Faultline of Fear

The German government announced yesterday that it has asked the highest official CIA representative at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin to leave the country in coming days. This news that Germany is expelling the CIA chief from its territory is an unprecedented blow to bilateral relations. This type of public affront due to espionage used to only be made in countries with totalitarian, marginalized governments. Even Cold War enemies — for example, the USSR or its satellites — tried to find less traumatic and striking methods. This is the latest chapter, for the moment, of the escalating tensions caused by the revelations of American espionage in Germany. If it all started with Edward Snowden’s leaks of the National Security Agency’s activities, then the detention of two spies captured by the CIA within the “brother” secret service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (or BND) — the German foreign intelligence agency — has unleashed this catastrophe for international relations. Unfortunately, we are not faced with an isolated conflict, more or less serious, between Berlin and Washington. Twenty years ago, it would have been different. Limiting damage would have had maximum priority over any type of public confrontation or reprisal.

We are in a different era, and there are essential changes in the perception of these relationships — on this side of the Atlantic, in any case. It is significant that Merkel has felt forced to make such a drastic decision. She would have liked to have prevented it. But her political instincts have dictated the necessity of such a measure. German anti-Americanism, silenced for decades for fundamental reasons, returns to tread the halls of power. It has reemerged from the bastion of the neo-Nazis and the far left, where it had been cloistered since the Soviet siege of Berlin in 1949. Worse still, with the EU’s financial and economic crisis, German neutrality has also grown. This has become terribly evident in the polls following the invasion, occupation and annexation of Ukrainian territory by Russia. Opinion polls reflected some tributes to the Russian soul and sympathy for Putin, which did not decrease due to the brutality of the invasion and the violation of international law. There are not only the many economic interests, especially Russian contracts for medium-sized German companies, which determine this attitude, but also the resurgence of some sentimental ties with Russia, which German romanticism has always cherished.

The West’s anchorage in NATO and the EU is most questioned at the moment by the radical leftists of Die Linke, as pro-Russian and pro-Putin as the extreme right’s Le Pen in France. But the German soul shows signs of a return to feeling uncomfortable in its own skin. It sees a reason for getting angry, due above all to the fact that the Americans are the evil spies in this movie, while their own hostility toward U.S. espionage may possibly provide some proof to those who believe in the need to gather information on their own since the CIA and NSA leaks. Merkel has acted because she knows she is weak in public opinion. She knows that her Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel wants her job as soon as possible and is already considering a left-wing government, even if it has to include radical party Die Linke, whose hostility toward NATO is what has prevented previous alliances. With this now predominant anti-American hostility, Gabriel would not have to pay too much of a political price for changing alliances. He could have a majority to finish off Merkel tomorrow. But additionally, that dreaded fissure to NATO would open up in the heart of Europe. We would be even more vulnerable in a world where worries are multiplying.