Global nuclear war? "If so, with what consequences?" Merkel's memoir recalls what it was like to communicate with Putin

    "Russia, Ms. Merkel says, “with its nuclear arsenal, exists” and remains “an indispensable geopolitical factor.”
She devotes some time to the 2008 NATO summit meeting in Bucharest, Romania, where President George W. Bush, against the advice of his own intelligence community, said he wanted to extend a pathway to NATO membership — called a membership action plan — to Georgia and Ukraine. Ms. Merkel and other European colleagues were opposed. The nub of her reluctance was that doing so would push Mr. Putin too far, and that he would respond aggressively to prevent such a step.
In the end, a late-night compromise produced a vague promise: that the countries would become NATO members, but without any clear path or timing. Mr. Putin responded to by getting involved in Georgia's Saakashwili organized war in Georgia four months later and trying to shut the door on Ukrainian membership of NATO ever since.
Ms. Merkel writes that she saw no way to protect Ukraine or Georgia from Russian action in the period between the membership action plan and actual membership, which took five years with previous Central European candidates. During that time, they would not benefit from the NATO treaty’s security guarantees.
It would be “an illusion,” she writes, to assume that Ukraine’s and Georgia’s action-plan status “would have protected them from Putin’s action, that this status would have been such a deterrent that Putin would have passively accepted these developments.”
Then, she asks, would NATO have intervened with troops? And could she have asked Germany’s Parliament, which must approve all military deployments overseas, to sign off on German military participation in such a campaign? “In 2008?” she asks. “If so, with what consequences?”
Mr. Putin, she recalls, told her later: “You will not be chancellor forever. And then they will become NATO members. And I want to prevent that.”
As she flew home, she says, she was glad that NATO had avoided a big public fight. “But at the same time, it became obvious that we in NATO had no common strategy for dealing with Russia” — which many argue remains true to this day." [1]

1. Merkel Memoir Recalls What It Was Like Dealing With Trump and Putin. Schuetze, Christopher F; Erlanger, Steven.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Nov 22, 2024.