This weekend, Donald Trump will attend the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Hamburg—his first visit to Germany as U.S. President. Given the relative quiet in the transatlantic drama since the NATO and G7 summits in May, this marks an opportunity to take stock of U.S.-German relations, at roughly the midpoint of Donald Trump’s first year in office. A charitable description of the relationship over the last six months might be: “from good, to strained.” Per today’s dispatch from Washington reporter Mike Allen, the powerful White House staffer Steve Bannon “loves, enables, and encourages the middle finger to NATO, and Germany in particular.” What is happening to our relationship and where will things go from here? How did we, within a generation, go from “Tear down this wall” to “The Germans are bad, very bad”? Will this weekend provide a reset opportunity? Regardless of the how and why, it is clear that President Donald Trump is causing a disorienting shift in the transatlantic dynamic in at least three interlocking areas: trade, international cooperation, and values–a shift that may be disrupting global politics with little offsetting gain.
First, the persistent trade imbalance between the two countries is, according to one observer, “driving a wedge between the two countries . . . more than differences over NATO, Russia or climate change.” Despite America’s economic might, President Trump and his team appear borderline obsessed with Germany’s success in making and exporting more products to the United States than the United States exports to Germany. The drumbeat from the White House since inauguration centers around an accusation that Germany’s large trade surplus stems from–in the words of senior advisor Peter Navarro–the Germans “exploiting other countries in the E.U. as well as the U.S.” through a “grossly undervalued currency.”
The tone from the American side of the Atlantic this year has been persistently aggressive. In January, shortly before his inauguration, Trump said to a Bild reporter about Germany: “it’s been very unfair to the U.S., it’s not a two-way street.” He added: “I would tell BMW if they think they’re gonna build a plant in Mexico and sell cars into the U.S. without a 35-percent tax, it’s not gonna happen.” During Chancellor Angela Merkel’s March 17 visit to Washington Trump breezily stated: “The negotiators for Germany have done a far better job than the negotiators for the United States. But hopefully we can even it out.” At his May meeting with EU leaders in Brussels, Trump reportedly said in a closed-door session that the Germans are “bad, very bad” — and that “we will stop . . . the millions of cars they are selling to the U.S.” Trump piled on a few days later via tweet: “We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO and military. Very bad for U.S. This will change.” Other senior administration officials (for example Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross who is leading the White House’s trade agenda) continue to echo these sentiments, as recently as last week. Meanwhile, German leaders across the political spectrum (from the center-right Angela Merkel, to her election opponent Martin Schulz) have defended their nation’s enviable commercial position by pointing out first of all the high quality of German products, as well as the fact that German policymakers simply lack the legal authority to control its shared European currency, or to negotiate international free-trade agreements.
To be fair, many economic experts agree with Trump’s core position that the German trade imbalance is uncomfortably high, and that Germany’s national government is not as powerless to address it as it claims to be. In April 2015, shortly before Trump announced his bid for the Oval Office, the decidedly unbombastic former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke wrote a piece entitled: “Germany’s Trade Surplus is a Problem,” in which he posited that the imbalance can pose a danger to the global economy, and laid out specific reforms that Germany could implement to moderate the risk. Since then, as Trump has elevated overhauling free-trade deals to the top of the U.S. agenda, his remarks and tweets have elicited a plethora of mainstream economic commentators in support of his basic observation (e.g. in Slate, Politico, Bloomberg, WSJ, and USA Today), if not his underlying reasoning. Other observers outside the U.S., including German economists (e.g. Wolfgang Münchau, Marcel Fratscher) and the Economist’s editorial page have made similar observations–essentially agreeing that Trump does have a point, notwithstanding a style more suitable for adversaries than allies. But one wonders why the White House favors such a hard-edged approach, especially now that it has stated that talks around TTIP (the ambitious free-trade deal between the U.S. and the E.U.) should resume.
Second, the fact that an American president is questioning international institutions that have helped preserve relative peace in Europe for 70 years, and have undergirded the creation of a democratic and unified Germany, is rattling the relationship. President Trump, for instance, disparaged the NATO alliance (calling it “obsolete” before walking that back), called into question America’s commitment to NATO’s core purpose of mutual defense (he reportedly excised reference to Article V from his NATO speech in May), and–in a move that only a conspiracy theorist could love–even gratuitously publicly pushed Dusko Markovic of Montenegro (NATO’s first new member since 2009) out of his way, only weeks after the U.S. Senate ratified that nation’s accession to NATO membership. Trump has also called into question the value of the European Union (calling himself “Mr. Brexit” and suggesting that other countries should also leave), and despite some recent positive movement on Russia, refuses to unequivocally condemn Russian aggression. While some may dismiss the president’s rhetoric about NATO, Brexit, and Russia as mere red meat to his base of supporters, the exit from the Paris Climate Accord in June shows that “America First” is more than merely words: it represents an American retreat from the idea that regional and global problems require international cooperation.
Finally, President Trump is walking away from the shared values that most bind the United States with Germany and other Western allies. In the 1950s, Germany and other aspiring democracies looked to post-war America as the role model after which to pattern themselves anew. The United States had demonstrated to the world that an enduring democracy is possible, based on representative government, free and fair elections, independent courts, respect for the rule of law, freedom of religion, and a free press. Trump, who has used his office to denigrate judges, lawmakers, and reporters by name, and who campaigned on keeping an entire religious group out of the country, appears willing to relegate America from a “shining city on a hill,” to just another nation willing to cut deals, depending on the circumstances. Chancellor Merkel’s congratulatory statement to Trump after his election win in November portended the current rift, as she offered to work closely with Trump “on the basis of [democratic] values.” Indeed, kind words from Washington toward foreign leaders nowadays are reserved more for strongmen like Putin, Erdogan, and Duterte–than Angela Merkel.
Where are we headed? In what areas will the United States and Germany continue to work as partners? Despite the bumpy ride, there is too much shared history and cooperation, and too many mutual interests, for things to unravel in the near term. At the same time though, this weekend’s Hamburg summit could bear witness to some further hardening of differences, as Merkel suggested last week.
If there is a silver lining to the new U.S.-German relationship, it may be that all of us (we Americans, and our friends overseas) are getting a real-life civics lesson about the scope of presidential power. At the same time, we will also have to pick up some of the slack. In the latest installment of the Anne Will show, Norbert Röttgen (the chairman of the German parliament’s foreign-affairs committee) opined: “America is not run by one person — there is also a political system of checks and balances, which appears to be working.” He added: “If we allow ourselves to be divided, if the Atlantic becomes a trench, then we Europeans become irrelevant. So we must become more active.” If the heads of state alone can’t or won’t preserve the transatlantic dynamic, then others–lawmakers, as well as leaders in business, academia, and civic life–will have to step up.