If Chancellor Angela Merkel remains unyieldingly wedded to austerity or finally reacts too slowly and too late to the euro-zone crisis, Germany may destroy Europe for the third time in a century \u2014 this time, without firing a shot. The contagion could poison our economy too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
You could legitimately argue that Germany won European supremacy without firing a shot; and you could even argue that Germany did well by spreading the risk of recklessly loaning to non-credit worthy Mediterranean economies so that they could buy lots of German goods. But \u201cdestroy Europe?\u201d<\/p>\n
What is destroying Europe is not Germany, but two clearly identifiable causes: (1) a fatally flawed euro, which ignored radically disparate culture, history, and common sense; and (2) fraud and corruption on the part of European countries with weak economies whose leaders never were candid with their own people or foreign lenders about their Ponzi schemes of getting easy northern European money at cheap subsidized interest rates for massive social entitlements.<\/p>\n
Should Germany choose not to sacrifice a sizable percentage of its GDP for years to come to bail out those who work less, produce fewer goods and services, and retire earlier with better benefits \u2014 while institutionalizing tax avoidance and endemic corruption \u2014 this would not be to \u201cdestroy Europe.\u201d Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and utopian technocrats in Brussels and Strasbourg did that well enough on their own long ago.<\/p>\n
Shrum misses entirely the irony of a Greek-like Obama administration railing at Germany to help its own reelection chances \u2014 a position Germany finds itself in because it wised up and rejected almost all of the policies and ideology that Obama is doing his best to implement in America.<\/p>\n
\n
\u00a92012 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner In open worries that the EU disaster may spread to the US and thereby endanger the reelection of Barack Obama, campaign consultant Bob Shrum recently\u00a0wrote:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[282],"tags":[12,1015,1050,149,107,1056,283],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-aL","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":706,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/dont-let-america-imitate-a-burning-eu\/","url_meta":{"origin":667,"position":0},"title":"Don’t Let America Imitate a Burning EU","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 14, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine Traveling through Europe can obscure the looming crisis threatening the continent. Visiting the medieval villages of Alsace, the castles on the Rhine, or the magnificent cathedrals in Basel or Cologne, it\u2019s easy to forget that Europe is on the brink of disaster. But these\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Economy"","block_context":{"text":"Economy","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/economy-europe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8681,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-three-crucial-factors-to-maintaining-the-peace-in-europe\/","url_meta":{"origin":667,"position":1},"title":"The Three Crucial Factors to Maintaining the Peace in Europe","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 25, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online The bailed-out Greeks are still broke. Now their islands are flooded with a horde of migrants from the Middle East and Africa. Spain, Portugal, and Italy are almost in the same boat. 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Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly \"war on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The EU"","block_context":{"text":"The EU","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/the-eu\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":314,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ahistorical-krugman\/","url_meta":{"origin":667,"position":3},"title":"The Ahistorical Krugman","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 30, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Paul Krugman\u00a0weaves a fantasy tale\u00a0of how high taxes, big unions, and government regulations created a booming 1950s economy \u2014 the implication being that in reactionary fashion we can now in a second term return to our heyday under Obama\u2019s envisioned union support, growth\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":731,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-limits-of-german-patience\/","url_meta":{"origin":667,"position":4},"title":"The Limits of German Patience","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Cologne, Germany I\u2019m still in Germany, and keep noticing a predictable, but continually interesting, pattern in talking to Germans of all walks of life \u2014 tourists, hoteliers, guides, drivers, casual bystanders, or students. 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The first Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the sober and judicious British Lord Ismay, famously remarked that the purpose of the controversial new postwar alliance would be \u201cto\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "NATO"","block_context":{"text":"NATO","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/geopolitics\/nato\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":669,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667\/revisions\/669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}