The Worst Ally

President Joe Biden’s press conference last week was atrocious, but one of his worst missteps amounted to telling the truth about Germany, if not by name.

Biden said there’d be divisions within NATO over a “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukraine. This is true enough, and the chief cause would be a Germany that is staking a strong claim to being our worst European ally.

If NATO is hollowed out over time, Germany will have much to do with it. The country is too guilt-wracked over its enormities in World War II to contribute rigorously to the defense of the West, and too cynical to allow anything to interfere with its selfish interests, both in Russian energy and the Chinese export market. It is attempting a kind of de facto economic alliance with the revisionist autocratic powers, China and Russia, at the same time it is allied politically with the foremost defender of the democratic West, the United States.

Its defense spending is inching upward but is still short of the 2 percent of GDP pledged by NATO countries. It stands now at 1.5 percent of GDP. This is an economic powerhouse that has been shirking its responsibilities, in part because it has been able to rely on the United States — and its vast military might — as a crutch.