Alone, Not Lonely

The American relationship with Germany is not as bad as many people think. What is bad is Berlin’s foreign policy.

The problem is not the German-American relationship, as many people wrongly believe. On the contrary, it’s better today than it was in Genscher’s or Schroeder’s time. In any case, neither of them earned the Medal of Freedom, the highest distinction with which Obama honored the Chancellor on Tuesday, June 7. The real problem is the new German foreign policy, a brand new jumble of unilateralism and isolationism, things for which the Germans usually like to criticize the United States. Oh, the irony.

There were times, and they weren’t too long ago, when distrust and even rage ruled on the American side. In the years of the eastern policy, Henry Kissinger didn’t trust the German chief negotiator Egon Bahr as far as he could spit; the little term “national neutralism” was going around. In Washington, Hans-Dietrich Genscher was considered a “slippery man,” an acrobat between two worlds who wanted Moscow and East Berlin to come together against America and release the tension between their own countries.

The problem is a German strategy that isn’t a strategy.

The absolute lowest point was before the Iraq War, when Ära Schröder formed an anti-American alliance with France and Russia. ”I was shocked and furious,”* Bush writes in his 2010 memoir Decision Points. Schröder “betrayed his trust.” After that “a constructive relationship became difficult.”* That’s the diplomatic paraphrase for the long-term iciness between the White House and the chancellorship which has, only since the election of Angela Merkel, began to melt.

In contrast, the relationship between Obama and Merkel (“a good friend”) is one of downright coziness and warmth. Obama calls her “one of my closest global partners.” The two call each other regularly on the phone. They don’t say “kiss, kiss”; instead Obama has given her the Presidential Medal of Freedom and an invite to the state dinner, to which only Chinese, Indian and Mexican guests had previously been invited.

No, the relationship between the capitals is not the problem, certainly not in comparison to earlier knots in the relationship. The problem is a German strategy that isn’t a strategy — unless the Germans want to idealize self-isolation as a “foreign policy.” The defamatory word “untrustworthy,” which is going through commentaries, is inaccurate because no chancellor has anchored the national interests entirely in the West — not even Adenauer. When the Social Democratic Party of Germany mocked him with the name “the Chancellor of the Allies,” he bolted straight to Moscow to negotiate a sort of “reassurance,” just like Bismarck and Stresemann before him and Brandt and his successors after him.

This strategic calculation was the opposite of the thoughtless reflexes that amaze our friends today: the solo efforts that, unlike those under Wilhelm II, don’t embody a thirst for glory or power, but rather an “aloneness” of self-isolation. Inwardly, these efforts are symbolized by a lightning-fast nuclear phaseout. Our European neighbors haven’t yet reconciled with the nuclear phaseout, but as the Parisian Energy Secretary rightly criticized, it will affect all of Europe.

The German “Without Us” mentality in Libya is the outward equivalent. Who needs to isolate Germany if it is already isolating itself? We accept the sufficiently debated question of who is actually right. Politics are always about being proven right, and political systems can’t function properly when governments fixate on the “all against one” principle from the start or ally with the wrong people (Moscow and Beijing). “Never alone” has been the highest precept of German politics since the days of Bismarck; Merkel and Westerwelle are the first politicians since 1945 who have rejected it without good cause.

Even Merkel likes to be right when she demands harsh reforms as a price for the financial support that Germany gave during the Euro crisis. This statement, however, also applies for the E.U.: whoever wants to be proven right has to forge coalitions. To show a whip and then pay is not a textbook example of good statesmanship, at least not on the part of an economic superpower that at the same time plays a key role in the alliance — or used to play one. No wonder Sarkozy, the solo artist, was immediately sucked into the vacuum that Merkel left behind for him.

That isn’t the chancellor who we knew after her election in 2005, who instinctively understood that Schröder had left behind a windswept House in terms of foreign policy, a policy that smoothed out the Atlantic rifts and kept a distance from Putin, a policy that patiently and neatly put together majorities, a policy that played out in accordance with the motto “gain brownie points through trust.” Germany is now acting like a panicked republic that doesn’t know foreign policy anymore and only knows its moods, which it deems necessary to follow in elections that end up being lost despite the general mood, or perhaps because of it.

To interpret the new policy as old nationalism is misleading. It is a “defensive nationalism” under a flag that reads “Leave us alone.” That’s not a “great strategy,” but a very small one not befitting of a great land. The fact that power demands responsibility is exactly what Obama recently tried to instill in the chancellor with pomp and ceremony. The nice thing about the strategy is the fact that whoever isolates themselves can come out of isolation and protect against the loss of significance.

*Editor’s note: These quotes, while accurately translated, cannot be verified.