Some celebrated legacies vanish much quicker than anyone expected. Barely three months after Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor for sixteen years, has left office her legacy is falling to pieces. Some outcomes of her long reign are so bad, especially her neglect of the armed forces and the consequences of her energy policy, that they have made Germany and Europe weaker and more vulnerable than at any time in the past two decades. On her farewell, many media hailed Merkel as an outstanding European leader. In her third term in office, the New York Times even described her as “the last…