Suspicious Minds: U.S.-German Relations in the Trump Era

Earlier this week, the Transatlantic Academy published its latest annual collaborative report, Suspicious Minds: U.S.-German Relations in the Trump Era. I edited the report as the Academy's program officer, and am one of 11 co-authors, along with executive director Stephen F. Szabo and our fellows Frédéric Bozo (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Stefan Fröhlich (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg), Wade Jacoby (Brigham Young University), Harold James (Princeton University), Michael Kimmage (Catholic University of America), Hans Kundnani (German Marshall Fund of the United States), Yascha Mounk (Harvard University), Mary Elise Sarotte (University of Southern California), and Heidi Tworek (University of British Columbia). 

The Academy works on a different topic related to transatlantic relations every year. The future of relations between the United States and Germany was a good fit for the final year of an institution which had been a German-American partnership. Despite the close cooperation between the Obama administration and German government under Angela Merkel, especially close after the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, we saw some long-standing and developing tensions in the relationship - revelations of National Security Agency surveillance badly damaged German trust in the United States including on the elite level, German distrust of U.S. corporate power has made the chances of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership highly questionable and is heightened in relation to digital giants like Google and Facebook in our digital age, Washington has complained about Germany's low defense spending, its unsustainable  policies towards to eurozone, and its huge trade surplus, Berlin joined the BRICS in abstaining on the Libya intervention resolution at the Security Council, and the sharp divide over Iraq - where Germany was far wiser - was not so long ago. 

Into this already more-fragile-than-it-seems situation comes the global catastrophe of Donald Trump as U.S. president. As we write, Trump "challenges four key assumptions on which German foreign policy has been based since the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949: the assumption that the United States’ posture toward Western Europe is predictable; the assumption that the United States sees Western Europe’s security as vital to its own strategic interests and would therefore come to Germany’s defense if needed; the assumption that the United States will defend and extend the liberal international trade and financial order; and the assumption that the German–American alliance is underwritten by such key political values as democracy, the rule of law, and human rights." Trump leaves U.S. allies (and especially security-exposed trade-dependent status-quo ones like Germany) with a nasty dilemma - "If they assume the best and embrace the status quo, they risk being caught unprepared. But if they assume the worst, act suspiciously, and formulate a radically new foreign policy strategy, they could hasten the demise of an alliance that has protected them for many decades. So far, Germany is taking a pragmatic wait-and-educate approach, trying to inform and advise a president unschooled in transatlantic issues and history and hoping that the lessons take."

Our recommendations for the Trump administration essentially boil down to continue to cooperate with the Europeans, don't change U.S. foreign policy too much, and don't try to destroy the European Union. The federal bureaucracy, state and local governments, and the private sector should try to maintain the benefits of transatlantic cooperation amidst the chaos at the top. Meanwhile, Germany does need to do more to provide for its own security, in its own interest, and we have some good suggestions on creative ways to do so including DARPA-style defense research that could yield long-term economic gains and hiring top-notch cybersecurity people away from the private sector with good salaries (for more detail on these ideas, see Heidi Tworek in War On the Rocks). It also needs to strengthen Europe by rebalancing the European economy, and play the long game and not give up on the United States. This Trump shall pass.

Give the report a read if you get a chance - I'm proud of it. The Transatlantic Academy is closing shop at the end of May, but we'll have a few more policy papers come out later this month, potentially in to June, and a few more events.