Jeffrey Sachs talking to Glenn Diesen yesterday

• Professor Sachs thinks Angela Merkel was fundamentally decent. She was the worst German leader since Hitler, not forgetting Ulbricht and Honecker: allowing in a million young Arab men without papers, abandoning nuclear power and not going along with Bush's proposal that Ukraine and Georgia join Nato. Germany has a veto! She also made Brexit happen because of her obduracy - for this I am grateful. And she agreed to the construction of Nord Stream, something which Donald Trump condemned and Zelensky blew up. British journalists hailed her as the leader of the free world when Trump became President the first time. With leaders like her the free world was in trouble.

Germany’s terrible leadership is the reason why this war broke out and why it continues.

It’s very poignant to read the memoirs of Angela Merkel, where she describes the point where Germany gave in to US demands for NATO enlargement at the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008.


On the first day of that summit, when George Bush was recklessly pushing NATO to commit to enlarging to Ukraine and Georgia, France and Germany — and I know others, Norway and others — all thought this was a very bad idea. They tried to resist, explaining to Bush that this could provoke war, that this would provoke a crisis in Europe, and so forth.


The United States persisted. This is just an example of the US deep state — in this case, Bush being a very weak president, Cheney being a very dark figure behind him, but really the deep state still pursuing a policy it had already set more than a decade earlier: that yes, NATO would enlarge. They pushed the Europeans to accept it. Merkel resisted on the first day of the summit, but then gave in on the second day.

That, to my mind, is the turning point of Europe. She says, “I salvaged something because we didn’t have a literal plan for accession, only the commitment to accession of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO.” That didn’t make much difference from the Russian point of view, and it didn’t make much difference from the politics that was to unfold afterwards. So Merkel, who was a very decent person in my view as chancellor, gave in. That was her mistake.

Scholz was just impossibly weak and confused. He didn’t utter one sentence of truth or sense about any of this during his time as chancellor. And Merz has been a grave disappointment as well, because when Merz came into office as chancellor, he just beat the drums of war from the first moment. He didn’t say, “Well, I’m newly arrived. I’m going to contact my counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to see whether it’s possible that we work something out.” He just said we’re heading towards an even bigger war.

So German leadership has been terrible, and it’s consequential because Germany is really at the center of this story in a lot of ways.

Most importantly, in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Germany was still divided between the German Democratic Republic in the east and the Federal Republic in the west, Helmut Kohl was chancellor and wanted to move towards fast reunification. That required the approval of the Soviet Union. And to obtain that approval, Kohl explained to Gorbachev on February 10, 1990, that German unification would not threaten Russian national security because, in part, NATO would not move eastward.

That commitment was made by Kohl to Gorbachev, and it was made repeatedly by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister — publicly, privately, in countless ways. That’s the basis of German reunification.

Merz should understand this. Germany cheated in a very big way. Of course it cheated alongside the United States. It was both Germany and the US that, from 1993 onward, started to push for NATO enlargement. I often talk about the US being the main driver of this, and I think it was. But Germany was an enthusiastic NATO enlarger, even though Germany was the overwhelming beneficiary of the commitment that NATO would not move one inch eastward. This is all well documented.

Merz should know it. Then, to bring us to the anniversary of the Maidan coup, in which the US did a lot to overthrow a neutral government in Ukraine — we should recall that on February 21, 2014, the German, French, and Polish foreign ministers negotiated an agreement with Yanukovych for an end to the unrest on the Maidan, much of it stoked by the United States itself, in return for elections later in 2014. Germany was a party to this agreement. This agreement was also brought to agreement with President Putin and President Obama.

And the next day, the coup leaders stormed the government buildings in Kyiv and overthrew Yanukovych. At that moment, the Western governments should have said, “We don’t accept this coup. Yanukovych is the legally constituted president.” He was in Kharkiv that day. He said, “I’m still president.” But Obama immediately recognized the new government, which was part of the US deep state plan. Germany went along again. This is terrible. Europe failed. Europe had signed an agreement with Yanukovych and then, completely within 24 hours, buckled to the United States.

Then Germany cheated again. In 2015, after the war had broken out, the two oblasts in the Donbas — Donetsk and Luhansk — had broken away and declared that they were not following the coup regime in Kyiv. A war began with the Kyiv government attacking the breakaway regions. And President Putin helped to orchestrate what became first the Minsk I and then the Minsk II agreement.

Most importantly, the Minsk II agreement of 2015 said that the fighting would stop on the basis of political autonomy for the two ethnic Russian and Russian-language regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. The guarantors of that agreement were to be Germany and France. And we now know, by the testimony of both of them, that they did not enforce the agreement, they did not pressure Ukraine to follow through, as was their responsibility.

As Merkel later said in a rather shockingly brazen statement, she regarded the Minsk II agreement as a holding period — a time for Ukraine to build up its strength for war. I don’t know if Merkel meant that at the time in 2015. That’s how she explained it in 2022 and 2023. But in any event, Germany did not fulfill its role.

So to my mind, Germany has the highest responsibility — as the largest country in the European Union, as the one that was at the very center of this story from 1990 onward, and as the one that has failed in its political responsibility at the crucial moments: on the question of NATO enlargement, on the question of the coup on the Maidan in February 2014, and on the enforcement of the Minsk II agreement. Germany failed repeatedly.

For Merz to come into office as chancellor and simply declare that Putin cannot be trusted betrays either a basic ignorance of the key facts of the events of the last 25 years, or a brazen disregard of those facts. I hope that it’s ignorance of them.

The way that one would solve the question of ignorance is through dialogue. Merz should have immediately picked up the phone and called his counterpart and said, “I’m newly elected as Chancellor of Germany. We have a major responsibility to try to find peace. I believe that our foreign ministers should meet and discuss what might be done. Maybe we won’t reach an agreement. Maybe we will, but we should try.”

Nothing of that sort happened. I believe that’s what should happen immediately. I assume that after Mr. Merz hears our interview just now, he will immediately call President Putin and try to find peace.