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Wednesday, November 27, 2024 6:55:40 PM
Merkel Memoir Recalls What It Was Like Dealing With Trump and Putin
"Att: B402 - What John Mearsheimer gets wrong about Ukraine"
The new book by former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany also aims to justify decisions she made that are still affecting her country and the rest of Europe.
Listen to this article · 5:44 min
An awkward silence between Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office in 2017, shortly after his inauguration. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
By Christopher F. Schuetze and Steven Erlanger
Christopher F. Schuetze covered Angela Merkel’s last term as Germany’s chancellor, and Steven Erlanger
is The Times’s chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe. Both reported this article from Berlin.
Nov. 22, 2024
Leer en español
All links
Shortly after Donald J. Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Angela Merkel, who was then Germany’s chancellor, visited Washington. As the world looked on, the two leaders sat in front of an unlit fireplace, awkwardly and silently waiting for the photographers to do their work.
After hearing the photographers demand “handshake, handshake,” an urging that Mr. Trump ignored, Ms. Merkel tried herself, she relates in a new memoir. “They want to have a handshake,” she said in a hushed tone audible to the press corps just feet away.
“As soon as I said that, I shook my head mentally at myself,” Ms. Merkel wrote, according to excerpts from the memoir released this week in Die Zeit .. https://www.zeit.de/2024/49/freiheit-angela-merkel-memoiren-biografie-erfahrungen/komplettansicht , the German weekly. “How could I forget that Trump knew exactly what effect he wanted to achieve?” she added.
Long-anticipated in Germany, the book, “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021,” promises the inside story of the taciturn woman many saw as the defender of a global liberal order .. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/world/europe/germany-merkel-trump-election.html . When the world was shocked by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, the first election of Mr. Trump and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Ms. Merkel exuded a kind of patient, cerebral calm that was widely seen as the bastion of an old, more predictable world order.
Since she stepped down in 2021, things have changed drastically. Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting Germany to wean itself off cheap Russian gas. Absorbing both the lack of cheap energy and a reduction of the Chinese export market, the German economy has stagnated. The country’s bridges, roads and railways, long neglected, are falling apart. And Ms. Merkel’s welcoming migration policy has led to a surge in the far right.
All of which has led to widespread unhappiness and a rethinking of Ms. Merkel’s legacy.
Ms. Merkel’s book, which is also being published in an English translation and hits bookstores on Tuesday, is expected to be more than just a fascinating first-person view from the seat of a great European power. It is also a justification for decisions she made that helped lead Germany and the rest of Europe to a perilous place.
Destruction in Kostyantinivka, in eastern Ukraine, in May. Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
In the excerpts, Ms. Merkel writes about her youth in Communist East Germany, American politics — she wanted both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris to win — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and events presaging Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
She is also clear about her views of Mr. Trump.
“He judged everything from the perspective of the real estate developer he had been before entering politics,” she writes in the book, which was completed before his re-election this month. At the same time, she felt in that March 2017 meeting that Mr. Trump wanted to be liked.
“We talked on two different levels,” Ms. Merkel writes. “Trump on an emotional level, me on a factual one.”
He did not share her conviction that cooperation could benefit all. “He believed that all countries were in competition with each other, in which the success of one was the failure of the other,” she writes. “He did not believe that the prosperity of all could be increased through cooperation.”
Ms. Merkel dismisses Mr. Putin as “someone who was always on guard not to be treated badly, and always ready to dish out punishment, including power games with a dog and making others wait,” a reference to her own fear of dogs, which he manipulated famously at one meeting in 2007, by bringing in a large black Labrador.
“You could find all this childish, reprehensible, you could shake your head at it,” she writes. “But that didn’t make Russia disappear from the map.” Russia, she says, “with its nuclear arsenal, exists” and remains “an indispensable geopolitical factor.”
Mr. Putin, knowing Ms. Merkel’s fear of dogs, allowed his black Labrador to be in the room during talks held in Sochi, Russia, in 2007.
Axel Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
She devotes some time to the 2008 NATO summit meeting in Bucharest, Romania, where President George W. Bush, against the advice of his own intelligence community, said he wanted to extend a pathway to NATO membership — called a membership action plan — to Georgia and Ukraine .. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/world/europe/13iht-nato.4.10021504.html . Ms. Merkel and other European colleagues were opposed .. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/europe/03nato.html . The nub of her reluctance was that doing so would push Mr. Putin too far, and that he would respond aggressively to prevent such a step.
----------
Insert: Att: B402 - What John Mearsheimer gets wrong about Ukraine
[...]It is certainly true, as Mearsheimer notes, that the Nato summit declaration in Bucharest in 2008 stated that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of Nato”, but without any timeline for their accession. This was deliberate. The declaration was a compromise between those leaders who supported Kyiv’s eventual admission, most notably the then US president George W Bush, and those who were opposed, such as the French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel. Was the resulting equivocation a particularly smart idea? No. Does it constitute justification for Russia .. https://www.newstatesman.com/tag/russia ’s invasion? Also, no.
[Insert: Putin’s Talk with Tucker Carlson... and America: A Mixture of Blunt Lies and Toxic Propaganda
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173818900]
Fifteen years later, Ukraine is not meaningfully closer to joining Nato. For evidence, one only has to look to Volodymyr Zelensky .. https://www.newstatesman.com/tag/volodymyr-zelensky ’s scathing response to the latest formulation from Nato leaders in Vilnius this July, which promised to “extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met”. (They did not specify what those conditions were.) As the Ukrainian president interpreted the message: “It seems there is no readiness neither to invite Ukraine to NATO nor to make it a member of the Alliance.”
Even if Ukraine had been close to Nato membership, this would still not explain Putin’s compulsion to invade it. Finland, which has a 1,340-kilometre land border with Russia, joined the alliance in April .. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2023/04/finland-join-nato .. this year. Sweden, which sits across the Baltic Sea from St Petersburg, is poised to do the same if Turkey and Hungary approve its accession. Both countries have fought wars with Russia in past centuries. Yet Russian troops are not massing on their borders. The difference, of course, is how Putin views Ukraine.
Bizarrely – despite the fact that Putin has claimed that Ukraine is not a “real” country, invaded it, and compared himself to the 18th century Russian imperialist Peter the Great .. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2022/06/vladimir-putin-the-great – Mearsheimer refuses to believe that his actions could be motivated by imperialism. “There’s no evidence that he had imperial ambitions before the war,” Mearsheimer assured .. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/john-mearsheimer-on-putins-ambitions-after-nine-months-of-war .. the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner in November 2022, two months after Putin had announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions .. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2022/10/vladimir-putin-desperation-donetsk-luhansk-ukraine . “There would have to be evidence that he had said that it was desirable to conquer Ukraine and incorporate it into Russia.” Plus, he added, Putin had said that he respected Ukraine’s sovereignty. But, Chotiner countered, Putin had also said that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people” and violated Ukraine’s sovereignty, so should we necessarily take him at his word? Mearsheimer changed the subject.
Equally perplexing is Mearsheimer’s tendency to conflate Putin’s obsessions with Russian interests as a whole. Mearsheimer’s assertion that “Russian leaders” viewed the invasion as “just” ignores the fact that much of the Russian foreign policy establishment was blindsided by the start of the war. Within the Kremlin elite, it was not a settled matter that conflict with Ukraine was inevitable or desirable. In fact, according to the Financial Times .. https://www.ft.com/content/80002564-33e8-48fb-b734-44810afb7a49 , Putin did not even consult his own foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, ahead of the attack. “He has three advisers,” Lavrov reportedly complained to an oligarch later: “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”
[The long history of Russian imperialism shaping Putin’s war
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173910279
----------
In the end, a late-night compromise produced a vague promise: that the countries would become NATO members, but without any clear path or timing. Mr. Putin responded by organizing a war in Georgia four months later and trying to shut the door on Ukrainian membership of NATO ever since.
Ms. Merkel writes that she saw no way to protect Ukraine or Georgia from Russian aggression in the period between the membership action plan and actual membership, which took five years with previous Central European candidates. During that time, they would not benefit from the NATO treaty’s security guarantees.
It would be “an illusion,” she writes, to assume that Ukraine’s and Georgia’s action-plan status “would have protected them from Putin’s aggression, that this status would have been such a deterrent that Putin would have passively accepted these developments.”
Russian troops leaving Georgia, in 2008.Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Then, she asks, would NATO have intervened with troops? And could she have asked Germany’s Parliament, which must approve all military deployments overseas, to sign off on German military participation in such a campaign? “In 2008?” she asks. “If so, with what consequences?”
Mr. Putin, she recalls, told her later: “You will not be chancellor forever. And then they will become NATO members. And I want to prevent that.”
As she flew home, she says, she was glad that NATO had avoided a big public fight. “But at the same time, it became obvious that we in NATO had no common strategy for dealing with Russia” — which many argue remains true to this day.
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. More about Christopher F. Schuetze
Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union. More about Steven Erlanger
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/22/world/europe/merkel-memoir-trump-putin.html
"Att: B402 - What John Mearsheimer gets wrong about Ukraine"
The new book by former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany also aims to justify decisions she made that are still affecting her country and the rest of Europe.
Listen to this article · 5:44 min
An awkward silence between Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office in 2017, shortly after his inauguration. Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
By Christopher F. Schuetze and Steven Erlanger
Christopher F. Schuetze covered Angela Merkel’s last term as Germany’s chancellor, and Steven Erlanger
is The Times’s chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe. Both reported this article from Berlin.
Nov. 22, 2024
Leer en español
All links
Shortly after Donald J. Trump’s 2017 inauguration, Angela Merkel, who was then Germany’s chancellor, visited Washington. As the world looked on, the two leaders sat in front of an unlit fireplace, awkwardly and silently waiting for the photographers to do their work.
After hearing the photographers demand “handshake, handshake,” an urging that Mr. Trump ignored, Ms. Merkel tried herself, she relates in a new memoir. “They want to have a handshake,” she said in a hushed tone audible to the press corps just feet away.
“As soon as I said that, I shook my head mentally at myself,” Ms. Merkel wrote, according to excerpts from the memoir released this week in Die Zeit .. https://www.zeit.de/2024/49/freiheit-angela-merkel-memoiren-biografie-erfahrungen/komplettansicht , the German weekly. “How could I forget that Trump knew exactly what effect he wanted to achieve?” she added.
Long-anticipated in Germany, the book, “Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021,” promises the inside story of the taciturn woman many saw as the defender of a global liberal order .. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/world/europe/germany-merkel-trump-election.html . When the world was shocked by Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, the first election of Mr. Trump and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Ms. Merkel exuded a kind of patient, cerebral calm that was widely seen as the bastion of an old, more predictable world order.
Since she stepped down in 2021, things have changed drastically. Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting Germany to wean itself off cheap Russian gas. Absorbing both the lack of cheap energy and a reduction of the Chinese export market, the German economy has stagnated. The country’s bridges, roads and railways, long neglected, are falling apart. And Ms. Merkel’s welcoming migration policy has led to a surge in the far right.
All of which has led to widespread unhappiness and a rethinking of Ms. Merkel’s legacy.
Ms. Merkel’s book, which is also being published in an English translation and hits bookstores on Tuesday, is expected to be more than just a fascinating first-person view from the seat of a great European power. It is also a justification for decisions she made that helped lead Germany and the rest of Europe to a perilous place.
Destruction in Kostyantinivka, in eastern Ukraine, in May. Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
In the excerpts, Ms. Merkel writes about her youth in Communist East Germany, American politics — she wanted both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris to win — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and events presaging Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
She is also clear about her views of Mr. Trump.
“He judged everything from the perspective of the real estate developer he had been before entering politics,” she writes in the book, which was completed before his re-election this month. At the same time, she felt in that March 2017 meeting that Mr. Trump wanted to be liked.
“We talked on two different levels,” Ms. Merkel writes. “Trump on an emotional level, me on a factual one.”
He did not share her conviction that cooperation could benefit all. “He believed that all countries were in competition with each other, in which the success of one was the failure of the other,” she writes. “He did not believe that the prosperity of all could be increased through cooperation.”
Ms. Merkel dismisses Mr. Putin as “someone who was always on guard not to be treated badly, and always ready to dish out punishment, including power games with a dog and making others wait,” a reference to her own fear of dogs, which he manipulated famously at one meeting in 2007, by bringing in a large black Labrador.
“You could find all this childish, reprehensible, you could shake your head at it,” she writes. “But that didn’t make Russia disappear from the map.” Russia, she says, “with its nuclear arsenal, exists” and remains “an indispensable geopolitical factor.”
Mr. Putin, knowing Ms. Merkel’s fear of dogs, allowed his black Labrador to be in the room during talks held in Sochi, Russia, in 2007.
Axel Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
She devotes some time to the 2008 NATO summit meeting in Bucharest, Romania, where President George W. Bush, against the advice of his own intelligence community, said he wanted to extend a pathway to NATO membership — called a membership action plan — to Georgia and Ukraine .. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/world/europe/13iht-nato.4.10021504.html . Ms. Merkel and other European colleagues were opposed .. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/europe/03nato.html . The nub of her reluctance was that doing so would push Mr. Putin too far, and that he would respond aggressively to prevent such a step.
----------
Insert: Att: B402 - What John Mearsheimer gets wrong about Ukraine
[...]It is certainly true, as Mearsheimer notes, that the Nato summit declaration in Bucharest in 2008 stated that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of Nato”, but without any timeline for their accession. This was deliberate. The declaration was a compromise between those leaders who supported Kyiv’s eventual admission, most notably the then US president George W Bush, and those who were opposed, such as the French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel. Was the resulting equivocation a particularly smart idea? No. Does it constitute justification for Russia .. https://www.newstatesman.com/tag/russia ’s invasion? Also, no.
[Insert: Putin’s Talk with Tucker Carlson... and America: A Mixture of Blunt Lies and Toxic Propaganda
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173818900]
Fifteen years later, Ukraine is not meaningfully closer to joining Nato. For evidence, one only has to look to Volodymyr Zelensky .. https://www.newstatesman.com/tag/volodymyr-zelensky ’s scathing response to the latest formulation from Nato leaders in Vilnius this July, which promised to “extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the alliance when allies agree and conditions are met”. (They did not specify what those conditions were.) As the Ukrainian president interpreted the message: “It seems there is no readiness neither to invite Ukraine to NATO nor to make it a member of the Alliance.”
Even if Ukraine had been close to Nato membership, this would still not explain Putin’s compulsion to invade it. Finland, which has a 1,340-kilometre land border with Russia, joined the alliance in April .. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2023/04/finland-join-nato .. this year. Sweden, which sits across the Baltic Sea from St Petersburg, is poised to do the same if Turkey and Hungary approve its accession. Both countries have fought wars with Russia in past centuries. Yet Russian troops are not massing on their borders. The difference, of course, is how Putin views Ukraine.
Bizarrely – despite the fact that Putin has claimed that Ukraine is not a “real” country, invaded it, and compared himself to the 18th century Russian imperialist Peter the Great .. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2022/06/vladimir-putin-the-great – Mearsheimer refuses to believe that his actions could be motivated by imperialism. “There’s no evidence that he had imperial ambitions before the war,” Mearsheimer assured .. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/john-mearsheimer-on-putins-ambitions-after-nine-months-of-war .. the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner in November 2022, two months after Putin had announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions .. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/ukraine/2022/10/vladimir-putin-desperation-donetsk-luhansk-ukraine . “There would have to be evidence that he had said that it was desirable to conquer Ukraine and incorporate it into Russia.” Plus, he added, Putin had said that he respected Ukraine’s sovereignty. But, Chotiner countered, Putin had also said that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people” and violated Ukraine’s sovereignty, so should we necessarily take him at his word? Mearsheimer changed the subject.
Equally perplexing is Mearsheimer’s tendency to conflate Putin’s obsessions with Russian interests as a whole. Mearsheimer’s assertion that “Russian leaders” viewed the invasion as “just” ignores the fact that much of the Russian foreign policy establishment was blindsided by the start of the war. Within the Kremlin elite, it was not a settled matter that conflict with Ukraine was inevitable or desirable. In fact, according to the Financial Times .. https://www.ft.com/content/80002564-33e8-48fb-b734-44810afb7a49 , Putin did not even consult his own foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, ahead of the attack. “He has three advisers,” Lavrov reportedly complained to an oligarch later: “Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.”
[The long history of Russian imperialism shaping Putin’s war
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=173910279
----------
In the end, a late-night compromise produced a vague promise: that the countries would become NATO members, but without any clear path or timing. Mr. Putin responded by organizing a war in Georgia four months later and trying to shut the door on Ukrainian membership of NATO ever since.
Ms. Merkel writes that she saw no way to protect Ukraine or Georgia from Russian aggression in the period between the membership action plan and actual membership, which took five years with previous Central European candidates. During that time, they would not benefit from the NATO treaty’s security guarantees.
It would be “an illusion,” she writes, to assume that Ukraine’s and Georgia’s action-plan status “would have protected them from Putin’s aggression, that this status would have been such a deterrent that Putin would have passively accepted these developments.”
Russian troops leaving Georgia, in 2008.Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Then, she asks, would NATO have intervened with troops? And could she have asked Germany’s Parliament, which must approve all military deployments overseas, to sign off on German military participation in such a campaign? “In 2008?” she asks. “If so, with what consequences?”
Mr. Putin, she recalls, told her later: “You will not be chancellor forever. And then they will become NATO members. And I want to prevent that.”
As she flew home, she says, she was glad that NATO had avoided a big public fight. “But at the same time, it became obvious that we in NATO had no common strategy for dealing with Russia” — which many argue remains true to this day.
Christopher F. Schuetze is a reporter for The Times based in Berlin, covering politics, society and culture in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. More about Christopher F. Schuetze
Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union. More about Steven Erlanger
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/22/world/europe/merkel-memoir-trump-putin.html
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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