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Memoirs of Angela Merkel no Freedom. But it can also be called No regrets. In her newly published book, the former German chancellor looks back on her 16 years in power and argues that, all things considered, she did everything right.
It will be interesting to see if Barack Obama is similarly defensive when he publishes the next volume of his memoirs. After all, the international legacy of the years of Obama and Merkel looks more and more doubtful as time goes on.
From 2008 to 2016, Merkel and Obama were the two most influential politicians in the Western world. They got along well – which is not surprising, because their personalities were similar. They were both outsiders: the first female chancellor of Germany and the first black president of the United States. They both grew up far from the metropolis, in East Germany and Hawaii, respectively.
Both Merkel and Obama are self-confident, highly educated, intelligent and cautious individuals by temperament. These qualities made them cautious, educated liberals. (I plead guilty.) But in retrospect, their meticulous rationalism made them ill-equipped to deal with ruthless strongmen like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Both Merkel and Obama still have huge fan bases, many of whom look back nostalgically on their era as a period of stability and reasonable government. So it was, in many ways.
But it is increasingly clear that the decisions made by the two leaders – or often the decisions they did not make – have had a detrimental effect, when delayed, on global stability. We are now witnessing major wars in Europe and the Middle East and a sharp rise in tensions in East Asia. Some of today’s issues are related to mistakes made during the 2012-2016 reporting period.
Merkel did not like or trust Putin. But she calmed him down. The mistakes made by the former chancellor, especially after the illegal annexation of Crimea and the attack on Donbass in 2014, were disassembled in numerous reviews of her book. Her desire to avoid a broad European war involved Merkel in the futile “Minsk process” of negotiations between Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France. Her reluctance to stand up to Putin also reflected her country’s economic interests — specifically, German industry’s thirst for cheap Russian gas.
Instead of reversing the mistakes made by the German chancellor, Obama reinforced them. During his second term, he made three critical foreign policy mistakes. Together, they sent a message of weakness that contributed to the mess we are in today.
Obama’s first mistake was failing to draw his own red line on Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Promising to take military action and then backing down in the face of opposition in Congress — and his own personal misgivings — looked weak. The decision can be easily justified. But it still resonated around the world.
Trump’s camp will add Obama’s decision to sign a deal limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program to its indictment of his Middle East policies. But this is a much less obvious mistake than the decision not to respect the chemical weapons red line.
The reason the Syrian decision mattered so much was because it was part of a pattern. Obama’s second mistake was that China did not respond to China’s construction of military bases on the artificial islands it created in the South China Sea. In 2015, President Xi clearly promised not to militarize the South China Sea in a statement made at the White House. In fact, it already was is happening. Obama’s passive response gave the impression that the authoritarian leader had once again thrown sand in his face — and he got away with it.
The third mistake is Ukraine’s failure to rearm in response to Russian aggression. There are people in Berlin and Washington who claim that it was Merkel who initiated this policy. If that’s true, Obama was wrong to listen.
But it also seems likely that the natural caution of Merkel and Obama reinforced each other. Undoubtedly, there were people in Obama’s entourage who were quietly alarmed by his timid response to the annexation of Crimea. One later complained to me about America’s reluctance to take actions that Putin might find provocative, lamenting, “We were afraid of our own shadows.” President Joe Biden also concluded that Obama’s response to the 2014 attack on Ukraine was too weak. There is Biden is quoted as they say: “We screwed up. Barak never took Putin seriously.”
Obama and Merkel could no doubt retort that their critics are perfectly intelligent. Some of them, including Biden, agreed with many of their decisions at the time. Any government involves difficult trade-offs, and it is far easier to maintain a generally satisfactory status quo than to demand sacrifices to repel a threat that may never materialize.
Merkel holds a PhD in quantum chemistry. Obama was a law professor. Their training told them to weigh the evidence and avoid rash decisions. Unfortunately, international politics is not like a legal seminar or laboratory, but a playground in difficult conditions. Playground bullies tend to become more obnoxious and aggressive until someone finally stands up to them.
