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, 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. 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.
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.”
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. Ms. Merkel and other European colleagues were opposed. 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.
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.”
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.
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