The Moment Merkel Realized Trump Changes Everything for Germany
Merkel was asleep in her government plane in June when Donald Trump went back on his word, leaving the German chancellor stunned.
(Bloomberg) --
For Angela Merkel, the wakeup call came in the middle of the night.
The German chancellor was asleep in her government plane somewhere over the Atlantic in June last year when Donald Trump scuttled the fragile settlement she’d built with other Group of Seven leaders in Canada, according to a person familiar with the events.
Before turning in for the night, she’d been in a buoyant mood due to the concessions she secured from the U.S. president for a common statement on trade. When he went back on his word, she was stunned.
Merkel has faced a barrage of attacks since Trump took office -- over German luxury cars, defense spending, Iran, Russian gas, and doing business with China’s Huawei Technologies Co. But it was the rupture after last June’s G-7 meeting that made up her mind: Trump is not a partner that Germany can rely on.
Almost 12 months on, the situation has only gotten worse. There’s a mix of anguish and frustration in Berlin and officials are asking themselves whether the relationship has already crossed the point of no return.
Even if Trump loses in 2020, they say the trust that underpinned the transatlantic friendship for seven decades may be gone for good. Germany has already started building new alliances that will safeguard its interests in a world where the U.S. won’t. And some of them are not to Washington’s liking.
“We have to take our destiny much more into our own hands in the future if we want to be strong,” Merkel told a political rally on Friday in Munich.
Trump’s Beef
When the chancellor visits the U.S. Thursday, she’ll give a commencement speech at Harvard University, but she won’t bother visiting the White House as she has the past two years.
U.S. officials insist that Trump respects Merkel. But they also give a sense of the misunderstanding at the heart of their relationship.
Trump’s main beef with Merkel is Germany’s trade surplus, one senior administration official said. But the U.S. administration has little patience with the fact that Germany, like all other European Union members, has handed control of trade negotiations to Brussels. Trump argues that Germany should be able to use its leverage as Europe’s largest economy to sway the talks.
In private meetings, the president has implored Merkel to engage personally in trade talks, the official said. But the chancellor insists he has to speak to the European Commission.
The official insists there is no animosity, but nor is there any rapport. The Germans are not warm people, he says.
“The president has his opinions, and I have mine,” Merkel said in an interview with CNN aired Tuesday. “Very often we also find common ground. If not, then we have to keep on talking and negotiating."
It’s a far cry from Barack Obama, or even George W. Bush. She embraced Obama when he visited the chancellery in April and in 2007 she was delighted to visit Bush’s Texas ranch.
White House Tour
It’s not that Trump and Merkel haven’t tried.
On her second visit to the Trump White House in April 2018, the president gave Merkel a tour of the residence, including the Lincoln Bedroom, as he sought to impress her.
But Trump acts as if his charm offensives can work even when he’s attacking Germany on policy issues. For Merkel, it all adds up and the result is a president she can’t trust.
Weeks after that White House visit, he claimed, -- falsely -- that crime in Germany was “way up” because of Merkel’s immigration policy. A month later he labeled her a “captive of Russia” for planning a new gas link. In December, U.S. officials threatened to shut Germany out of shared intelligence networks if Huawei was allowed to supply equipment for the country’s fifth-generation data networks.
Merkel’s Fears
All this is part of a broader assault on the multilateral world order that has kept Germany safe and made it rich. As Trump steps up his attacks, Merkel’s warnings about the dangers that poses are growing darker.
After that last White House visit, the chancellor began to ruminate on the Thirty Years War which devastated Europe in the 17th century. Then, as now, Europe had enjoyed some 70 years of stability. And then, as now, leaders began to disregard the constraints that underpinned that peace.
“In one fell swoop, the whole order went in the trash,” Merkel said at a religious conference a few days after returning from Washington.
That’s increasingly how decision-makers in Germany view the transatlantic relationship. Even as they muddle through in areas where cooperation is possible, the toughest issues are getting tougher.
Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran has left German officials struggling to hold together the accord that restricted the regime’s ability to produce weapons-grade uranium after the U.S. pulled out. German officials are bewildered at what they see as a lack of strategic direction.
With German businesses angry at being forced to bow to threats from the White House, one senior official said Iran could be the issue that triggers a broader rupture between the U.S. and Germany.
New Ties to Russia
As Trump turns the screws, he’s forcing Germany into the arms of rival powers like China and Russia, a move that serves in turn to deepen the frustration in Washington.
Perhaps the most significant example is the Nord Stream 2 pipeline which will pump 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas a year under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany.
Officials in Merkel’s chancellery were taken aback in February at coordinated American diplomatic maneuvers to scuttle the project and now the U.S. is threatening sanctions against companies involved.
“We always have had powers that were trying to change the rules of the game,” Niels Annen, Germany’s deputy foreign minister, told a conference in Berlin this month. “What is new is the country that was really at the beginning, that was at the creation of that set of rules, is now trying to question this.”
Trump’s Envoy
At the center of the Trump diplomacy in Berlin is Ambassador Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist and one-time Fox News contributor with a penchant for lighting political brush fires and a direct line to the president. Grenell’s sharp elbows might be a deliberate tactic for Trump, but at least in the short term, they damage his cause.
Trump has potential allies in Berlin who agree that Germany should raise defense spending and take a harder line on Russia. But Grenell’s scorched-earth approach is alienating the German public and making it difficult for them to offer him support, according to several officials.
“The way in which at least the American administration makes policy in general at the moment, with a lot of sanctions, with the fact that international agreements are scrapped, is not a good way to cooperate,” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who replaced Merkel as leader of the governing Christian Democrats last year, told Bloomberg Television in Davos, Switzerland, in January.
And so Merkel is edging toward a world in which Germany no longer relies on the U.S. In November last year she raised the prospect of a European army. Merkel called Trump’s bluff over Huawei, refusing to ban the company from German networks. And the Russian gas pipeline is going ahead.
But it’s not a world that Merkel has sought and it’s not one that she welcomes.
When she realized it would fall to her to build it on that flight back from Quebec she was shocked. She avoided the reporters on her plane until they landed again in Berlin. Then she got straight into her car, and drove off.
--With assistance from Arne Delfs, Nick Wadhams and Zoe Schneeweiss.
To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Donahue in Berlin at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Ben Sills at bsills@bloomberg.net, Zoe Schneeweiss
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