Germany’s outreach to China signals a reckoning, rather than a shift

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who heads to Beijing this week, had warned last year in relation to China that economic dependencies make Germany “susceptible to blackmail”. As chancellor, he confronts an export model under strain, a deteriorating transatlantic environment and the fiscal reality that moral posturing does not sustain an industrial economy.
Merz has never been shy about stating where he stands. As chairman of the non-profit Atlantik-Brucke from 2009 to 2019, he boosted the view…