Germany loves to present itself as the adult in the room — the global hall monitor with a clipboard, sighing at the messy kids. Especially Americans. Loud, wasteful, unserious… unlike Germany, land of engineering, planning, and doing things “the right way.”

And then Germany pulled off one of the most expensive self-owns in modern energy policy.

They shut down nuclear power — a steady, high-output source that doesn’t care if it’s cloudy, calm, or cold. Not a “phase down,” not a “keep it as backup,” but a full-on exit. Congratulations: you just deleted a major chunk of reliable electricity because it felt morally satisfying.

Now comes the part that makes the smugness taste funny.

When you remove dependable baseload power, the grid doesn’t clap. It panics. So Germany filled the gap with natural gas — the “bridge fuel” — and for years a big slice of that bridge ran straight to Russia. Cheap, convenient, and strategically brain-dead. It’s like bragging about your house’s fire safety while storing gasoline in the living room.

Then geopolitics hit. Prices went wild. Supply turned into a security crisis. Suddenly the same country lecturing everyone else on responsibility was sprinting to build LNG terminals and sign new import deals — because it had already set its nuclear plants on fire, politically speaking.

And the best punchline? Germany didn’t actually get rid of nuclear power. It outsourced it.

When it needs electricity — especially when renewables aren’t delivering — it can import power from neighbors. France, famously, still runs heavily on nuclear. So Germany shuts down its own reactors… then buys nuclear-generated electricity from across the border. That’s not a clean-energy victory. That’s a vibes-based policy with an extension cord.

So if you’re writing How To Ruin A Country, the recipe is simple:

  • Delete reliable power
  • Replace it with weather + imports
  • Tie your economy to volatile fuel markets
  • Then quietly buy the “bad” energy from someone else and pretend it doesn’t count

Germany’s mistake wasn’t being ambitious. It was confusing “feels smart” with “is smart.” And nothing says “we’re smarter than you” like shutting down your own nuclear plants… and then plugging into France’s.