Branding the Biden administration a band of neophytes when it came to managing Russia before it invaded Ukraine is highly tempting, but did Angela Merkel pave that long and bumpy road?

The woman who served as Germany’s chancellor for 16 years until 2021, has a new memoir coming out next Tuesday called “Freedom,” excerpts of which have just been published in the German weekly Die Zeit.

 Ms. Merkel’s long tenure as top Teuton has recently come under scrutiny, particularly for her leading role in opening the door for more than million Syrian refugees to seek asylum in Germany. The country’s inability to cope with the overflow is one of the factors that led to the collapse of the country’s current governing coalition.

Plus, too, Ms. Merkel also exposed Germany to economic vulnerabilities by failing to understand the risks of making German industry, now sagging, overly dependent on cheap Russian energy. 

Some left-leaning publications like the German-owned Politico have seized on Ms. Merkel’s interactions with Donald Trump during his first presidential term, but those are just the hors d’oeuvres. 

Prognosticating about the president-elect’s future behavior is by now a guessing game on every continent, but in this case it’s the former chancellor’s admissions about Ukraine that are more compelling. They may foreshadow some of the difficult terrain ahead for the incoming administration. 

In the book, Ms. Merkel defends Germany’s past resistance to Ukraine joining the North Atlantic Treaty, a decision that some critics say enabled the Russian invasion. In 2008, a blueprint for candidate status for Ukraine as well as Georgia was discussed at a NATO summit at Bucharest.

Of that discussion she writes she “understood the desire of the Central and Eastern European countries to become members of NATO as quickly as possible”  but it was her belief that  “the admission of a new member should not only bring more security to the new member, but also to NATO.”

In other words, she feared a Russian military response should Ukraine be put on track to join the alliance. Those fears may have been overblown. However, Ms. Merkel did correctly see the

risks presented by what then amounted to the contractually secured presence of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet on the Crimean peninsula. 

“No other NATO candidate country had ever had such an entanglement with Russian military structures. Moreover, at the time only a minority of the Ukrainian population supported the country’s membership in NATO,” she writes.

“I thought it was an illusion to assume that the candidate status of Ukraine and Georgia would have protected them from Putin’s aggression, that this status would have been such a deterrent that Putin would have accepted the developments without taking action,” she added. 

Ms. Merkel contends that not only would it have been highly unlikely that  NATO member states would have responded militarily — with both materiel and troops — in an emergency, but she also asks “Would it have been conceivable that I, as Chancellor, would have asked the German Bundestag for such a mandate for our Bundeswehr and received a majority for it?” 

In the memoir, she goes one step further to smooth over her uneven tracks in respect of Ukraine policy. “The fact that Georgia and Ukraine did not receive a commitment for candidate was for them a no to their hopes,” she avers, but “the fact that NATO at the same time offered them a general commitment for their membership was for Putin a yes to NATO membership for both countries [and] a declaration of war.”

President Trump, in 2018, scolded Germany for its reliance on deliveries of Russian gas. That was after Russia seized Crimea but before President Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

Germany is now reeling from an economic downturn caused in part by higher energy costs across Europe  in the wake of that invasion.

Mrs. Merkel, in her memoir, states that in her view Trump saw everything from the perspective of a real estate entrepreneur and that “for him, all countries were in competition with one another.” That begs a question that Frau Merkel ducks: Are they not?