Let’s add one more strand to our understanding of how the world is being shaped at the moment, this one on Merkel’s Germany. Here’s how it starts.

The best profile of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel in the English language is this one.  This is no doubt she was very sympathetic to the Soviets growing up. Her parents moved from West Germany to East Germany in 1954, soon after she was born. She literally got her communism with her mother’s milk. At 1970 at the age of 16 she won the national prize in East Germany for her Russian-speaking ability. At Leipzig University she devoted a year to studying Marxist-Leninist thought. She attended a university in Leningrad for a year in 1977, away from Stasi and available to the KGB without the Stasi being aware. Coincidentally, Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in Leningrad in 1977.

From there it gets only more incredible but remains plausible to the end, to put it mildly. Only the relatively optimistic tone in the conclusion seems misplaced. I suppose you have to hope.