It is hard to believe that just seven years ago, Time Magazine actually named Germany’s Angela Merkle as their Person of the Year. They even fawningly described her as the “Chancellor of the Free World.”

Time owes whatever readers it has left a solemn apology. Nearly every major economic and security policy advanced by Merkel as German Chancellor has turned out catastrophically wrong.

Today, the German economy is in tatters in no small part due to her blunders. See the headline this week from Business Insider:

It was Merkel who decided to move Germany away from fossil fuels and nuclear power and instead “go green.” Her green energy movement nearly bankrupted the German manufacturing economy, and nearly the entire failed experiment in solar and wind energy has been scuttled.

It was her decision in 2017 against the advice of Trump to build the Nordstrom pipeline, which only made Germany wholly dependent on Russia and Putin for natural gas. She made trade deals with China – deliberately undermining Trump’s strategy of economically isolating Beijing. She chose to align Germany with Russia, China, and even Iran over the NATO alliance with the United States. She tragically bet Germany’s future on the wrong horses.

In short, every Merkel blunder has made the world a more dangerous, less free, and less prosperous place. She was to Germany what Joe Biden has been to the United States – a dismal failure. Lets hope American figure this out more quickly than the Germans did.