Germany’s New Face in Foreign Affairs

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/opinion/germany-foreign-affairs-maas.html

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Berlin — On May 23, Germany’s new foreign minister, Heiko Maas, will meet his American counterpart, Mike Pompeo, for the first time. The meeting will take place in rough times for trans-Atlantic relations, amid European worries over Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and a looming trade war. If Germany truly is the centerweight of Europe, then it matters enormously what its leading figure on foreign policy thinks. The thing is, no one knows.

Mr. Maas is no stranger to politics, but he is a novice when it comes to foreign policy. During Chancellor Angela Merkel’s last term, the 51-year-old Social Democrat served as the minister of justice and consumer protection, his first federal office. Before that, he spent nearly 20 years as a representative and government minister in the Saarland, a small state along the French border.

And yet, in just the 10 weeks since Mr. Maas took charge, he has already begun to leave his mark.

On March 26, only two weeks after he took office, Germany joined 28 other countries in expelling Russian diplomats in response to the poisoning of a Russian-British double agent, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter.

A few weeks later, Mr. Maas flew to Moscow for his inaugural visit with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart. Mr. Lavrov is one of the world’s most experienced diplomats, and someone known to bring the proverbial gun to every knife fight. One can only imagine the flurry of briefing papers and meetings at the German Foreign Ministry to get their new guy up to speed.

But by all accounts, the meeting went well. Despite years of acrimony between Russia and Germany — and especially between Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Maas’s predecessors — the Germans came away promising to support a veterans’ hospital, and the Russians committed to the so-called Normandy Format, an effort to resolve the crisis in eastern Ukraine involving France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine.

The day after meeting Mr. Lavrov in Moscow, Mr. Maas traveled to Lithuania for a meeting with the foreign ministers of the three Baltic States. It was a meeting with friends, and yet the whole drama of German foreign policy was in this visit, too: With Britain leaving the European Union — along with its sizable military — the three small states, in fear of Russian aggression, are looking to Germany to fill the security void. Mr. Maas left them feeling reassured, without yet making the sort of concrete commitments the Baltics are looking for.

And all of this — Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics — account for just one part of Germany’s foreign policy portfolio. As the representative of a country that is only now figuring out its leadership role, Mr. Maas is walking a narrow line — but he seems to be relishing the challenge. “I still have to get used to not going to the office but to the airport every morning,” he joked on the flight back.

Mr. Maas is energized by his new office, almost boyishly excited by it. In public he is reserved and, well, diplomatic; in one-on-one meetings he’s more casual, leaning back deeply into the seat of the plane, holding a pretzel stick between two fingers like a cigar, as if discussing world politics in some fancy Berlin bar.

The Foreign Ministry has changed Heiko Maas. But how will he change German foreign policy?

The list of past foreign ministers includes some of the leading figures in German politics, from Willy Brandt to Joschka Fischer, and each of them left a significant imprint. It’s early still, but Mr. Maas will likely follow them. He has strong policy convictions and knows how to make himself visible, how to use the news media not just to get out information, but to tell a story.

As minister of justice, Mr. Maas made the fight against populism his trademark. He worked out a controversial bill that levies fines on Facebook and other networks if they don’t remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough from their sites.

He is carrying this same narrative into his new job. In his inaugural speech as foreign minister, Mr. Maas sketched a world divided between those who believe in international cooperation and those who see the world in zero-sum terms. These division lines, he said, reached “deeply into the West,” certainly hinting at, though not naming, Mr. Trump.

At the same time, and unlike his immediate predecessor, Sigmar Gabriel, he sees value in continuing strong trans-Atlantic ties, regardless of Mr. Trump. He once took a road trip around the United States, and he draws optimism from the energy of American civil society.

In this he resembles the French president, Emmanuel Macron — and, perhaps not coincidentally, he also holds a strong emotional bond to France. He likes to tell an anecdote about his grandmother, who over the course of her life in the Saarland held five passports, in part because the region changed hands between France and Germany. In fact, his first visit as foreign minister was to Paris, the very day he took office.

A third close emotional relation is with Israel. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Maas said that he has entered politics because of Germany’s crimes at Auschwitz, and the need for his country to atone for them by supporting the Jewish state.

Strong ties with France and Israel and a belief in the trans-Atlantic relationship are conventional positions for a German foreign minister; what matters, now, is his commitment to strengthening them.

Where he truly differs from the recent norm is on Russia. While Ms. Merkel has always been clear in condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine, her Social Democratic foreign ministers, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Sigmar Gabriel, tended to be more ambivalent. Many Social Democrats still feel nostalgic about Brandt’s “Entspannungspolitik,” or détente.

Mr. Maas, in contrast, has called Russia “increasingly hostile”; despite his constructive meeting with Mr. Lavrov, we should expect Germany to become even more critical of Russia, and even more supportive of efforts to check it abroad.

It will be months, if not years, before we know what a “Maas Doctrine” looks like. But the outline is clear: activist, strongly European and anti-populist. He will insist on Germany getting a place at the table alongside the United States, France, China and Russia, and he will not be quiet in pursuing his goals. For a Germany long used to foreign policy half-steps, we can expect a bracing change of pace.