Germany and America: Headed for a Divorce?

Germany and America: Headed for a Divorce?

07/15/14

David C. Hendrickson

Foreign Policy, Bilateral Relations, Security, Germany, United States

Both nations have different views about where the balance between liberty and security should be struck.

For younger Americans, the relations between the United States and Germany may seem divested of emotion. For many within America’s deep state (the one that occasionally informs the president what it is doing), those relations have become purely instrumental, linked to nothing but competitive advantage. But these perspectives must seem alien to anyone versed in the history of these countries over the past century. Much that was terribly base, but much, too, that was sublime, were bound up in the relationship of these two peoples. The meaning of this history is central to Germany’s identity, and was once central to ours.

The German-American relationship deteriorated ominously a hundred years ago, in 1914, when the outbreak of the Great War threw Germany and America into a host of disagreements over U.S. neutrality, issues that ultimately led to the U.S. declaration of war against Germany in April 1917. A century later, the relationship is again on the ropes; there is bitterness in Germany over U.S. spying and espionage. What Germans thought was a relationship founded on common values and mutual trust has suffered a profound betrayal. A deep anger simmers in Germany over what the Americans have become—apostates to the faith of civil freedom taught to Germany by America after 1945.

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