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The memoirs of Angela Merkel are called Freedom. But it could also be titled No regrets. In her recently published book, the former German chancellor looks back on her 16 years in power and claims that, all things considered, she was right.
It will be interesting to see if Barack Obama is similarly defensive when he publishes the next volume of his memoirs. Because the international legacy of the Obama and Merkel years looks more and more questionable with time.
From 2008 to 2016, Merkel and Obama were the two most powerful politicians in the Western world. They got along well – which is not surprising, because they were similar characters. Both were outsiders: the first female chancellor of Germany and the first black president of the USA. Both grew up far from the metropolis, in East Germany and Hawaii, respectively.
Both Merkel and Obama are self-confident, highly educated, intellectual and cautious in temperament. These are the qualities that have endeared them to cautious, educated liberals. (I plead guilty.) But, in retrospect, their careful rationalism made them ill-equipped to deal with ruthlessly powerful leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Both Merkel and Obama still have large fan bases, many of whom look back nostalgically to their era as a period of stability and sound government. And 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, if delayed, impact 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 problems stem from mistakes made in the crucial period from 2012 to 2016.
Merkel did not like or trust Putin. But still she calmed him down. The mistakes made by the former chancellor — especially after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and the attack on Donbas in 2014 — were disassembled in many reviews of her book. Her desire to avoid a wider European war dragged Merkel into the futile “Minsk process” of talks between Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France. Her reluctance to confront Putin also reflected her country’s economic interests — particularly German industry’s thirst for cheap Russian gas.
Instead of confronting the mistakes made by the German chancellor, Obama made them even worse. In 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 enforce his own red line on the use of chemical weapons in Syria. A promise to take military action and then back down in the face of congressional opposition—and his own misgivings—looked weak. The decision could easily be rationalized. But it still resonated around the world.
Trump’s camp would add Obama’s decision to sign a deal limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program to its indictment of his policies in the Middle East. But it is a much less clear-cut mistake than the decision not to enforce the chemical weapons red line.
The reason the Syrian decision was so important is that it was part of a pattern. Obama’s second mistake was not responding to China’s construction of military bases on the artificial islands it has created in the South China Sea. In 2015, President Xi expressly promised not to militarize the South China Sea in a White House statement. Actually it already was it happens. Obama’s passive response made it look like the authoritarian leader threw sand in his face again — and got away with it.
The third mistake was the failure to rearm Ukraine in response to Russian aggression. There are people in Berlin and Washington who claim that it was Merkel who led 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. There were certainly people in Obama’s circle who were quietly horrified by his timid reaction 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. It’s Biden quoted as he says: “We screwed up. Barack never took Putin seriously.”
Obama and Merkel could no doubt reply that their critics are blessed with perfect hindsight. Some of them, including Biden, agreed with many of their decisions at the time. Any government involves difficult trade-offs, and it is much easier to preserve a largely satisfactory status quo than to demand sacrifices to fend off a threat that may never materialize.
Merkel has 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 less like a law school seminar or laboratory than a playground in a difficult area. Bullies on children’s playgrounds become even nastier and more aggressive, until someone finally stands up to them.
