Merkel Must Teach Obama Some Manners

What’s next? With unlimited control-freak mania, the National Security Agency spied on Angela Merkel along with dozens of other European heads of state — apparently over many years and with the connivance and knowledge of the U.S. president, who regularly received the reports and became privy to the extent of the details that were being vacuumed up from Merkel’s favorite cell phone.

America eavesdropped not only on the conversations of its enemies, but on those of its friends and allies as well. Smart alecks — others might call them the cynical and fatalistic — may contend that’s all old hat in the world of power interests. But “so what” surely can’t be a serious reaction.

The political and diplomatic sphere is highly emotional, as we Germans and Europeans are now discovering. The tone is very strident; it borders on the unbearable.

Even Angela Merkel herself, who for the purposes of her political campaign as well as out of loyalty to the United States, approached the scandal carefully and gingerly, finally had to resort to unusually blunt language with Obama.

Hand in Hand with Hollande

That she now wants to head up a protest movement against the West allied with French President Hollande, whose U.S. skepticism virtually seeps from every pore, and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is worth noting.

Superpower America has to learn to treat its well-meaning partners more fairly and decently. A U.N. resolution is just the thing that would teach the U.S. a needed lesson!

In fact, this all carries naïve overtones with traces of bigotry as the intelligence agencies of all the players here go their merry ways doing the same as always. The Germans may operate in a different way, but the bottom line is the BND intelligence agency is nevertheless the offspring of the United States.

In a certain way, the Germans are still an American product, which is why Merkel’s Marianne*-like “To the barricades!” gesture is intended to show how strong Germany is compared to its big brother. Merkel has shrewdly elevated herself to the status of global warning signal: “Just a minute, Mr. Obama, we’re somebody, too!”

Nobody on the global stage can dispute this common-sense conclusion. Diplomacy is a question of discretion, intelligence agencies or no intelligence agencies.

That Obama thus far has reacted modestly to all the signals cannot then be chalked up to simple ignorance. Obama can’t treat Merkel and Hollande as supplicants. Of course, saving face is important to all sides, as is the political symbolism.

We’ll see whether Western criticism of the United States gains momentum and whether Merkel adds to the anti-American sentiment. That would be particularly tragic.

*Translator’s note: Marianne is the allegorical figure representing France depicted by artist Eugène Delacroix in his painting “Liberty leading the people.”