It's not idiotic. They are just friends with Putin. Just see where their former top officials are employed, how they torpedoed the Norway-Poland pipeline and how they were pushing Nordstream 2 even though everyone told them it will destabilize safety of Baltic states. It's not incompetence, it's too consistent.
I am hopeful about sanctions but I am afraid Germans won't allow ones that actually work.
Shutting down their nuclear plants for no good reason was certainly not in Germany's best interests. They will now pay dearly for that boneheaded decision.
Fortunately we have a friendly neighbor with plenty of nuclear power which renders germany's anti-nuclear stance into a political play with a side dish of market consolidation.
Fission is obviously no clean energy. The previous posts claiming neutralizing nuclear wastes in 600 years was a solution was absurd. But yeah, completely decommission nuclear power plants now for sure would be controversial. But I'm in no position to judge that decision. It's all about trade off, but for what is a question.
Yeah, there are no guilt-free answers when it comes to base load generation, and fission is no exception.
But when the plants already exist and you shut them down because the Japanese decided to build one in a tsunami-prone seismic zone, hire a corrupt organization to operate it well beyond its intended service life, and install backup generators in the basement, or because the Soviets built one and operated it under the "Hold my vodka and watch THIS" school of engineering, well... those just aren't good reasons, and also not the kind of thinking I expect from the Germans.
France's modern plants should help, but they won't come online for years.
Hopefully other sanctions will also help. Cutting them off from the international banking system, for example.