The left-wing Greek government has pursued a hard-edged, maximalist negotiating strategy, hoping that by pushing to the brink of leaving the eurozone, the other European countries would acquiesce to bailout terms more favorable to Greece. It underestimated how strongly held Germany’s position really was, and how many other countries Germany could pull in to support it.

For five years now, the threat of a Greece exit from the eurozone, with the idea that European unity was more fragile than its leaders had always claimed, was the cudgel that ultimately pulled the parties together to make a deal. But leaders of Germany and some of the other Northern European creditor countries (Finland, the Netherlands, Austria) are fed up with this, and are increasingly rejecting the premise behind the last five years of European debt negotiations.

The Germans seem to have done more planning for how to execute a Greek exit than Greece has; the former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner described in his memoir a 2012 meeting with the German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble in which Mr. Schäuble showed something approaching enthusiasm for pushing Greece out of the eurozone and thus pulling the remaining countries closer together.

The German proposal for a bailout extension explicitly raised the possibility of Greece’s exiting the euro for a five-year period before re-entering, which boggles the mind. As Alex White of the Economist Intelligence Unit tweeted, it is the equivalent of “Let’s divorce, divide up the finances, go our separate ways,” and get married again in five years.

By contrast, all signs suggest that the Greek government, for all its misgivings, genuinely does want to keep the nation in the eurozone. Some reporting indicates that the Greek government led by Alexis Tsipras hasn’t even done much contingency planning for how a euro exit would work and was expecting Greek voters to accept the creditors’ plans in the July 5 referendum.

Compare the German view of Greece — that it may be time to walk away — with the view led by the other great power of Europe, France, that the eurozone must be unbreakable, part of a one-way march toward a politically and economically integrated continent.