Politico | Washington farewells Angela Merkel
- German chancellor visits White House in last formal trip to Washington
- Merkel, who has dealt with four US presidents, steps down later this year
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Ryan Health on politico.com on July 15, 2021.
Don’t call it a farewell tour. But also don’t ask any hard questions about Russia or China.
Angela Merkel came to Washington this week – with a pit stop in Baltimore to pick up an honorary doctorate from Johns Hopkins University – as the undisputed political queen of Europe, and to firm up what she called the “framework conditions” for democracy.
Merkel stuck to her comfort zone of stabilising, general talk. “Democratic institutions have to be nurtured,” she said accepting her Doctor of Humane Letters. “If these institutions are under permanent attack and put into question, democracy will not work.”
For 36 years, Merkel lived under the Soviet-aligned East German regime, and over 16 years as Chancellor of Germany, she attended more than 100 summits, weathered four US presidents, beat a global financial crisis, opened her country's doors to more than a million refugees in the summer of 2015, and survived Brexit.
If there’s a Merkel Doctrine, it’s based on survival: keep standing and compromising, because the alternative is worse.
“She's a great friend, a personal friend, and a friend of the United States,” Biden said as Merkel arrived in the Oval Office on Thursday for a bilateral meeting that lasted two hours. “She knows the Oval Office as well as I do,” he added later at a joint press conference.
White House officials speak about Merkel with reverence – the sort of florid praise reserved for an icon who is the longest-serving leader in Nato, the G7 and the EU. Merkel first joined the German cabinet in 1991, with the reunification of Germany, a decade before Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and when some of his top foreign policy advisers were still in middle school.
Speaking at her final White House press conference before leaving office September 26, Merkel acknowledged that her usual survival strategy would not be enough for the transatlantic alliance to succeed in the future.
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Left unsaid: it will be up to her successor to create those solutions.
While US-German relations have returned to a steady state in 2021, there’s significant disagreement in the nuts and bolts of policy.
There’s broad agreement that the two countries should aim for strong democratic institutions, net-zero carbon emissions, an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, and joint policies on Russia and China – but no plan on how to get there.
On Thursday, Merkel didn’t get the answer she wanted on even her most fundamental question: would the Biden administration lift the travel ban on Europeans entering the United States in place since March 2020? In fact, she didn’t get any answer at all. Biden told reporters he’d deliver an answer “in coming days”.
In the same vein, Biden didn’t get the answer he wanted on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline he opposes between Russia and Germany.
Merkel has doggedly supported construction of the pipeline over strong opposition from both Washington and Brussels, but left open the option of sanctions against Russia if it acts against Ukraine’s territorial integrity or stops selling gas via Ukraine’s pipelines. “Our idea is and remains that Ukraine remain a transit country for natural gas, and Ukraine retains the right to territorial integrity,” Merkel told reporters.
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Senator Marco Rubio led calls by Republicans on Thursday for Biden to step up pressure on Merkel, given the pipeline is set to open as soon as August. Biden in May pulled back from imposing sanctions on the company constructing the pipeline.
A senior administration official defended the move Wednesday as giving “diplomatic space” for Washington and Berlin to minimise the pipeline’s negative impacts. Running under the Baltic Sea, the pipeline bypasses Ukraine, which depends on fees from Russian gas transiting across its territory to fund its defence and other public services.
Germany has its own misgivings about US policy. After years of undershooting a shared Nato target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence, two recent US moves have allowed Germany to put Washington on the back foot in defence discussions.
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At Johns Hopkins University, Merkel urged her audience to “remain vigilant” against Covid-19 despite the pandemic “wearing us down.”
In the absence of binding federal US climate targets or a carbon market, Merkel suggested American innovation would be critical in tackling climate change, predicting “a profound transformation for the way we live, which doesn’t work without innovation”.
But Merkel admitted she may struggle with her own upcoming profound transformation: to private citizen.
Asked by Ronald Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University, about her plans for life after office, Merkel said: “I don’t know. I’m so used to what I do now. I’m sort of afraid no one will want to see me any more”.
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