America has lost the leadership of the globe in the last ten days. In fact, it lost it two times over. For completely different reasons. The first time it was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that did it. Twilight of American power, right there. Might as well mothball the nuclear subs and aircraft carriers. The second time was when it pulled out of the Paris accords. No time for the mothballs, Americans have abandoned science and will shortly be living in cave dwellings along Appalachia. Both are cases of the commentariat wishing Donald Trump’s presidency to be shown to be more disastrous than it is. And so the race to find the next global leader is on.

Joan Walsh declared Angela Merkel the leader of the free world. How interesting! But it fails the sniff test. The European Union exists on several unspoken agreements. One of them is that Germany doesn’t get a big military anymore. In compensation it does get the greatest benefit from the euro currency. Another unspoken part of the deal is that the European Union is the political deputy in the NATO alliance. That is why, whenever EU expansion talk comes it is about whether to include more NATO countries, even when they aren’t European, like Turkey. Never that big European country outside of NATO, which is Russia.

Germany could not maintain its treasured European project if suddenly it made a bid for world leadership with a military buildup. The whole project of the EU rests on the military reality that the U.S. provides Europe’s security from Russian domination. Does anyone for one minute believe that a German public that is now dogmatically anti-war and pro-EU would be willing to jeopardize the political arrangement they love and that gives them prosperity for a major military build-up that would require new sacrifices?