Over the years, I have had great fun making fun of Angela Merkel. Now deadly earnest Libya war supporters are managing to steal even this simple pleasure from the rest of us by making ridiculous criticisms of Merkel’s response to Libya. When she was backing into her first electoral victory despite her best efforts to sabotage the Union’s electoral chances, I was very critical of her. When she was carping on the sidelines when Stoiber was the party leader and making all the right “Atlanticist” noises in support of the Iraq war, she was an embarrassment. Back in 2007, Der Spiegel was writing up her shift in German foreign policy in a decidedly pro-U.S. direction as something that was startling and different:

It is virtually unprecedented in German history for a chancellor to be so unreservedly aligned with the US. Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany, saw America as a guarantor of freedom, but also perceived it as an occupation force. Helmut Schmidt and Willy Brandt, both Social Democratic (SPD) chancellors, were pro-American but innately skeptical.

Merkel, on the contrary, wants to expand Germany’s close ties with the United States and is on the verge of making a pact with America the cornerstone of her foreign policy. Indeed, the resoluteness with which she has pursued this goal stands in conspicuous contrast with her government’s lack of political progress back home in Germany.

As Roger Cohen would have it, this never happened, and Merkel’s response to Libya represents some horrible break with past German practice. It’s simply not true, and what should give all of us pause is how Sarkozy, Cameron, and Obama managed to push the most reliably pro-American Chancellor of the last two decades into the camp of the abstaining governments. If Libya has divided traditional allies, isn’t the burden for the rupture on the governments that started the war? If Libya has driven Germany into the opposition camp, why are we blaming the Germans rather than the French and British?

In his previous column, he was claiming that Adenauer would be spinning in his grave because of German abstention on the Libya resolution, but this is little more than nostalgia substituting for argument. It’s no better than the Republican over-reliance on invoking Reagan or the Tory habit of invoking Thatcher regardless of the situation or the historical record. Adenauer was instrumental in bringing West Germany into NATO, but I have a hard time believing that he thought it should ever be the purpose of NATO to launch offensive wars on other continents for any reason. Merkel could plausibly argue that she is resisting efforts to turn NATO into something that it shouldn’t be. Viewed that way, she has a far better claim on Adenauer’s legacy than war supporters appropriating his name to justify a blunder.

Today Cohen compares 2011 Germany to the Germany of ten years ago, as if Schroeder’s obvious electoral opportunism in opposing the Iraq war had never happened. The accusation that Merkel was aligning German policy with German public opinion isn’t a very damning one anyway, but it’s simply silly to contrast what Merkel is doing now with some mythical “solidity” and “direction” that Germany previously had and now lacks. Merkel’s foreign policy has largely been a repudiation of Schroeder’s far more “pro-Russian” and “anti-American” approach, but Libya was one ill-conceived blunder too far even for Merkel.

Cohen says that Merkel should acknowledge her Libyan error, but it is not at all clear that it is she who has made the error. As each days goes by, the decision to attack Libya looks worse and worse. The worst thing one can say about Merkel under these circumstances is that she did not try harder to dissuade her allies from their folly. Of course, it is because Merkel doesn’t want another rupture with the U.S. that Germany did not actively oppose the Libyan war as it opposed Iraq under Schroeder. It is because she wants to preserve the Franco-German relationship that her government has gone out of its way not to criticize any of its allies directly. It is because Merkel wants the Atlantic alliance to survive that she hasn’t made Libya into a much bigger issue when it would be extremely easy and popular for her to do so. If Merkel were the opportunistic, pandering “maneuverer” that Cohen says that she is, she could have been creating a lot more trouble for the governments that started the Libyan war.

Update: Simon Jenkins sums things up nicely:

Most members of Nato and the EU are absent from the Libyan imbroglio. This is not, as the western media incant, because they are wimpish, small-minded and, as the New York Times grandly puts it, parochial. It is because they are not stupid.