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Trump, Grenell, and Pompeo in Conflict with Germany

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Trump, Grenell, and Pompeo in Conflict with Germany H-Diplo H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Series 2021-45: Swaggering Home: Trump, Grenell, and Pompeo in Conflict with Germany Discussion published by George Fujii on Tuesday, July 6, 2021 H-Diplo | ISSF Policy Series America and the World—The Effects of the Trump Presidency Swaggering Home: Trump, Grenell, and Pompeo in Conflict with Germany Essay by William Glenn Gray, Purdue University Published on 6 July 2021 | issforum.org Editors: Diane Labrosse and Joshua Rovner | Commissioning Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii https://issforum.org/to/ps2021-45 Everyone saw the photo of President Donald Trump and Chancellor Angela Merkel glaring at one another during the G-7 summit in Quebec in June 2018. Trump, seated, looked stubborn and impetuous; Merkel leaned forward across the table in stern disapproval. The photo went viral after being tweeted out by the Chancellor’s press chief, Steffen Seibert – an indication that Merkel herself may have approved this framing.[1] Fifteen months earlier, the Chancellor’s staff had publicized more amicable photos of the Chancellor’s visit to Washington, but the gaping rift between the U.S. and Germany was becoming impossible to gloss over.[2] The exceedingly poor personal chemistry between Trump and Merkel was, of course, one major source of tension. Even the President’s attempts at levity, such as when he famously tossed Starburst candies at the Chancellor, came across as sour and ill-tempered.[3] But a broader review of recent U.S.-German dust-ups suggests that the damage was compounded by the “swaggering” demeanor of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the brusque comportment of the U.S. ambassador to Berlin, Richard Grenell. In their own distinctive ways, all three men trampled on German sensibilities – and all of them put the U.S. on a course toward withdrawing from strategic assets in Germany, a profoundly destabilizing prospect for European security.[4] Trump’s election loss in November 2020 put an end to the free-fall in U.S.-German relations. Since the inauguration of President Joe Biden, no European country has seen a greater favorable swing in public opinion toward the United States.[5] But it would be naïve to anticipate a full restoration of German confidence in Washington or an enthusiastic embrace of what was once called, quite unironically, U.S. leadership. Chancellor Merkel has remained studiously aloof toward the Biden administration.[6] The specter of Trump is not fully banished so long as his hold over Republicans remains uniquely strong. More importantly, perhaps, the Trump administration exhibited an entire spectrum of troubling behavior, extending well beyond the President’s own ‘America First’ nationalism. Trump’s departure from the White House leaves behind a legacy not of isolationism, but Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Series 2021-45: Swaggering Home: Trump, Grenell, and Pompeo in Conflict with Germany. H-Diplo. 07-06-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/7893127/h-diploissf-policy-series-2021-45-swaggering-home-trump-grenell Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Diplo of crude efforts to undermine Germany’s governing coalition and push a multilateral agenda that is at odds with German values and interests. Personalities dominate media coverage, and this was particularly evident in reports on meetings between Trump and Merkel. Attention often focused on the gender dynamics: the President’s body language conveyed a lack of courtesy and respect. During their first White House meeting, he either ignored or did not hear Merkel’s request to shake hands.[7] Trump betrayed a consistent pattern of belittling women in positions of power, and Merkel was the single most influential female leader that he encountered during his four years in office.[8] During their phone calls, the President berated the Chancellor, reportedly calling her “stupid” while conveying a long litany of grievances. Although Merkel remained remarkably calm during these encounters, such revelations – coming late in Trump’s term in office – would surely have deepened the crisis in U.S.-German relations had he been re-elected.[9] Yet Trump’s snide treatment of Merkel reflected a deeper animus toward Germany. Europe’s strongest economy was a touchstone for President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, and Germans had responded rapturously to Obama as a candidate; he drew a crowd of more than 200,000 to the Victory Column in Berlin in July 2008. Disillusionment set in during Obama’s second term, as ongoing drone strikes and espionage allegations by whistleblower Edward Snowden touched off a furious response in Germany. Obama’s initiative for a Trans-Atlantic Investment and Partnership (TTIP) encountered a great deal of suspicion, and might have been derailed even under a Hillary Clinton presidency.[10] Nevertheless, within U.S. domestic politics Democrats have often foregrounded Germany as a positive role model – as seen in President Bill Clinton’s enthusiasm for German job apprenticeship programs.[11] For a president determined to reverse Obama’s line on every front, and to undo whatever Democratic administrations had done in the past, a rejection of warm relations with Berlin was only to be expected. Thanks in part to Trump’s colossal ignorance of history, the President did at least refrain from taking cheap shots about the Third Reich; baseless remarks about Germans as Nazis – taking no cognizance of Germany’s democratic flourishing since 1945 – were absent from Trump’s rhetoric. The hoary old specter of “Rapallo,” the suspicion that Germany and Russia might secretly conspire against the interests of the West, fell into abeyance. On the contrary, it was the humanitarian impulses of Merkel’s Germany that drew fire from Trump during his 2015-2016 election campaign. Trump declared in November 2015 that he was “no longer a fan” of Merkel; her improvised decision to welcome nearly one million refugees from Syria’s civil war was a “total disgrace.”[12] The following summer he claimed (falsely) that asylum seekers in Germany had driven crime “to levels that no one thought they would ever, ever, see.”[13] It was a convenient talking point for Trump’s base, highlighting his own determination to keep out refugees and to stop migration at (or before) the U.S. borders. As president, Trump continued to tweet out defamatory claims about German crime rates.[14] Germany also loomed large as a leading advocate for international action against climate change. “This Paris climate accord is not just some accord or the other,” Merkel remarked at a press conference in May 2017. “It is a central accord in defining the contours of globalization.”[15] The President, in turn, spoke of the Paris agreement as a “self-inflicted, major economic wound” that “handicaps the United States’ economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo/ISSF Policy Series 2021-45: Swaggering Home: Trump, Grenell, and Pompeo in Conflict with Germany. H-Diplo. 07-06-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/7893127/h-diploissf-policy-series-2021-45-swaggering-home-trump-grenell Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Diplo global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country’s expense.”[16] There was no scope for common ground here. After Trump formally announced U.S. plans to withdraw from the Paris accord, Merkel’s expressions of regret commanded the headlines, and the chancellor went on to make climate change the central topic of the G-20 summit she hosted in Hamburg in July 2017. Merkel orchestrated a united front against Trump in Hamburg; the summit’s final communiqué rebuked the U.S. position and declared the Paris agreement to be “irreversible.”[17] Long before Merkel emerged as the European ringleader of resistance to Trump’s policies, the President had enumerated his core grievances against Germany. There was trade, of course. In January 2017, the President-elect threatened to impose a 35% tariff on German vehicles – in apparent ignorance of the fact that U.S. workers in South Carolina were building BMWs exported to the world market.[18] Coverage of the Trump-Merkel encounters emphasized the chancellor’s hapless efforts to educate the President about the nature of global trade, and to explain why Germany’s gaping trade surplus vis-à-vis the United States need not be a source of concern.[19] Such reports implicitly backed the German standpoint. But there clearly was a larger challenge posed by German economic policies; tight German budgets at home fueled underinvestment and created structural imbalances with respect to most of the planet, including many EU countries.[20] Unfortunately, Trump’s ‘America First’ policies were singularly ill-suited to yield a change of course in Berlin. Instead, they reinforced European solidarity with Germany. When the Trump administration imposed a 25% tariff on steel and 10% on aluminum against the European Union in June 2018, it prompted retaliatory tariffs against iconic U.S. products such as bourbon, blue jeans, and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.[21] A more damaging row over airplanes continued into the end of the Trump years. These trade battles did little to advance American interests; they were simply a way for the President to lash out against countries that were deemed to be trading unfairly with the United States. Arguably Trump’s deepest conviction about Germany involved its unsatisfactory performance as a military ally. His twitter feed, preserved in the “Trump Twitter Archive,” contains frequent expressions of anger over Germany’s lagging defense spending. March 18, 2017: “Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!” December 8, 2018: “All we ask is that you pay your fair share of NATO.
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