Germany’s government fumed when Trump said in the debate that the Germans have turned against green energy and “we’re back to building normal energy plants.”

Politico reports that “Germany’s Foreign Ministry flipped out and responded with an unusually confrontational post on X.”

Richard Grenell, Trump’s ambassador to Germany, responded with a rebuttal and accused Berlin of “blatant election interference.” Anna Lührman, Germany’s Europe minister, fired back: “As democrats, we can no longer allow false statements to stand uncommented.”

The irony is that the media coverage of this spat has almost completely ignored the fact that Trump was basically right. The German blog Eugyppius explained:

The Foreign Office tweet was wrong: Germany’s “energy system” is not comprised of 50% renewables. That figure applies only to our electricity generation. The German Economics Ministry had to gently clarify this in comments; they did so in German, to spare their Foreign Office colleagues embarrassment before an American audience. Were our Economics Ministry more honest, they could have further explained that Germany did indeed reactivate several coal plants during the energy crisis of 2022, and that since the nuclear phase-out we are hard at work building new natural gas plants as well.

Trump, in other words, was basically correct, but that’s a side matter. What I would like to know, is how this shallow preening advances the interests of actual Germans, which is what our Foreign Office is supposed to be doing. The all-too-obvious answer is that it doesn’t.

Here are the energy statistics for Germany, which show a continuing heavy reliance on fossil fuels:

Georgetown political scientist Emma Ashford drily notes that “it seems like diplomatic malpractice for a country’s foreign office to take a side in the (close!) election of their primary security provider.”