IT’S a remarkable achievement to unite almost every nation and shade of political opinion, yet Vladimir Putin has done it. Unfortunately for him, this unprecedented international consensus is that Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is indefensible.

Still, everyone coming round to this view isn’t much more than confirmation of what was already a widespread opinion. It never required an unusual degree of political perspicacity or regular attendance at Chatham House round tables to conclude that Mr Putin was a wrong ’un; there were all those little clues, like his locking up journalists and human rights activists, and the way his opponents kept falling out of windows or keeling over with radiation poisoning. The big change in opinion hasn’t been towards Russia (or at least, its current regime). It’s been in attitudes towards other countries.

First, of course, towards Ukraine, now everybody’s new favourite place and its heroic president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has seamlessly transitioned from his former role as a sitcom actor – and voice of Paddington – to international statesman with a 100 per cent approval rating.

The more unexpected shift, though, has been the startling change in perception of Germany which, despite the welcome and belated reversal of its position over the last couple of days, has looked tremendously shoddy during this current crisis.

This has come as a particular shock to the many people, especially numerous in the virulently pro-EU camp, who have spent years holding Germany up as a model state, an example of how politics ought to be conducted, and, under its former Chancellor, Angela Merkel, the only really grown-up Western democracy.

Except it now turns out that almost every decision Germany has made in the past couple of decades has been wrong, that Mrs Merkel’s decision to cosy up to Mr Putin was a moral, economic and political blunder of staggering proportions, and that, far from being some benevolent model of European social democracy that puts the rest of the continent to shame, its short-sighted and self-centred policies have caused untold damage. And that the country’s first instinct, when that became apparent, was to fling almost everyone else under the bus.

The Greeks, and probably the Italians (since that country is now essentially an economic satrapy of Germany, with an unelected Prime Minister fresh from a long stint running the European Central Bank in Frankfurt), could have told you the second part of that already, since they’ve already had their economies ruined at Germany’s expense, and been subjected to privations that make the Coalition government’s austerity measures here look like Viv Nicholson on Supermarket Sweep.

In some ways, it’s surprising that the Euromaniacs haven’t also taken a dim view of the country’s recent record, since its dominance has created many of the imbalances that have stoked disaffection with the EU, particularly in southern and eastern members states. It could be argued that Mrs Merkel’s ill-thought-through policy on Syrian refugees was one of the indirect causes of Brexit; it’s almost certain that her refusal to give any concession at all on freedom of movement to David Cameron was directly responsible for dooming the Remain campaign to failure.

The most staggeringly stupid German error, it is now obvious, was to close down perfectly good nuclear power stations – ostensibly because of some imaginary threat from tidal waves in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima (something not even the Japanese, who actually had a basis to fear such a thing, did). In reality, of course, this was to shore up Mrs Merkel’s green credentials, on which front it was completely counter-productive, because the country instead became even more reliant on coal and fossil fuels. And, as everyone can now see, on gas imported from an untrustworthy megalomaniac warmonger.

Those who’ve been applauding the commitment announced the other day by the new Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to spend two per cent of his country’s GDP on defence should bear in mind that that is only complying with a requirement of Nato membership (which only the UK and US regularly meet). Indeed, Germany’s main contribution to European defence and security over the past couple of decades has been systematically to undermine it. The gap between what it has actually spent on defence (1.2 per cent) and should have been spending amounts to hundreds of billions of Euros, which it has instead been shovelling in the direction of Russian energy firms.

It has not only accommodated (and done a lot of lucrative trading with) Russia at the expense of Poland, Slovakia, the Baltic states and other near neighbours, but underfunded its own military to the point where, on the invasion of Ukraine, Alphons Mais, head of the German army, posted his frustration on social media that German armed forces would be incapable of doing much about it, even if they wanted to. Worse than that, until a couple of days ago, Germany was actively blocking other countries from providing military equipment to Ukrainian forces. Its own contribution was a paltry 5,000 helmets, which it delivered to Lichtenstein.

Germany was also the principal obstacle to imposing restrictions on Russia’s access to Swift, which would have impeded international bank payments, and been one of the most credible threats to its economy. Those who point out that Russia has built up some $640 billion of foreign currency reserves (precisely in order to wage this war) quite often forget the fairly significant point that most of this money, while it might belong to Russians, is in Western banks, and it isn’t going to be much good to them if we decline to hand it over – something which anyone wanting to stand by Ukraine might imagine is a perfectly reasonable position.

The recent change of heart in the Reichstag is welcome, but that it took so long to get round to it is alarming, not least because – on all sorts of grounds – Germany is, and should be, a dominant force in Europe. Those who have argued for it as a model of democracy, responsibility and efficiency can now see that it has failed at the very moment it should have been setting a firm example. And those who have been worried that the country is over-powerful may now be reflecting that it’s even more dangerous for it to be weak and lily-livered – and prepared to let a huge chunk of Europe be over-run by a dictator, as long as they can keep the home fires burning.

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