Former chancellor Angela Merkel has described Donald Trump as in thrall to autocratic leaders and someone who views everything “from the perspective of the real estate entrepreneur he had been before politics”.
In an extract from her new memoir, published on Tuesday, Merkel recalls her frosty first meeting in Washington with Trump in March 2017.
After shaking hands at the White House door, Merkel realised only later that his refusal to shake her hand a second time for the press in the Oval Office was part of the German-American president’s anti-German showmanship.
“Trump knew exactly what effect he wanted to achieve,” she wrote. “He wanted to create material for conversation through his behaviour.”
Their talks always took place on two levels, she added, with her “figures and facts” making no impression with a president who operated “on an emotional level”.
“When he did pay attention to my arguments, it was usually only to construct new accusations from them,” she wrote.
Finding solutions to bilateral problems – Germany’s low defence spending and trade surplus with the US – seemed less his goal than to nurse grievance and make her “feel guilty”.
“When he noticed that I was vigorously opposing this, he abruptly ended his tirade and changed the subject,” she wrote.
In this first meeting Trump appeared most interested in information on Vladimir Putin.
“The Russian president was clearly very fascinating to him,” she wrote. “In the years that followed, I had the impression that politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits cast a spell over him.”
Writing about her refusal to open the Nato door to Ukraine in 2008, Merkel said “the admission of a new member should not only bring more security to the new member, but also to Nato”.
She saw many reasons not to proceed, from public opposition in Ukraine to the complications of having the Russian fleet stationed on the Crimean peninsula, then still under Ukrainian control.
It was an “illusion”, she adds, to think that Nato membership would have protected Ukraine and Georgia from Russian aggression and it was questionable if she would have received parliamentary backing for any military action required to meet Germany’s alliance obligations.
Watching Putin up close at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, where he denounced the US-led unipolar world, she said that “what annoyed me most was his self-righteousness”.
“Not a word about the unresolved conflicts on his doorstep in Nagorno-Karabakh, Moldova and Georgia,” she said. “Criticism of Nato’s deployment in Serbia, yes, but not a word about the atrocities committed by the Serbs during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia; not a word about developments in Russia itself.”
In her memoir Merkel recounts her first major conflict with an alpha male politician on election night 2005, when the final poll lead of her Christian Democratic Union shrank in exit polls to less than one percentage point ahead of outgoing chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democratic Party.
In a now infamous post-election encounter, Merkel admitted she was dazed as a forceful Schröder insisted his party would never serve under her – which they later did, three times.
“I very much doubt whether Gerhard Schröder would have behaved in the same way towards a man,” she wrote. With his televised ambush on her, she added, “he seemed to overlook the fact that, beyond a certain amount of force, people tend to show solidarity with the party being attacked”.
After 16 years dealing with complicated and often vain men, Merkel asked for advice once from an expert: Pope Francis. His suggestion to her for dealing with strong-willed men of fundamentally different opinions: “Bend, bend, bend, but be careful not to break.”
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