The US government is scrambling around in an attempt to placate Angela Merkel and her government in the wake of the spying scandals. The Chancellor isn't buying it. She has too much political heat to deal with.
Berlin Spying Prompted U.S. Offer Too Late to Sway Merkel
U.S. Ambassador John Emerson made his way to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin armed with a plan to head off the worst diplomatic clash of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship.
Emerson came to the July 9 meeting with an offer authorized in Washington: provide Germany a U.S. intelligence-sharing agreement resembling one available only to four other nations. The goal was to assuage Merkel and prevent the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief of station in Berlin.
It wasn’t enough.
The same morning, across the boundary once marked by the Berlin Wall, Merkel convened her top ministers following the 9:30 a.m. Cabinet meeting on the sixth floor of the Chancellery and resolved to ask the U.S. intelligence chief to leave German soil.
The chance to be the Sixth Eye doesn't seem to have done much for her.
“It might have been the case in the Cold War that people were so mistrustful,” Merkel, who has until now reserved her Cold War-mentality accusations for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, told reporters yesterday. “This is the 21st century.”
That is the problem with the way that the US intelligence agencies are operating. They seem to think that the cold war is still on and that Germany has no choice but to do their bidding. Der Spiegal has a a good article that encapsulates the present German view of the world. It is not what it used to be.
Germany's Choice: Will It Be America or Russia?
Of course, this isn't really what the chancellor wants. She would prefer to see the Germans remain firmly rooted in the Western alliance and loyal to their American partners. But she has also noticed how much anti-American sentiment the NSA scandal has stirred up among Germans. The Körber Foundation recently commissioned a study on Germans' attitudes toward German foreign policy. With which country should Germany cooperate in the future, respondents were asked? In a near-tie between East and West, close to 56 percent named the United States while 53 percent named Russia.
Therein lies the deeper tension. On the one hand, Germans are disappointed by the Americans and their unceasing surveillance activities. At the same time, they have demonstrated a surprising level of sympathy for the Russians and their president, Vladimir Putin, in the Ukraine crisis. This raises the fundamental question of Germany's national identity. In the long run, Germans will have to decide which side they prefer.
There is a lot of the world that no longer sees the US as the hope of the world. Bush's heavy handed approach went a long way toward creating the present problems. The World was so happy to see Obama that they embraced his nice speeches with open arms. They are now becoming increasingly impatient to find it business as usual.