Who is Defender of the Rule-based International Order?

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The former US President Barack Obama said about Angela Markel, “Now she is all alone”. He had spent 3 hours alone with Angela Merkel in Hotel Adelon in Berlin in late November 2016. Former President Donald Trump had just been elected the 45th president of the US and Obama was worried as he prepared to leave office. She is the only individual to keep the liberal world order alive while America was taking leave of its geopolitical senses. The German chancellor Merkel had decided not to seek another term after the German federal elections in September 2017. Obama was in the German capital to make her change her mind and succeeded. Merkel was persuaded that it was her duty to carry on the baton of liberal internationalism, free trade, and democracy for at least the next 4 years.

Obama’s speechwriter Ben Rhodes said, “I noticed a tear in her eye as we left”. In the next four years, it was Merkel who sought to salvage the Paris climate accord and it was she who maintained the geopolitical pressure on Vladimir Putin when Trump did the opposite. If anything is Merkel’s legacy, it is her custodianship of the liberal world order. Angela Dorothea Merkel is above all, a pragmatic foreign politician. However, her immediate predecessors and her mentor, the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl (1982-98) and the social democrat Gerhard Schroeder (1998-2005) are primarily remembered for domestic policies, but Merkel was a foreign-policy politician. Kohl presided over German unification and Schroeder reformed the welfare state. Merkel’s legacy that she really is standing down, has been international.

The former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said, “Who do you ring when you want to call Europe? The answer for the past 16 years has been Angela Merkel. She will be missed. There are no politicians who can fill her shoes but her successor will still be the person to call”. Merkel shows that politics should be focused on solving problems rather than on winning the arguments. She was not a successful politician because she was uniquely wise or prescient. She got results because she was willing to collaborate and find common ground. Merkel used state intervention on a massive scale to rescue the world economy after the 2008 financial crash. She embraced anti-austerity policies to save the euro. In 2008, Markel said, “I want as much market economics as possible, with as much state intervention as necessary”.