John Vinocur is annoyed by German foreign policy:

Mrs. Merkel blocked Ukraine and Georgia’s efforts to win status as candidate members of NATO, removing a potential constraint on Russia and permitting its invasion of Georgia later in 2008 [bold mine-DL]. She had come to office three years earlier campaigning against Mr. Schröder’s unilateral Nord Stream gas pipeline deal with Russia, but as chancellor she abandoned her opposition and increased EU members’ dependency on Russian energy. Remarkably, she also refused to let Germany join NATO’s 2011 intervention against Moammar Gadhafi, and wound up abstaining along with Russia and China at a U.N. vote.

In at least two of these cases, Merkel’s position has been vindicated by subsequent events. German opposition to bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO was shared by other European governments, and it avoided dragging the alliance into direct conflict with Russia. As it was, the pledge made at the Bucharest summit that these states would one day join the alliance ratcheted up tensions and contributed to the outbreak of the August 2008 war. Had it not been for previous Western support for Georgia’s membership in the alliance, it is very doubtful that its government would have ever risked escalating a conflict over the separatist republics. That means that there likely would have been no war. At least European resistance prevented a harmful policy from becoming a complete disaster. Most Ukrainians never wanted to join NATO, and bringing the country into the alliance would have worsened the country’s internal political divisions. Neither country was suitable for the alliance, and seeking to bring either one in as a member was one of the most serious mistakes that the U.S. made in Europe in the last twenty years.

Vinocur also misrepresents the intervention in Libya in that he makes it sound as if Merkel held Germany back from joining in a war that its people wanted to fight, but Germans were overwhelmingly against participating in the campaign. In the years since NATO’s war in Libya ended, Libya has descended into the instability and disorder that inevitably follow from regime change, and Germany’s opposition to the war and refusal to participate in it seem more justified and defensible than ever. Germany abstained on the resolution out of deference to its allies, but it would have been entirely proper for it to vote no. Germany is being faulted here for not wanting to extend security guarantees that Western governments would never honor in practice, but its opposition to making those guarantees probably prevented the August 2008 war from triggering an even larger international crisis. It is also being derided because it refused to join in an unnecessary war that has resulted in greater regional instability, but if its allies had taken the same position it is doubtful that the situation in Libya would be any worse than it is now. In both cases, the German government exercised better judgment than our own did, and it would do the U.S. and our other more belligerent allies good to take some cues from their greater caution and restraint.