LibriumArcana.Games

Chancellor Angela Merkel got on the phone with President Barack Obama with a message that was coldly blunt: We cannot go on like this.

Her government had just sent the CIA chief packing after German intelligence uncovered a spy in its own ranks. It was the second big shock to the relationship after the Edward Snowden document dump disclosed that the U.S. had been spying on her cell phone. German media was filled with daily pronouncements about the worst rupture in the U.S.-German alliance since the Iraq War.

In the call last July, according to U.S. and German officials, Merkel made clear to Obama the intense pressure she was under at home to respond to what many Germans saw as unconscionable provocations. She and Obama agreed that their respective chiefs of staff must meet immediately — in Berlin, not Washington. This last point was important for Merkel, since Germans well know the more familiar custom is for them to cross the Atlantic to come calling on Americans.

That was how Obama’s trusted retainer, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, found himself in the office of Peter Altmaier, her chief of staff and longtime confidant, for a four-hour meeting.

This weekend Obama is in Germany for a Merkel-hosted gathering of the G7 nations in Bavaria, an event which by outward appearances is intended partly as a culmination of a yearlong effort by Merkel and Obama to rehabilitate a badly damaged relationship.

But the public narrative obscures a complicated reality. Merkel had fed a public line that she was outraged and personally offended over the American surveillance. The reality, according to people who have spoken directly with her, is that she was less angry than mystified by what seemed to her the stupidity of it all. She thought it seemed sadly representative of Obama’s general approach to the world — distressingly small-minded, too willing to cede American moral high ground in the name of a supposed pragmatism that was in fact more like amateurism.

Obama, for his part, fed a public line that he was himself surprised and concerned by the spying on Merkel. The reality, according to administration officials, is that he regarded the public uproar as naive among people who were genuinely mad and disingenuous among those merely pretending to be — since even allies snoop on each other, that’s just the way of the world, embarrassing as it was to get caught.

The one belief shared by both of them is that when it comes to dealings between national leaders, matters of personal pique are largely beside the point.

Indeed, the Obama-Merkel relationship — more than six years since he came to power and nearly a decade since she did — stands as a rebuke to those who emphasize personal rapport and trust between leaders as an essential variable in foreign relations. In this case, it is mutual interest far more than mutual chemistry that is shaping the power dynamics playing out at the Elmau summit.

Well before last year’s uproar, Obama and Merkel fashioned an exterior relationship that is cordial and appreciative, but privately freighted by a weak personal connection and occasional exasperation.

At the same time, this distance has not prevented the resumption of effective working relationships between the two countries, fuelled in part by regular phone calls between McDonough and Altmaier, which has become a key channel between the White House and the Chancellery on spying, the Iran nuclear talks and other hard cases.

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 05: The Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building that houses the Office of Personnel Management headquarters is shown June 5, 2015 in Washington, DC. U.S. investigators have said that at least four million current and former federal employees might have had their personal information stolen by Chinese hackers. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)


For Obama administration officials, the rapprochement is accentuated by a sense that Germans need to accept already that they need American intelligence, and that they’re going to have to learn to live with being in a subservient position. Officials in Berlin say that as long as Washington engages with them more closely, they can live with this dynamic: After all the U.S. spends about ten times as much per capita on intelligence, meaning that Germany can’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with America.

Obama, who has a crowded national security agenda, seemingly has been happy to contract out large parts of the difficult job of managing Vladimir Putin to Merkel, who has kept open lines to the Russian autocrat.

Obama, U.S. officials say, plans to press Merkel at the G7 meeting to continue to push a tough line on economic sanctions against Russia as punishment for its land grab in Ukraine. Merkel is facing growing pressure in Germany and around Europe for a gradual lifting of these sanctions, which hit some German businesses nearly as hard as they squeeze Moscow, but she is publicly committed to keeping them in place at least through the end of the year.

Though far from personally close, Obama and the chancellor have a lot of character traits in common that have always eased contacts, say people close to the American president. They’re both analytic, pragmatic and drama-averse people. They speak to each other at length, in English, with Merkel only occasionally turning to her translator when she can’t find a word. Calls and in meetings, say people who’ve been in them, feel like they’re trying to one-up each other on who spent more time with the briefing book.

“Almost on an instinctual basis, when there’s some kind of burning issue, the president will say, ‘I need to speak to Merkel’,” said a senior Obama administration official. “She has become a kind of go-to counterpart.”

Merkel long ago gave up trying to warm up to Obama. She was wary of his charisma, but thought at first that they’d be able to relate as two outsiders who rose to the top of political power. In private, Merkel’s a lot warmer than her public persona. Her impersonations are legendary, including a Putin that has a penguin walk to go along with his voice, though she hasn’t done any of them for Obama or unveiled one of the president himself that people who’ve spent a lot of time with her have seen. And she’s been struck by how the president doesn’t warm up himself.

Four years ago, when Obama brought Merkel to the White House to give her the Medal of Freedom, they spent the evening at dinner with their spouses. The conversation was fine, but still stilted enough that Michelle Obama, who rarely gets involved in international politics, pulled her aside later: “He really treasures you, Angela,” she’d later recall the first lady saying.

There are concerns on both sides of the Atlantic that Obama’s gone too much toward a more typical German-style multilateralism that recoils at military force and is disengaged from a Europe increasingly in turmoil; and that Merkel and Germany, still haunted by its wartime history and unwilling to invest in its threadbare armed forces, aren’t ready for the role she’s sometimes referred to in private as being the leader of “the United States of Europe.”

Another provocation from Putin could be a breaking point.

“Germany doesn’t have the strength, politically or militarily, or the self-confidence to really carry on a strategic approach to Russia without the United States by its side,” said John Kornblum, an American ambassador to Germany under Bill Clinton who still lives and works in Berlin. “At a certain point, the Russians are going to do something really awful and the Germans are not going to know what to do — and the Americans are going to stand there on the sidelines, not having built up a position.”

Or, go assessments not quite that dire, the administrations in Washington and Berlin are fooling themselves that the collaboration has actually meant all that much. “The German view is now that the relationship with the administration and the White House is better,” said Kurt Volker, a former National Security Council staffer and American ambassador to NATO who stays in close touch with Germans. “But are we accomplishing things, or are we just talking to each other?”

In the year and a half Obama has left and as Merkel nears the back end of what some speculate will be her own last term, up at the end of 2017, they have a lot they’re going to try to do together beyond Ukraine and Iran: the international climate deal, new trade agreements, arguments over the eurozone that Merkel still thinks Obama should stop trying to mess around in, just to name a few.

“The real story,” said Kornblum, “is not so much the two of them get along, but whether two such distant personalities can bring the Western world into a new place where it’s supposed to be.”