The most powerful leader in Europe, though, was a woman with a temperament nearly the opposite of Sarkozy’s: Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. I first met Angela in 1994, during a visit with Bill to Berlin. She came from the former East Germany and was already serving as Minister of Women and Youth under Chancellor Helmut Kohl. When she was introduced to me, she was described as “a young woman who will go far”—words that proved prophetic. She and I stayed in touch over the years, even appearing together on a German television show in 2003. In 2005 she was elected Chancellor, the first woman leader of her country. For all of its vaunted progressivism on matters like health care and climate change, Europe can still feel like the world’s most venerable old boys’ club, and it was heartening to see Angela shaking things up.
My admiration for Angela grew during my term as Secretary of State. She was decisive, astute, and straightforward, and she always told me exactly what was on her mind. As an accomplished scientist, having studied physics and earned a doctorate with a dissertation on quantum chemistry, she was particularly knowledgeable on technical issues like climate change and nuclear power. She brought her curiosity about the world to every discussion, armed with questions about events, people, and ideas—a welcome change from some other world leaders who seemed to think they already knew everything worth knowing.
When the Chancellor visited Washington for a state visit in June 2011, I hosted a lunch for her at the State Department and toasted her warmly. In response she presented me with a framed German newspaper covering a recent visit I had made to Berlin. As soon as I saw it, I started to laugh. The front page featured a large photo of the two of us standing side-by-side, but with our heads cropped out. Two sets of hands clasped in front of two similar pantsuits in just the same way. The paper challenged its readers to guess which one was Angela Merkel and which one was me. I had to admit that it was hard to tell. The framed newspaper hung in my office for the remainder of my time as Secretary.
During the worst years of the global financial crisis, Angela’s leadership was put to the test. Europe was hit hard by the crash and faced unique challenges because of the single currency shared by many of its nations, the euro. The weakest economies—Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland—faced staggering public debt, anemic growth, and high unemployment, but they did not have the monetary policy tools at their disposal that come from controlling your own currency. In exchange for emergency help, Germany, the strongest economy in the Eurozone, insisted that these countries take drastic measures to reduce spending and reform their budgets.
The crisis posed a difficult policy dilemma. If these weak economies failed to get out from under their debts, the entire Eurozone might collapse, which would throw the world and our own economy into turmoil. Yet I also worried that too much austerity in Europe would slow growth even further, making it harder for them and the rest of the world to climb out of the hole. In the United States, President Obama responded to the recession by pushing an aggressive investment program through Congress to get growth going again, while working to reduce the national debt over the long term. It was reasonable to suggest that Europe should take similar steps rather than just cutting spending, which would contract the economy even more.
I spent a lot of time talking to European leaders about these challenges, including Merkel. One could agree or not with her fiscal and monetary policies, but it was impossible not to be impressed with her steely determination. As I observed in 2012, she was “carrying Europe on her shoulders.”
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The strongest link in the transatlantic chain was NATO, the military alliance that included Canada as well as our European partners. (Many Americans may take our relationship with Canada for granted, but our northern neighbor is an indispensable partner in nearly everything we do around the world.) Beginning at the start of the Cold War, NATO succeeded in containing the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations for four decades. After the end of the Cold War, the Alliance prepared for new threats to the security of the transatlantic community. Virtually all of the former Soviet republics, other than Russia itself, felt vulnerable without some security guarantees from the West, given their fear that Russia might someday revert to aggressive, expansionist behavior. Led by the United States, NATO decided to open the door to any of the countries to the East. The Alliance also established a network of partnerships with many former Soviet republics and a consultative council with Russia itself. As the Clinton Administration made clear at the time, NATO, while dealing with new challenges, would still retain what was called a “hedge” capacity should a future Russia once again threaten its neighbors.
While NATO forces were fighting to bring peace to Kosovo, Bill and I celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a summit of its leaders in April 1999, hosting the largest gathering of heads of state ever to meet in Washington. The meeting marked great optimism about the future for Europe and NATO. Václav Havel, the first post–Cold War President of the Czech Republic and a fierce and compelling democracy advocate, remarked, “This is the first summit of the Alliance that is attended by representatives of . . . countries that were members of the Warsaw Pact no more than ten years ago. . . . Let us hope that we are thus entering a world in which the fates of nations are not decided by powerful foreign dictators but by the nations themselves.” If not, he might have added, let us be prepared to defend the freedom we have gained.
In 2004, seven more former Eastern bloc nations joined, expanding NATO’s reach even farther. Two more, Albania and Croatia, did so on April 1, 2009, bringing the total membership to twenty-eight. Others, including Ukraine, Bosnia, Moldova, and Georgia, were exploring the possibilities of future European Union and NATO membership.
In the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in early 2014, some have argued that NATO expansion either caused or exacerbated Russia’s aggression. I disagree with that argument, but the most convincing voices refuting it are those European leaders and people who express their gratitude for NATO membership. It gives them greater confidence about their future in light of the ambitions of Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. They understand that Putin’s claim that NATO’s open door is a threat to Russia reflects his refusal to accept the idea that Russia’s relations with the West could be based on partnership and mutual interests, as Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev believed. Those who give credence to Putin’s position should ponder how much more serious the crisis would be—and how much more difficult it would be to contain further Russian aggression if Eastern and Central European nations were not now NATO allies. The NATO door should remain open, and we should be clear and tough-minded in dealing with Russia.
By the time President Obama took office, NATO had become a democratic community of nearly a billion people stretching from the Baltics in the East to Alaska in the West. At my first visit to NATO’s Brussels headquarters in March 2009, the hallways resounded with excitement about the “return” of American engagement. I shared the feeling and spent many hours with the NATO Foreign Ministers and NATO’s Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Prime Minister of Denmark, the kind of experienced and skillful leader that the Alliance needed.
Sometimes there were growing pains, not all of them serious. Bulgaria, for example, which joined NATO in 2004, was a faithful partner in Afghanistan and other missions. Yet when I visited its capital, Sofia, in February 2012, Prime Minister Boyko Borisov was clearly nervous about our meeting. I knew we had serious matters to discuss and hoped nothing was wrong. After all, we were allies now. “Madam Secretary, I was very worried when I saw television footage of you getting off the plane,” he began. “I was briefed by my chief of staff that when your hair is pulled back, it means you’re in a bad mood.” My hair was in fact pulled back at that very moment (perhaps invoking bad memories of KGB agents and Communist Party apparatchiks). I looked at the mostly bald Prime Minister, smiled, and said, “It just takes me a little longer to do my hair than it takes you.” He
laughed, and with that out of the way, we went on to have a productive meeting.
The long war in Afghanistan had taxed NATO’s capacities and exposed gaps in its preparedness. Some allies were slashing their defense budgets, leaving others (mostly the United States) to pick up the slack. Everyone was suffering from the economic crisis. There were voices on both sides of the Atlantic asking whether NATO was still relevant twenty years after the end of the Cold War.
I thought NATO remained essential for meeting the evolving threats of the 21st century. America can’t and shouldn’t do everything by ourselves; that’s why building partnerships around common interests and goals was so important. NATO was still by far our most capable partner, especially since its members voted to act “out of area” for the first time in Bosnia in 1995, a recognition that our collective security could be threatened beyond direct attacks on NATO countries themselves. And NATO allies sacrificed their blood and treasure in Afghanistan, a commitment we should never forget.
In 2011 we were able to show what a relevant 21st-century NATO looks like as the Alliance took the lead in the military intervention to protect civilians in Libya, working in concert for the first time with the Arab League and its member nations. Fourteen allies and four Arab partners contributed naval and air forces to the mission. Contrary to the views of some critics, this proved to be a successful joint operation. The United States provided unique capabilities but our allies—not us—flew 75 percent of the sorties and were responsible for striking 90 percent of the more than six thousand targets destroyed in Libya. That was a nearly exact reversal of the distribution of labor a decade before, during NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, when the United States was responsible for 90 percent of the bombing of air defenses and military targets. And though Britain and France led the way with their capable militaries, the effort extended beyond them. Italy dedicated seven air bases to hosting hundreds of allied jets. Belgian, Canadian, Danish, Dutch, and Norwegian planes, as well as jets from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Jordan, all contributed to the more than twenty-six thousand sorties. The Greek, Spanish, Turkish, and Romanian navies helped enforce the arms embargo at sea. It was a true team effort, just as NATO was intended to be.
If NATO is one of the most successful military alliances in history, the European Union (EU) is one of the most successful political and economic organizations. In a remarkably short period of time, countries that had fought two world wars in the 20th century agreed to make decisions by consensus and elect representatives to a shared Parliament. Despite the EU’s unwieldy bureaucracy, it is nothing short of miraculous that it exists and persists.
The EU’s many contributions to peace and prosperity within and beyond its borders were honored with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2012. Individually and collectively our European partners accomplish so much around the world. Norway is second to none in supporting global public health projects. Ireland, a land once ravaged by famine, leads the way on ending hunger. The Netherlands sets the standard for working on poverty and sustainable development. The Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, provide invaluable support and expertise to pro-democracy activists around the world. The Danes, Swedes, and Finns are champions on climate change. The list could go on and on.
I wanted to expand our partnership with the EU, especially on energy and economics. Early on in President Obama’s first term, I urged the EU to start the U.S.-EU Energy Council to coordinate transatlantic efforts to help vulnerable countries, particularly in Eastern and Central Europe, develop their own energy resources, where possible, and reduce dependency on Russian gas. The U.S. and EU also began discussing a comprehensive economic agreement that would harmonize regulations, increase trade, and spur growth on both sides of the Atlantic.
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None of our relationships in Europe needed more tending than Turkey, a country of more than 70 million people, overwhelmingly Muslim, with one foot in Europe and one in Southwest Asia. Modern Turkey, established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk out of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, was intended to be a secular democracy oriented toward the West. It joined NATO in 1952 and was a reliable ally throughout the Cold War, sending troops to fight alongside ours in Korea and hosting U.S. forces for decades. Yet the Turkish military, which saw itself as the guarantor of Atatürk’s vision, intervened a number of times over the years to topple governments it saw as too Islamist, too left-wing, or too weak. Maybe that was good for the Cold War, but it delayed democratic progress.
Unfortunately the Bush years took a toll on our relations, and by 2007 approval of the United States had collapsed to just 9 percent in Turkey, the lowest in any of the forty-seven countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project that year.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s economy was booming, with one of the fastest growth rates in the world. As the rest of Europe staggered under the financial crisis and the Middle East stagnated, Turkey emerged as a regional powerhouse. Like Indonesia, Turkey was testing whether democracy, modernity, women’s rights, secularism, and Islam could all coexist, and people across the Middle East were watching. It was strongly in the interest of the United States that this experiment succeed and that relations between our countries get back on firmer footing.
I visited Turkey as part of my first trip to Europe as Secretary. In addition to meetings with top Turkish officials, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and President Abdullah Gül, I reached out directly to the Turkish people, as I tried to do everywhere. This was particularly important in countries where governments wanted to work with us but large segments of the population were generally distrustful or anti-American. By taking my case directly to the people, via the mass media, I was trying to influence attitudes, which, in turn, could give governments greater political cover to cooperate with us.
A popular television talk show called Haydi Gel Bizimle Ol, or Come and Join Us, invited me to appear as a guest. Similar in format to The View, it appealed to a wide cross-section of Turkish society, especially women. The hosts, a diverse collection of women, asked me about serious policy issues as well as more personal questions. The discussion was warm, funny, and wide-ranging.
“When was the last time you fell in love and felt like a simple person with a simple life?” one of them wanted to know. This wasn’t normal fodder for a Secretary of State, but it was exactly the kind of topic that might help me connect to viewers. I talked about meeting my husband in law school, falling in love, and building a life together, and also about the challenge of raising a family in the public eye. “I think that my favorite times are when my husband and my daughter and I are together and we do simple things,” I said. “I mean, we go to the movies, we talk and play games together, card games and board games. We go for long walks. I try to do that every chance I can with my husband. And my daughter is busy with her own life now, but when she can, she joins us. So it’s not easy, but I work really hard to find those quiet times when the spotlights aren’t on and when you can just be yourself and be with people that you enjoy and love. And those are the best times in life.”
The audience in the room warmly applauded, and the feedback collected afterward by our embassy staff was encouraging. For many Turks who had become distrustful of America and its leaders, it apparently was a pleasant surprise to see the U.S. Secretary of State as a normal person with cares and concerns similar to their own. Maybe as a result they’d be more receptive to what I had to say about the future of U.S.-Turkish relations.
One man in particular held the key to the future of Turkey and of our relationship: Prime Minister Erdoğan. (In the Turkish system, the President is largely a ceremonial post and the Prime Minister actually runs the government.) I first met him when he was Mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s. He was an ambitious, forceful, devout, and effective politician. Turks first elected his Islamist Party in 2002 and reelected them in 2007 and 2011. Prime Minister Erdoğan viewed all three elections as mandat
es for sweeping change. His government aggressively went after alleged coup plotters in the military and managed to gain a tighter grip on power than any of its civilian predecessors. (The term Islamist generally refers to people and parties who support a guiding role for Islam in politics and government. It covers a wide spectrum, from those who think Islamic values should inform public policy decisions to those who think all laws should be judged or even formulated by Islamic authorities to conform to Islamic law. Not all Islamists are alike. In some cases, Islamist leaders and organizations have been hostile to democracy, including some who have supported radical, extremist, and terrorist ideology and actions. But around the world, there are political parties with religious affiliations—Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim—that respect the rules of democratic politics, and it is in America’s interest to encourage all religiously based political parties and leaders to embrace inclusive democracy and reject violence. Any suggestion that faithful Muslims or people of any faith cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting, dangerous, and wrong. They do it in our own country every day.)
Some of the changes under Erdoğan’s leadership were positive. Motivated by the requirements of potential EU membership (which up to now has remained out of reach), Turkey abolished state security courts, reformed the penal code, expanded the right to legal counsel, and eased restrictions on teaching and broadcasting in Kurdish. Erdoğan also announced an intention to pursue a “Zero Problems with Neighbors” foreign policy. The initiative to resolve old regional conflicts and take a more active role in the Middle East was advocated by Ahmet Davutoğlu, one of Erdoğan’s advisors who later became Foreign Minister. Zero Problems sounded good, and in many cases it was constructive. But it also made Turkey overeager to accept an inadequate diplomatic agreement with its neighbor, Iran, that would have done little to address the international community’s concerns about Tehran’s nuclear program.
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