Maybe. I guess you can celebrate her for her "international leadership" (what are we exactly celebrating by the way?) and at the same time acknowledge that she completely missed the interests of her constituency.

I mean, "international leadership" are your words. I don't know what Merkel personally has done (or what her "useful idiots" have personally done, or even who those "useful idiots" are). But you are positing that there's a contradiction between Germany's dependency on China and Russia, and Merkel's perceived achievements in international leadership. I'm just saying that there's no contradiction or hypocrisy in being in an influential international leadership role, while being from a country with its own national security issues.

Essentially, I'm saying that the last part of your argument falls under the "vaguely gesturing at imagined hypocrisy" category.

Yeah I don't see how she made any strategic decisions that set up the long term success for Germany and EU. She's remembered bigly internationally for letting all the migrants in.

Bordering countries like Italy and Greece were becoming overwhelmed by migration wave. They were crying for help for quite some time til anyone even noticed the problem. So to ease the pressure there was plan to redistribute them in to EU. This was refused by several countries so 'Merkel' took some of them to Germany. It was not ideal but better then nothing.

That crisis was caused by instability in Middle East. Which was caused by several other factors like climate (farms without water in Syria) and international politics of Russia and USA. But like now everyone was blaming Germany.

She should have thrown money and equipment at the problem like the US does. That works most of the time. When it doesn't, let French diplomacy handle it. Or even better, just do both at the same time. Italy and Greece, just take this money and patrol ships and do coastal patrol. Hungary, just take this money and build a barbed wire fence, if you think it works. Border states were guarding the Schengen Area dreamland. Instead they paid Turkey tribute to allow it to blackmail and took the migrants in, assingned quotas which made everyone unhappy about it.

Building barbed wire and stronger coastal patrols doesn't help you take in more refugees. Getting more countries to accept refugees helps take in more refugees.

But I suppose you solution is to just kill all the refugees by letting them drown or whatever. Which, I suppose, is one way to solve a perceived "refugee crisis", but it wouldn't be my first choice.

Most of those were not war but economical refugees and they forced through EU borders, which the EU states at the periphery of the EU have to guard. Belarus used them to blackmail Poland and Lituania. Turkey used the refugees to blackmail the EU for more funds to essentially keep them out. The fences worked in fact, because the refugees changed their route. Other states have also built fences, but Hungary was the first to do so and it is by far the largest fence built during the refugee crisis.

The US has a 650 mile border wall with Mexico exactly for this reason. Most of this border barrier was actually built during the Obama administration, Trump just used it as a campaign objective to build a "big, beautiful wall" instead of a fence.

A fence does not necessarily bar a country from accepting refugees, but offers better border enforcement and so does an adequate coast guard. If a state can't even enforce its borders, there is no state to begin with. When human traffickers are discouraged, they'll look for other sources of income.

I'm not for building fences and walls, but I can't really imagine other alternatives that actually work at enforcing borders at least to some extent.