John McCain was in a wistful mood.
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It was the spring of 2017 and I was visiting him for what would turn out to be the final time in his Senate office on Capitol Hill.
After catching me up on the latest in our home state of Arizona, McCain turned to another of his passions: Europe. The senator had just returned from a swing through the Balkans (spending time in one of Tito's hunting lodges, among other places) and he was worried that neither Washington nor the Europeans were paying enough attention to the security situation there and the broader region, especially regarding the threat posed by Russia.
What about the Germans, I asked, knowing how frustrated McCain had been with Berlin’s stance on Russia over the years. (In 2015, McCain, enraged over Berlin’s refusal to help arm Ukraine, said Angela Merkel’s course reminded him of “the policies of the 1930s,” a reference to the U.K.’s ill-fated appeasement strategy towards Hitler).
McCain, who never abandoned the vernacular of his fighter-pilot days, cracked a mischievous smile.
“The fucking Germans,” he laughed. “What is there to say?”
Were he still alive, McCain would no doubt have plenty to say about the foreign policy trajectory of Merkel’s government in recent years.
Since McCain’s death in 2018, Germany has refused to back the U.S. on just about every major foreign policy front, whether concerning China, Russia, Iran, Israel or the broader Middle East.
Meanwhile, Berlin continues to fall short of NATO defense spending targets and the defense ministry’s procurement practices — in recent days it had to scrap plans to order a new standard-issue assault rifle over a patent dispute — remain a comedy of errors.
It’s tempting to blame this new transatlantic divide on Donald Trump, his questioning of NATO’s purpose and his bizarre love-hate obsession with both Merkel and Germany, the land of his forebears.