One Casualty of Eavesdropping on Merkel: A Warm Rapport

Listening Post: One Casualty of Eavesdropping on Merkel: A Warm Rapport

 

One Eavesdropping Casualty: Leaders’ Warm Rapport

By MARK LANDLER

For President Obama, the erosion of his relationship with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is, perhaps, the most painful cost of the phone-tapping episode.

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Michael Sohn/Associated Press

President Obama and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, in Berlin in June. Spying revelations have angered Ms. Merkel.

By MARK LANDLER

Published: November 1, 2013

WASHINGTON — At one level, the National Security Agency’s surveillance of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is a highly technical story of digital-age espionage, in which the spying is done by entering codes into a distant mainframe instead of by hiding bugs in a politician’s boudoir.

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At another, though, it is a deeply personal tale of two leaders who had struck up a rapport that went beyond the pleasantries uttered at Group of 8 meetings, and now have to grapple with the awkward reality that one of them, unwittingly he says, was eavesdropping on the other.

For President Obama, who has made few close friends in the rarefied club of world leaders, the collateral damage the N.S.A. surveillance has inflicted on his relationship with Ms. Merkel is a less tangible, but perhaps more painful, cost of the episode.

Given the cool discipline of both, it is not likely that they will give full vent to their feelings. A senior American official said the White House would like “to compartmentalize these issues, and continue to move forward on other aspects of our bilateral relationship.”

But Ms. Merkel, declaring last week that “spying between friends is simply unacceptable,” said there had been a breach of trust that would have to be repaired. That may be hard, given how angry she is said to be, according to those who know her. A permanent chill would undoubtedly dismay Mr. Obama, for whom Ms. Merkel had become a sort of BFF in Europe.

Theirs is not a relationship of backslapping or bonhomie. When Mr. Obama and Ms. Merkel talk on the phone, aides say, they dispense with small talk and pick up where they left off in previous calls, speaking in English and dissecting the issue at hand with a matter-of-fact logic that comes naturally to a former law professor and a physicist.

It is also a relationship that had cooled off, even before the latest revelations, over issues like how to respond to Syria’s use of chemical weapons and how much Germany should do to save the European currency union from fracturing. On Wednesday, in an ill-timed report, the Treasury Department criticized Germany for relying too much on exports for growth, saying its policies were hurting the rest of Europe.

“The phone taps came at the end of a long period of low-level friction,” said John C. Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany who works as an investment banker and business consultant in Berlin. “Merkel is now terribly embarrassed, and she, like most of us, wonders if anyone is minding the store in Washington.”

One can imagine the Arctic temperature of the call that Mr. Obama took on Oct. 23, when Ms. Merkel confronted him with a report in the newsmagazine Der Spiegel that the N.S.A. had been monitoring her cellphone. “Not easy,” said a senior aide to Mr. Obama, stating the obvious.

It is easy to overstate the role of personal ties in big-power relationships, but White House officials insist that Mr. Obama’s kinship with Ms. Merkel has been special. In addition to their analytical styles, both are outsiders in their countries: an African-American from Hawaii, and a woman who grew up in East Germany and rose to power in a conservative party.

After other world leaders had left a Group of 8 meeting in Camp David last year, Mr. Obama invited Ms. Merkel to stay for a sunset chat about the mounting pressure on Germany, not least from him, to help Greece with an American-style bailout and fiscal stimulus program.

A year earlier, Mr. Obama awarded the chancellor the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At a state dinner in the Rose Garden, Ms. Merkel was served apple strudel and serenaded by James Taylor, who sang — what else? — “You’ve Got a Friend.”

Despite all that, Ms. Merkel rebuffed Mr. Obama’s entreaties to do more to bail out Greece. That says less about the quality of their relationship than about her own political calculations: She was running for re-election with a German public deeply hostile to the idea that it should be on the hook for the financial folly of the Greeks.

For Mr. Obama, there is a silver lining in that experience. It shows that Ms. Merkel is, above all, a pragmatist — a master tactician, in fact, who for the second time will preside over a coalition with her chief opponents, the Social Democratic Party. Just as she did not succumb to American pressure during the European crisis, she is not about to allow personal grievances to hinder projects that she considers high priorities.

Topping that list is the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, an ambitious pact between the United States and the European Union that some analysts estimate could be worth nearly $750 a year to an average household in Europe. Ms. Merkel has kept a lid on public criticism of the Obama administration by government officials in large part to prevent those negotiations from being derailed. “They’re certainly not going to let that be torpedoed,” said Jackson Janes, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “Both of them are in their final terms, and I think they are focused on their legacies.”

None of this is to say that Mr. Obama does not have to do some serious fence-mending in Berlin. German news media coverage of the N.S.A.'s surveillance, Mr. Kornblum said, was approaching the level of vitriol before the Iraq war. The cover of the current issue of the newsmagazine Stern has an unflattering illustration of Mr. Obama over the headline, “The Spy.”

Administration officials said the president would probably spend more time in Europe next year than he usually does. With a nuclear security summit meeting in the Netherlands, a Group of 8 meeting in Russia, and a NATO summit meeting in Britain, he will have several opportunities.

For now, though, his relationship with Ms. Merkel may be limited to formal encounters at those meetings. The days of apple strudel and “You’ve Got a Friend” in the Rose Garden seem a long time ago.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
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