Germany, and Merkel personally, would be the subject of considerable animus from Trump and his associates throughout his presidency. The phone calls from the White House were so unhinged that they were put on a specially restricted distribution list in the German government. Trump sent a political agitator, Richard Grenell, to act as his ambassador in Berlin, who described his agenda, weeks after arriving, as “[empowering] other conservatives throughout Europe”[1]—which decidedly did not mean Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)—and would routinely denounce a government that believed itself to be a close US ally.

  Meanwhile, Trump held the German car industry hostage to the threat of being slapped with substantial tariffs, which was given credibility by his already-demonstrated willingness to hit allies with steel and aluminum duties. The president’s attacks on the European Union cut at a project so close to the heart of German national strategy that Wolfgang Ischinger, the former ambassador to Washington and chairman of the Munich Security Conference, warned that if Trump pushed for other countries to follow the UK’s Brexit example, it “would amount to a kind of non-military declaration of war.”[2]

  But it wasn’t just the political attacks on Germany and the economic threats to its industry that were the problem, nor the fact that the populism that Trump and his friends in Europe represented harked back to darker times on the continent. Merkel was also trying to hold together a certain version of world order. Trump’s tabula rasa approach threatened to unravel the fabric of the entire global framework that Germany relied on; the economic globalization that had generated remarkable prosperity for the country even in the midst of the last decade of crises; the multilateral institutions that had navigated differences without resort to the destructive power politics that had bedeviled European history for centuries; the relative peace that ensured the German government could be spared the costs of serious military expenditures.

  China itself was not perceived as a security threat, but it was not really viewed as an economic one either. Despite growing concerns from sections of German industry, explained in the previous chapter, China remained at the core of that globalization story. Germany was almost unique among major economies in continuing to run a trade surplus with China. Whether this was a product of superior German production quality, prescient labor-market reforms or the advantages of forgoing the Deutsche Mark for the euro was beside the point. If the Trump administration’s China policy was going to threaten this framework, Merkel believed she needed to figure out how best to keep at least some version of it alive. Germany had simply not experienced the “China shock” that upended lower-wage employment across the Western world and helped create the political conditions for the resurgent populism in the United States, the UK, Italy and elsewhere that Merkel feared being replicated at home. The rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in the shadow of the refugee crisis was a baleful specter that had the potential to influence figures in her own party, who mulled joining them in coalition governments at the state level.

  It was also extremely difficult to determine whether to take the US position seriously. If Germany and Europe were being asked to join forces with the United States in a long-term rebalancing of their approach towards China, there was a conversation to be had. Indeed, it had already started. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 saw it kicked out of the G8, the remaining seven heads of government, and the EU leadership, had a discreet space at which to discuss their mutual concerns about China once the formal summit agenda was over. The only voice of dissent among the G7 leaders to the notion that they had a worsening China problem that they needed to figure out was not Merkel but the British prime minister, David Cameron, who was then in the grips of the “golden era” China mania. But any hope of these exchanges continuing and turning into common action after Barack Obama left office was quickly curtailed. When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, raised the prospect of joining forces to take on China’s problematic economic practices, the response from Trump was stark: “The EU is worse.”[3]

  The capricious nature of the Trump administration’s decision-making also made it hard to determine what was going to stick and what was just a means of building leverage for the trade deal with China that Trump craved. The particular scenario Berlin feared was a repeat of what they had watched playing out with ZTE, Huawei’s state-owned counterpart, which was subjected to punishment from the US government not only for its initial sanctions violations but then for breaking a subsequent agreement with the Justice Department and shipping US goods to Iran and North Korea.

  While US officials had insisted that the crippling restrictions on ZTE’s access to essential components that they enacted in 2018 stemmed purely from the wheels of the justice system grinding into gear, Trump soon revoked them after reaching an agreement with Xi Jinping to keep the company alive for the sake of the two sides’ trade talks. A set of documents that US authorities found on a laptop belonging to ZTE’s chief financial officer, after he was detained in Boston’s Logan Airport in 2016, had not only exposed ZTE’s sanctions-busting with Iran but fingered Huawei for its involvement in the same practices. Indeed, it highlighted them precisely as justification for why ZTE had to follow suit or lose out to its Chinese competitor. Meng Wanzhou’s arrest in Canada, just as Xi and Trump were meeting in Buenos Aires, was one of the dramatic results of the investigation that followed. But the fear was that there was nothing to stop Trump and Xi reaching a similar agreement over Meng, and Huawei too. And many in the German government trusted Trump even less than they did Xi.

  Politicians and important sections of German business worried less about the actual security risks that might result from Huawei’s presence in 5G networks and more about the risk that German industry would be caught in a pincer. The United States was never going to use Huawei equipment for its own 5G networks, but it feared that the administration could ease up the pressure on the company elsewhere as part of a similar ZTE-style quid-pro-quo with Beijing. Then, if the United States concluded a bilateral trade deal with China, every indication was that Trump would train his tariff-slapping energies on the EU, with German cars at the top of the list. For its part, Beijing had been none-too-shy about signaling what the consequences would be if Germany reached the “wrong” verdict over Huawei. “If Germany were to make a decision that led to Huawei’s exclusion from the German market, there will be consequences,” Wu Ken, China’s ambassador to Germany, warned.[4] “The Chinese government will not stand idly by.” “See, last year, 28 million cars were sold in China, 7 million of those were German.”

  While the German economy as a whole is not excessively dependent on China, a couple of sectors—chemicals and cars—remain highly exposed. Turning the taps off for chemical companies like BASF, on which China’s own industrial base relies, would be difficult. A decision by the Chinese government to “encourage” businesses and consumers to turn away from VW and Daimler would be easier to enact, though the preponderance of those cars were now made by Chinese workers in Chinese factories, which gave the threat a slightly mythical air. It induced deep German nervousness nonetheless. Like Brexit-troubled London, there was a sense that they couldn’t afford to treat it dismissively. The result, if paired with US actions, would have been the economic equivalent of a two-front war, as some of Germany’s largest employers faced escalating tariffs in one of their two largest markets and the use of deniable but devastating state-directed measures in the other.

  It was not only a portion of the 600,000 existing car jobs, and those tied to the wider array of associated suppliers across Europe, that were potentially at stake. 5G was supposed to provide the underpinnings of Germany’s broader industrial future. The telecoms firms played on these anxieties about falling behind. The likes of Deutsche Telekom issued dark claims that Germany would be vastly outpaced by its international competitors unless it stuck with Huawei. As a result, for all the German economics ministry’s talk of building “European champions,” there was not the level of love for Scandinavian equipment suppliers that the government’s language might have implied. In much of Europe, this was already understood as code for “Franco-German champions,” and few cases illustrated this better than the disregard given to any notion that support to the Finnish and Swedish champions should feature in German decision-making over 5G. As one industry expert noted: “If Nokia or Ericsson had been a German firm, we wouldn’t even be having the Huawei debate.”

  Those who talked to Merkel did not find her naive about what China was becoming under Xi Jinping. Indeed, some German companies were unhappy about her private warnings that they needed a plan for the fact that their days making hay in the Chinese market were drawing to a close. Her hopes and illusions of the past were the illusions shared with most other Western leaders. But one of the issues she came back to, that framed her dealings with Beijing in the final years, was the United States. If Europe was facing an era in which it could find itself subjected to a Donald Trump, relations with China couldn’t be allowed to slide too far. There was little confidence that the EU could act with sufficient weight alone to address crises with Washington and Beijing at the same time, not least given the threats from Putin she had been at such pains to point out to Trump. As one German expert put it:

  Ultimately her thing was that there are large world historical forces at work. China is getting back to its rightful place as the dominant power, and she has very little faith in US staying power or in German society doing what it needs to do to become an independent power that stands up for its own interests.

  It was a resignation to fate. Better to “cut deals now and enjoy the party while it lasts.”

  Whether it was Huawei or a new investment agreement with China, the substance was less important than keeping a floor under the relationship. She would seek to do so to the very end of her tenure as chancellor. But the scale of the foot-dragging on the most basic readjustments of the European position was bemusing even to many of those working most closely on it. Rarely have I encountered so many officials in a democratic government as exasperated as those dealing with the black hole of the chancellery on China policy in the last couple of years of Merkel’s term.

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  In Germany too, the 5G question was kicked to a technical agency, though this one was a very different beast. The Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) has a less storied history than GCHQ. The Federal Office for Information Security was the former cryptographic department of the foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), which still houses the country’s external signals intelligence activities. The BSI was spun off in 1991 from the BND headquarters in Pullach, near Munich, to the country’s soon-to-be-vacated seat of government in Bonn. While the BND has since moved most of its operations into a vast new building near the site of the Berlin Wall, the BSI stayed put in the former capital alongside a small number of other federal ministries. Bonn is not only the home of the old West German government, however. It is also the headquarters of Europe’s largest telecoms provider, Deutsche Telekom. The proximity between the two has been contentious. If the question of regulatory capture was an acute one in the UK, it was at least clear that GCHQ and its relatively recently created cyber-security center had a complex agenda with respect to Huawei. Less so the BSI, an entity without NCSC’s clout but that would play an outsized role in the decision-making process relative to its capabilities and bureaucratic weight. Other German industries had to make a beeline for the chancellery on the really important decisions, which Deutsche Telekom made sure to do too. But they also had a friendly agency in closer proximity, run by a former lobbyist with close industry links rather than a dyed-in-the-wool spook. One executive on the wrong end of this coziness complained in a more exasperated moment that in the telecoms sphere they felt like Germany was a “banana republic.”

  The United States also faced a deeper problem in Germany than in the UK, one that pre-dated Trump: the long shadow of the Snowden revelations. For parts of the German security establishment, these were no big deal. Indeed, one of the reasons the leaks blew up in Germany was precisely because they laid out for the public so comprehensively the close collaboration between the NSA and the BND. German intelligence was perfectly well aware that, despite the close linkages between their services, they did not occupy the same rarefied sphere as the British or other Five Eyes nations, who were exempt from US targeting. The supposed shock of US spying on Germany, including the aggressive targeting of Merkel’s personal phone, was not really a surprise at all to those in the know—allies spied on allies. But the dismissive “get real,” “don’t be naive,” “grow up,” “everyone does it” attitude from various US policymakers and some of the harder-bitten German officials and experts did not land well politically. A wider public steeped in the dual legacies of totalitarianism, which polled at the very highest levels in Europe for concerns over data privacy, did not believe that their allies should be their biggest surveillance problem. It also resulted in a very jaded environment for any American officials coming to Berlin to tell Germans that they should be worried about Chinese spying.

  In the second half of 2019, the situation in Germany did not look promising. In mid-October, the German government released its security catalogue, a set of draft security requirements for the 5G network, in a form that was so outrageous that one White House official I met at the time openly wondered whether the real intention behind it was to provoke a political backlash. Beyond a couple of certification requirements, there were no criteria with teeth for dealing with sensitive vendors. The US delegations to Berlin in recent months had clearly not made much headway. Numerous German officials wanted Huawei excluded, but not officials in the places that counted most.

  The barrage of US messages and visits was becoming a little relentless, especially given how poisonous the wider political atmosphere had become. German participants in the meetings with US officials described some of them as “actively counterproductive.” In their darker moments, even arch Huawei-skeptics muttered that they were minded to say “no” to the Trump administration just to spite them. There were similarly unhelpful musings in the Trump administration, which was weighing up whether to unleash retaliation on Germany after the news broke about the security catalogue. German officials would also repeat the messages they heard from their British counterparts—“that’s not what GCHQ says” was perpetually used as cover. But much as the United States ultimately ended up relying on the changing politics in London to get the outcome it wanted, behind the scenes in Germany the situation was set to take a tumultuous turn. It would affect not just the 5G decision but the wider politics of German China policy. A revolt was brewing—and from an unlikely source.

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  Norbert Röttgen was once a rising star on the German political scene. A brilliant career politician from a powerful North-Rhine Westphalia CDU party background, he was among the progressive, green-minded faction close to Merkel during her first term in office, with a George Clooney-esque look to boot. As her environment minister, he appeared poised for greater things and was even spoken of as a potential successor. Then he crashed to earth. A failed run to be prime minister of his home state, Germany’s most populous, saw the CDU plummet to its lowest voting numbers in decades. He was personally blamed by Merkel for the party’s performance, told he had to take responsibility and summarily removed as minister.

  He would have to reinvent himself. His vantage point was the chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Bundestag, which he took over from its longstanding chair Ruprecht Polenz, who described it to him as “the nicest job you will ever have.” Polenz had shaped the role into the parliamentary face of German foreign policy, both in the domestic media and to the rest of the world, a mantle that Röttgen eagerly took on. The position suited him, and even if he was not able to rebuild his base in the party, the vantage point it afforded—internationally connected, somewhat non-partisan, sharper and more outspoken on foreign policy than any government minister could afford to be—was well-suited for picking up issues and running with them in ways that shape the public debate. And Röttgen had not lost his political instincts. When the 5G question started bubbling up, he grabbed the opportunity.

  China had not featured so prominently on the German foreign policy agenda in his early years in the role. 5G was not just a “China” issue, however, nor even a foreign policy one. Its position at the intersection of so many fields may have created bureaucratic headaches, but it was ideally suited for politicians who could stitch them all together. In Germany, it was Röttgen who first took this task on. As the international debate took off, he started to brief up on it.

  He was an Atlanticist, so already minded not to do anything that would blow up relations with a Washington that was exhibiting a striking bipartisan consensus on the issue. He was also closely connected to the British Conservative parliamentarians that would go on to fight their own government on the issue. Digging into the subject further, it became clearer that 5G was even more a question of the fundamental values that would be compromised if a deeper dependency on Beijing resulted from a Chinese company controlling the enabling infrastructure of the German economy. He looked harder at the China that had been emerging under Xi Jinping and did not like what this would entail.