Obama's Legacy: the President Who Lost Germany

The future is opaque but not entirely. One thing we can say for certain: Obama is smoked, cooked, finished, well-done. His foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East are being led by uber-Qaeda group Islamic State; USG has been actively fomenting a state of war in the China Sea; AfPak is about to blow sky high. Then there is what could be the administration's greatest blunder of all, the estrangement of Germany, Europe's leading state.

An excellent overview of the espionage scandal rocking the U.S.-German relationship is "Germany Demands Top U.S. Intelligence Officer Be Expelled," written by Alison Smale, Mark Mazzetti and David Sanger. I was struck by the story's concluding paragraphs:

Both Thomas de Maizière, the interior minister, and Wolfgang Schäuble, the finance minister and a close ally of Ms. Merkel, suggested that the material handed to the Americans from the German intelligence employee arrested last week was nothing important. The Americans, Mr. Schäuble said, had simply proved to be stupid. 

“With so much stupidity, you can only weep,” he said. “And that is why the chancellor is ‘not amused.’ ”

That pretty well sums it up. USG is fat, stupid and out of touch, an aging bully that still waddles around the neighborhood intimidating and abusing friend and foe alike. The bully has little support at home and few allies among his neighbors. The time is ripe for a fall. Merkel's public announcement that the CIA station chief is being expelled augurs ill for the bully:

The decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel to publicly announce the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Berlin station chief was seen as a highly symbolic expression of the deep anger and hurt that German officials have felt since the exposure of the American espionage operations.

It is likely to force another reassessment inside the C.I.A. and other spy agencies about whether provocative espionage operations in friendly nations are worth the risk to broader foreign policy goals. One such assessment was conducted last summer, when President Obama ordered a halt to the tapping of Ms. Merkel’s phone after it came to light because of the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

*** 

Despite the apparent effort to keep relations on an even keel, the development marked a low point in relations with a critical ally just as Mr. Obama needs stronger cooperation on issues including Iran’s nuclear program, the stability of Ukraine and forging a broad trans-Atlantic trade agreement. 

As Ms. Merkel put it on Thursday, the two countries have better things to do than “waste energy spying” on each other. 

Ms. Merkel’s comments seemed similar to what Mr. Obama said early last summer, after the first of the Snowden revelations. “I’m the end user of this kind of intelligence,” Obama said. “If I want to know what Chancellor Merkel is thinking, I will call Chancellor Merkel,” he said, suggesting it was not necessary to spy on close friends. 

But in the year since, the evidence of American spying operations in Germany has grown so steadily that it called into question whether the intelligence agencies listened to the president that day, or whether the White House had failed to do a complete review of the spying operations against those allies.

Obama was elected as a "change agent." By now it should be obvious to the voters who put him in the White House that he has ushered in no change. The Deep State -- the fat, aging bully -- waddles on.

The comments that accompany the Smale et al. piece are overwhelmingly anti-USG. The one, from Franz in Aachen, that received the most recommendations is refreshingly sensible:

Ms. Merkel has done a lot so far to calm down the growing resentment against the digital US violence. But now she is under political pressure to show her teeth. This means, the buffer of good will has been used up. This is a bad day for US-German relationships.

Why are the USA so stupid to snub their closest partners with such silly behavior? Cynicism is a slow acting but devastating poison for a relationship. Following the Middle East disaster the USA are risking to loose the hearts and minds of Europeans for nothing. Events like this one result in distance and reduced empathy to support US politics. Instead, many Germans will vote for closer relationships to China and Russia, as we have already seen during the Ukraine crisis. The USA are giving their soft power away for small coin. We urgently need some robust actions from their side to repair the substantial damage and stabilize the slide of trust.

Those "robust actions" that Franz calls for should start with USG immediately concluding a "no-spy" agreement with Germany. After the Snowden revelations, Germany wanted Five Eyes status, but the Obama administration tossed up a bunch of hurdles:

When the Snowden revelations emerged last year, German officials suggested that they wanted a “no spy” agreement similar to the one the United States has with the English-speaking victors of World War II: Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But the negotiations only frayed relations even more. 

The way German officials tell the story, they were promised those negotiations by Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, and other American intelligence officials. But the American officials say there was never such a promise, and that German officials blanched when they heard what kind of responsibilities they would have for intelligence collection and cyberoperations around the world if they ever joined that elite club. 

The discussions went nowhere, and the public collapse of the talks left Ms. Merkel’s top aides embittered. Politicians, including Ms. Merkel, began talking about creating a “Germany only” segment of the Internet, to keep German emails and web searches from going across American-owned wires and networks.

If USG is not merely a giant zombie run amok, it will bend over backward giving Germany what it wants in the way of a "no spy" agreement. But even if such a deal is concluded, I think the damage has been done. Germany's realignment to the East with Russia and China will proceed apace. Merkel's call to Ukrainian President Poroshenko, warning him about committing atrocities in attacking Donetsk and Luhansk, is a welcome aspect of this realignment.