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Germany has spent trillions over the past quarter of a century to reintegrate its ex-Communist east. That laborious process is now largely over, and Germany is reaping the benefits of its investment. The catastrophic euro, which Mrs. Thatcher wisely kept Britain out of, serves as an ingenious scheme to boost German exports at the expense of its less superbly industrious neighbors in the sunnier parts of Europe. Moreover, Germany, which traditionally faced hostile neighbors, is now bordered solely by friendly states.

One of my commenters, Sean, offered the Machiavellian hypothesis that Ms. Merkel’s surprise 2015 decision to invite in a Million Muslim Mob was in reality a brilliant improvisation to disarm traditional British and French hostility toward German supremacy by recasting the mighty Reich as masochistically anti-ethnocentric, the Sweden of the south:

Given that Germany is now for the first time surrounded by friendly countries and only has an image problem as a demanding creditor in relation to Greece and pettifogging over EU rules, mass importing a million non-European migrants into Germany for a generation is an ingenious ploy. With the refugees Merkel has embarked on a soft power blitzkrieg that will make the German state not only masters of Europe, but moral exemplars…. In my opinion Angela Merkel is operating with a traditional German objective of dominating Europe. She manufactured a crisis with migrant Muslims, then solved it by a deal to give 70 million Turks the right to flood Europe. Germany against the West to secure a German hegemony, all over again, and because Germany is doing it with soft power this time they may succeed.

The establishment answer to these Brexit fears has been that Turkey won”€™t get to join the EU for years, so why worry?

Yet, Enoch Powell said in 1968:

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.

But he was bad, so that can”€™t be true.