The mismanaged eurozone crises that followed the crash of 2008 and her open door to Middle Eastern migrants both contributed mightily to the collapse of the very firewall against far-right parties she was supposedly maintaining. Much worse, she accepted, for enlightened environmentalist reasons, her country’s deindustrialization and an ever-increasing reliance on Russian oil and gas. And when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, it suddenly became clear that Merkel’s legacy wasn’t a strong alternative to Trump’s America; it was a weak European core threatened by and dependent upon an authoritarian rival to its east.