In 2008, after the outbreak of the Russian war with Georgia, I traveled with her to Tbilisi to meet the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili. Ms. Merkel had just come from a meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, and she briefed journalists in the plane about how she saw the crisis. What she said remains confidential, but she seemed to feel those two men didn’t have their emotions under control, and were therefore leading their countries into disaster.

The female chancellor as a refuge of cold reason was also a leitmotif of the euro crisis. Consider some of her male European peers at the time: Silvio Berlusconi, who can’t get his libido under control; the mercurial Nicolas Sarkozy; the cast of oscillating Central European populists, like Viktor Orban of Hungary.

Or take the Greek prime minister George A. Papandreou, who, after reaching a refinancing agreement with international partners, suddenly called for a national referendum on his work; after chaos ensued, he had to step down. Ms. Merkel would have never made such a hot-headed mistake.

Unlike some other leading politicians, Ms. Merkel is able to check her ego at the door when she enters one of the endless negotiations at European summits. “She just focuses on the issues at hand and is not as vain as some other heads of states and governments,” said Silke Mülherr, a colleague of mine at Die Welt who covered European politics in Brussels.

Let the alpha males fight it out, then take advantage of the holes they dug up for themselves — that’s one of Merkel’s tactics.

And of course it helps that they always underestimate the “little girl,” as former Chancellor Helmut Kohl once called her. That was before the “little girl” drove him from power in the Christian Democratic Union.

Part of what makes Ms. Merkel effective, both as a conservative leader and as a role model, is that she doesn’t stress women’s issues.