German settlers had to be repatriated from lands the Nazis had conquered—a messy undertaking marked by never-now-mentioned suffering. A de–Nazification program began immediately, and the German military was to be dismantled, although both of these objectives were complicated, to put the point mildly, as the wartime alliance with Moscow gave way to the Cold War the Truman administration insisted on provoking.

But it was in the matter of German hearts and minds that the remaking of the Reich into another kind of country tilted from ambition in the direction of hubris. This was a psychological operation the sweep and magnitude of which may never since have been matched. Only the post–1945 Japanese have undergone anything similar to it. This project was at first shaped and executed by Rooseveltian New Dealers. It was a year or two before Cold War ideologues dispensed with the high ideals in favor of the rigors of late–1940s, early–1950s anti–Communism. The Japanese, not without a subdued bitterness, call this “the reverse course.”

I do not know what the Germans call it, but the postwar volte-face amounted to the same thing. The project was the same across both oceans. It was not to engender authentic experiments in democracy, bottom-up attempts, as the orthodox historians advertise this period. It was to enlist Germany and Japan as Cold War soldiers. Democratization became mere pretext, inasmuch as democracy by its very definition can be neither exported by any country nor imported by any other. In this way, I may as well add, these two nations were the templates Washington applied in many other places during the Cold War. Pretend to democratize, cultivate submission: This was the true postwar project.

To put this point another way, to the extent Germany and Japan made themselves democracies in the postwar decades, this was not because of America’s influence so much as in spite of it.

In the U.S. zone, administrators in and out of uniform assumed control of all forms of information. All newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasters were shut down. American journalists (some of whom went on to illustrious careers) were assigned to reinvent German media to suit what was to be a new democracy. The propaganda programs accompanying this reinvention of mass media, in time heavy with anti–Soviet messaging, were immense, extending from reeducation projects and radio talk shows down to mass-distributed leaflets. The literature about this period gives the impression of an undertaking that excluded no uttered or written word and no image from official scrutiny.

A brief digression.

One of the memorable television programs of my early childhood was a popular law-and-order serial called Highway Patrol. I remember it well even after many years. There was something charismatic about the weekly episodes and their star. Broderick Crawford was the jowly, gruff, sloppily dressed chief of police in a never-named California town. He would sweep into crime scenes and fling open his patrol car’s door amid sirens and clouds of dust, barking orders into his hand-held radio—famously responding to his officers with the unforgettable “10–4.”