'He Does Not Understand What the Role of an Ambassador Should Be'

U.S. Ambassador Ric Grenell managed to shock and offend Berlin’s political class in his first month on the job. Now protocol-loving Germans are wondering—will he learn to change?

By EMILY SCHULTHEIS June 25, 2018

ERLIN—On an unusually warm late May evening, newly minted U.S. Ambassador Richard (“Ric”) Grenell sat front and center at a reception in the lofty atrium of Deutsche Bank’s main branch in Berlin. The event was celebrating a U.S.-German journalism exchange, and the keynote speaker, Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, began by reminiscing warmly about his experience as a young journalist participating in the program in San Francisco in the late 1980s. Mid-speech, however, he launched into a critique of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. “It seems as if the relations between Germany and the U.S. are worse than ever,” Döpfner said, “maybe the worst since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany.” As he continued, many eyes in the room darted to Grenell, who listened to an English translation through headphones. Grenell sat patiently, no noticeable reaction showing on his face, but the looks and murmurs exchanged in the room were a sign of palpable tension.

This would be a challenging time for the U.S. ambassador in Berlin regardless of who he was: Ask any German diplomat or politician about their country’s relationship with America under Trump, and most would wholeheartedly agree with Döpfner. (Axel Springer and Politico have a joint partnership in Brussels.) Trump’s decisions on the world stage this year—especially backing out of the Iran deal and the Paris climate accords, and hitting the European Union with steel and aluminum tariffs—mean the once-deep well of goodwill for Americans in Germany is running perilously low.

But Grenell is an ambassador who seems tailor-made to exacerbate these new tensions. It is hard to overstate just how brashly he has charged onto the Berlin political scene during his first month in town. With a tweet (instructing German businesses to “wind down operations immediately” in Iran), an interview (in which he told Breitbart News he hoped to “empower” conservatives across Europe), a meeting (with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seen as a breach of protocol for another country’s ambassador to arrange) and an invitation (to host Austria’s young, hard-line anti-immigration chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, whom Grenell referred to as a “rock star,” for lunch), Grenell has managed to shock and anger Berlin’s political and diplomatic elite. The 51-year-old ex-United Nations spokesman’s outspoken rhetorical style, his tendency to channel the president who sent him here and, perhaps most important, his outsize perception of his job stand in stark contrast to U.S. ambassadors who came before him—and have rubbed protocol-loving Germans exactly the wrong way.

“None of his predecessors intervened in domestic politics or created controversy in such a way,” says Stefan Liebich, a member of the German parliament’s foreign affairs committee from the left-wing political party Die Linke. “It’s very, very unusual, and I was surprised and disconcerted by it.” (Grenell, through a press officer at the U.S. Embassy, declined to comment for this article.)

Liebich was far from alone in his assessment of Grenell’s first few weeks on the job. Martin Schulz, the former chancellor candidate and leader of the center-left Social Democrats, said Grenell sounded more “like a far-right colonial officer” than a diplomat in his Breitbart interview; Sahra Wagenknecht, leader of Liebich’s Die Linke, called for Grenell’s expulsion from Germany. Things started off rocky behind closed doors, too, as Grenell clashed with top Foreign Office officials in his first days in the job. The ambassador is, however, reportedly willing to learn from his mistakes and has since worked to tone down his Trumpian rhetoric: He apologized for the Breitbart controversy in a meeting with officials from the Foreign Office, according to someone with knowledge of the encounter, and has kept a lower profile in the weeks since the controversy. Even his Twitter feed has, it seems, been tamer in recent weeks. But here in Berlin, Germans are still watching him very closely.

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/25/ric-grenell-berlin-trump-218890