战争、混乱和政权更迭使中东地区动荡不安。现在德国的联合政府已垮台。这是世界大事的一种交汇。所有这一切，都因为西方世界的美国之锚似乎对稳定国家这艘大船无能为力，或者说毫无兴趣。

Marc Fisher

War, disorder and regime change rattle the Middle East. Russia and Iran, two of the world’s major disrupters, suffer humiliating setbacks. China, despite a troubled economy, presses its expanding ambitions in much of the developing world. And now the German government collapses.

This is the sort of confluence of world events that historians will later look back on and wonder why people at the time failed to recognize an elemental pivot point.

All this as the West’s U.S. anchor seems incapable of — or not interested in — holding the ship of state steady.

Monday’s fall of the Berlin governing coalition led by Social Democrat Olaf Scholz is in some ways strictly about Germany. Watching German TV coverage of the momentous vote in the Bundestag to dump this government and call new elections, I was struck by how the news was perceived by Germans as confirmation of two American political adages: “All politics is local,” and “It’s the economy, stupid.” If you took the German coverage as your guide, this collapse is mainly about threats to trim pension and welfare benefits.

But behind the threat is a classic and abiding German anxiety: a fear that the country’s enviable stability is no longer dependable. And that takes us straight to the bigger picture, which is not at all parochial.

Since World War II, the U.S. role in Europe has been to provide security — against Russia, but also within Europe. Ukraine aside, this is the longest period of peace among European nations in centuries, and while surely the European Union is a key reason for that, it’s the assurance of U.S. support and defense through the Atlantic alliance that provides the foundation.

Now that foundation is looking pretty dang shaky. Although the Republican Party seems hopelessly tangled up between its long-standing internationalism and its ascendant Trumpian America-First-ism, the president-elect is threatening to act on his decades-old annoyance with NATO and the Europeans whom he views as leeches and layabouts. This is not a recipe for effective U.S. leadership.

No country has believed more in the European experiment, and in the value and goodness of U.S. leadership, than Germany. It’s a near-miracle of history that West Germany’s enduring postwar democracy was in part inspired, imposed and sustained by exactly the country that had just reduced much of Germany to rubble.

In every decade since the war, rumblings of right-wing extremism have greeted each dip in the country’s economic or political fortunes. Yet Germans, both before and after the reunification of East and West that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, have consistently put their trust and effort into a philosophy of Stability Über Alles.

Now, the far right is surging once more, in the form of an anti-immigrant political party, the Alternative for Germany, which is gaining votes even as the government’s domestic security agency keeps tabs on the threat it poses to the country’s constitution and democracy.

That surge is happening at the same time that the two major parties, the conservative Christian Democrats and the leftist Social Democrats, have — much like our own Republicans and Democrats — lost their clear visions for the future and, as a result, seen a muddling of their traditional followers.

In a European parliamentary system, when such consensus fails, disorder can follow quickly compared with the U.S. federal system. Our no-confidence votes arrive over years rather than mere weeks or months. Other parliamentary systems, in France and Britain, are struggling along with Germany’s to assure a stable confidence in government.

But the U.S. election was a clear thumbs-down to the status quo, and contributes to the disquiet of the West. Without a reasonably united Europe, U.S. capacity to resist China’s power grabs or restrain Vladimir Putin’s fantasies of restoring empire will be severely cramped.

With luck, the Germans will stumble into a new governing coalition after an election campaign over the next two months, but there’s little reason to believe that the election will produce a clear notion of where the country is heading. For Germans, as for Americans, the issues that divide and frighten people are just too big, the risks too scary, the forces of change seemingly impossible to regulate in any effective way.

Germans, as former chancellor Angela Merkel discovered in her last years in office, are indeed eager to present themselves to the world as a force for peace and equality, but they are not willing to risk economic security to take in the world’s refugees to a degree that would change the basic character of their country. And while committed to Ukrainian sovereignty — Germans have put up the money and military hardware to prove it — they are not willing to poke the Russian bear to the point of risking their own security. Their shaky confidence is further rattled by the possibility of global tariff wars that threaten to strike their export-dependent economy especially hard.

The collapse of Germany’s government comes at an awkward and fragile moment for the world. It’s especially unnerving because, whether they like it or not, the Germans have become a vital symbol of stability for the West — a model of what the U.S.-led community of nations can achieve. Germans tend to think they very much depend on U.S. strength. We — and they — should realize that we also need theirs.