Biden’s Got a Berlin Problem Brewing

By Dalibor Rohac & Ivana Stradner

Sunday, January 31, 2021

 

Those who expect President Joe Biden to singlehandedly fix the transatlantic relationship are in for a disappointment. Although the new administration in Washington takes a far more sympathetic view of Europe than its predecessor did, it is not clear that the sentiment will be reciprocated — especially in Berlin.

 

Following nearly two decades of Angela Merkel’s leadership, Armin Laschet, premier of Germany’s most populous state, Nordrhein-Westfalen, was elected on January 16 as the new leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Barring large swings in polls before the parliamentary election in September, Laschet is on track to become Germany’s next chancellor.

 

That is bad news for efforts to repair the U.S.–EU relationship. The presence of Laschet at the helm of Europe’s largest economy would give a boost for those in Europe who are reluctant to take their obligations within NATO seriously and would risk tethering the EU closer to both China and Russia.

 

Much as Biden and Laschet are likely to see eye-to-eye on climate change and other “multilateral” issues, the presumptive German chancellor is a man of little patience with those who see the promotion of democratic values as integral to foreign policy. As such, he is likely to frustrate U.S.-led efforts to hold Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and other dictators accountable for their domestic and international practices.

 

For one, Laschet has a long record of pandering to Putin, or “Putin-Verstehen” as the German neologism goes. Unlike Merkel and other European figures, Laschet hesitated to condemn the recent arrest of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. More broadly, he believes that “while drawing attention to violations of human rights or developments in democracy that we regard as undesirable, we should refrain from itemizing what is going on in Russia and passing didactic judgment on each individual item.” The reason? “We need Russia for many issues in the world” — not least climate change since a Paris Accord without Russia would be only “worth half as much.”

 

It gets worse. When the Russian strongman annexed Crimea in 2014, Laschet’s main concern was with fashionable “anti-Putin populism” emerging in the West. A year later, he disputed the evidence of Russia’s election meddling and disinformation campaigns in Germany. In 2018, Laschet questioned Russian involvement in the Novichok attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the U.K. Amid a chorus of U.S. and European critics of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Laschet reiterated his support for the project earlier this month.

 

There was much to criticize about President Obama’s half-hearted response to the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, which happened at the hands of the country’s brutal dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Yet curiously, in Laschet’s view, the U.S. administration’s main sin lay in its effort to “weaken Assad,” a supposed bulwark against ISIS-sponsored terrorism. Never mind that it was Assad’s atrocities, backed by Russia and Iran, that set in motion the largest refugee wave that Europe had seen since the end of the Second World War.

 

Unsurprisingly, Laschet opposed a ban on Huawei championed by other voices within the CDU, most notably Norbert Röttgen, the chairman of the Bundestag’s foreign-affairs committee and Laschets’s competitor for the party’s leadership. In Laschet’s view, “German business lives from international exports, also those to China.”

 

Laschet would not be the first German chancellor with questionable foreign-policy views. Gerhard Schröder, who served between 1998–2005, was subject to a barrage of well-deserved criticism after transitioning from the German chancellorship to high-ranking board positions in Russian energy companies. Merkel’s own geopolitical record is a mixed bag. On the one hand, she deserves credit for ensuring a united European front in maintaining the post–2014 sanctions regime against Russia. On the other, she has stood firmly with German business against Europe’s broader strategic interests, whether in the case of the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline or, more recently, on the EU–China investment treaty.

 

All of this bodes well for Russia and China, who seek to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe and undermine Western influence in the Balkans, post-Soviet countries, or in the Middle East.

 

While Laschet’s business-like approach to geopolitics has a long tradition in German foreign-policy thinking, the single-minded pursuit of profitable economic opportunities at the expense of broader strategic interests and values is a luxury belonging firmly to an era in which others — namely the United States — could be relied on to keep Europe safe and secure.

 

But Germans and Europeans should not fool themselves. Notwithstanding Joe Biden’s promise of a return to normalcy and to American leadership in the world, the benign old days are not coming back. And in the world that will likely greet a future chancellor Laschet, his seemingly level-headed economic pragmatism risks being proven hopelessly naïve and short-sighted.