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‘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

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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In German, the word for ambassador is Botschafter, which, translated literally into English, means “messenger.” The word says a lot about the way Germans view the role—and about why Grenell’s arrival has been what more than one person described to me as a “wake-up call” to Germany’s political world. An ambassador’s primary function is to serve as a go-between, German politicians and diplomats say—to explain and relay messages between the two countries.

Grenell, however, clearly views his role as a much more active one. Multiple sources from across Germany’s political, diplomatic and policy corps who have met him or been present for his meetings with high-level German officials say Grenell has made it clear he doesn’t want to be a messenger. Instead, these sources say, he sees himself as a “player” who has a role in influencing policy decisions—and a portfolio extending beyond just Germany to Europe more broadly. In return, Berlin sees Grenell first and foremost as someone who is here to sell Trump and Trumpism on this side of the Atlantic.

“He does not understand what the role of an ambassador should be,” says Nils Schmid, foreign policy spokesman for the center-left Social Democrats in parliament. “An ambassador is a bridge-builder who explains how American politics works, how the American government works, and at the same time explains to America how Germany sees things.” But Grenell, Schmid says, has “defined his role for himself, and it is not the traditional role of an ambassador. … He will work as a propagandist.”

That nontraditional role began the day Grenell arrived on the job in Berlin. After a lengthy confirmation process—Senate Democrats objected, for one thing, to controversial statements he had made on social media—Grenell formally presented his credentials to German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on May 8, the same day Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. Later that same day, Grenell tweeted a missive suggesting that German businesses “immediately” cease doing business with Iranian companies. The condemnation from across Germany’s diplomatic world was swift: “Never tell the host country what to do, if you want to stay out of trouble,” tweeted Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference and a former German ambassador to the United States. “Germans are eager to listen, but they will resent instructions.”

What Germans resented even more, it turns out, was an interview with the alt-right Breitbart published a few weeks later. When Grenell said in the multi-installment interview that it is his goal to “empower” conservatives across Europe, Berlin political types took those comments to refer to far-right populist parties like the Alternative for Germany. In the same interview, Grenell issued strong praise for Austria’s Kurz, whose hard-line immigration policies often put him at odds with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Germany’s Foreign Office soon asked for “clarification” from Grenell, and German politicians began crying foul, calling the interview at best undiplomatic and at worst a fireable offense. Grenell later said his comments had been misconstrued: “The idea that I’d endorse candidates/parties is ridiculous,” he wrote on Twitter. “I stand by my comments that we are experiencing an awakening from the silent majority — those who reject the elites & their bubble.” (The State Department also came to Grenell’s defense, with spokeswoman Heather Nauert saying, “Don’t we as Americans have the right to free speech?”) But even the choice of outlet—Breitbart has made no secret of its admiration for far-right populist parties across Europe—sent a clear message about the kind of audience Grenell seemed to want to reach in his new role.

That public tension mirrored the way things had started out behind the scenes as well. Grenell’s first meeting at the German Foreign Office, with State Secretary Andreas Michaelis, took place the same day as Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran deal. The tone of the meeting was “acrimonious,” according to a Foreign Office source with knowledge of the interaction, partly because of Trump’s Iran decision and partly because Grenell came in ready for a fight. Grenell “wants to be an amplifier for a president who clearly does not need an amplifier,” the source said. “What we need is the opposite.” (Subsequent meetings at the Foreign Office, the source noted, including Grenell’s first meeting with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, went significantly more smoothly.)

Given the president who sent him here, perhaps Germans shouldn’t have been surprised by the way Grenell has handled the job so far. But, beyond his own diplomatic snafus, Grenell is an in-your-face reminder to Germans of how diplomacy has changed in the age of Trump. For much of Trump’s first year in office, German officials hoped the brash real estate developer’s campaign-trail threats would remain confined to Twitter. This year, beginning with the appointment of Grenell’s old boss John Bolton as national security adviser, it has become abundantly clear that Trump intends to follow through. “Broadly speaking, I don’t think Grenell matters—the issue is Trump,” says Almut Möller, head of the Berlin office for the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank. Earlier in Trump’s presidency, Möller says, “there was the hope that this is Trump and there are adults in the room that will prevent him from doing this stuff. And that is not the case. He is basically dismantling the international legal order that Germany really needs and adheres to.”

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Since the furor over his Breitbart interview, Grenell has kept a somewhat lower profile, prompting those in Berlin who have met with him since to say he truly seems interested in learning from his early mistakes. Another meeting with Michaelis and others at the Foreign Office earlier this month, shortly after the Breitbart interview came out, was ultimately quite amicable, according to the Foreign Office official. Grenell apologized for the interview, the official said, and explained that he had not intended to cause such a stir. Peter Beyer, a member of Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats and the transatlantic coordinator in parliament, described the atmosphere at the meeting as “friendly and constructive,” but added that it included its fair share of “contentious issues.” What’s most important, Beyer says, is sitting down and discussing things face-to-face: “For me, speaking with each other instead of tweeting at each other is the right way to work together in partnership.”

Last Monday, as his boss was issuing a midair tweetstorm decrying America’s longtime allies after the G-7 summit in Canada, Grenell canceled an appearance at an event hosted by the German Marshall Fund. Two days before it was scheduled to take place, Grenell’s planned lunch with Austria’s Kurz was canceled for “scheduling reasons,” according to the U.S. Embassy. And at an off-the-record reception hosted on June 12 by the Aspen Institute in his honor, Grenell spoke warmly about the transatlantic relationship, saying the United States stands with Germany and downplaying talk of a potential trade war. After his brief remarks, Grenell held court with attendees at the Pan Am Lounge in Berlin’s Charlottenburg neighborhood, working the crowd and speaking with people in small groups. It was, in other words, an ambassadorial appearance far more in line with what one would expect. On Twitter similarly, Grenell’s most recent missives from Berlin include pictures with U.S. Marines watching Germany’s first World Cup match and a meeting with officials from the Finance Ministry.

“Hopefully, we’ll see a learning curve on both sides,” says Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute, another think tank in Berlin. “[Grenell] walked back some of the things that were most offensive to German ears and canceled the Kurz meeting, so he seems to have realized that maybe he went a bit too far in his desire to please President Trump.”

There’s opportunity on the German side as well, Benner and others have argued: If Berlin stops being outraged and starts accepting the reality that Grenell is who he is, Germany can potentially take advantage of Grenell’s direct ties to the White House. “I welcome the fact that the American government, with Ambassador Grenell, has sent a representative to Germany who represents the government and has access at the highest level,” says Beyer, the transatlantic coordinator. “This is an expression of the importance the American government attaches to its relationship with Germany.”

Still, it’s unclear whether and how this new kind of ambassadorship will continue to clash with German perceptions of the job. “That depends on the future,” says Liebich, the Die Linke MP, asked whether Grenell could reverse the early impression he has made here. “Everyone can make mistakes.” The Foreign Office official put it this way: “He has a great job—if he wants to do it the usual way.”