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Body
language is louder than words at the White House
Barbara Ellen
Angela
Merkel is just the most recent leader who refuses to be cowed by the
president’s body language
Sunday 19 March 2017
00.05 GMT
So, what’s the
latest on body language in the White House? Many have been enjoying
Trump’s “hands-on” approach to foreign leaders. There was the
infamous cuddle that Theresa May received (anyone else think that she
looked as though she was about to be bundled into the back of a
moving van?). Then there were all those arm pumping/limb yanking/hand
clasping displays of alpha-handshaking that Trump bestowed upon male
leaders.
However, last week,
Trump produced a curiously subdued handshake with Irish prime
minister Enda Kenny. Trump was also forced to stand with a face like
a crumbling urinal cake, while Kenny spoke warmly of St Patrick “The
patron saint of immigrants”.
Later, when Trump,
using his rumoured second language, English, blathered about
wiretapping, German chancellor Angela Merkel could barely suppress a
contemptuous grimace. Merkel didn’t get a lovely cuddle, she was
even denied an Oval Office handshake, to which she responded with the
serene expression of a mother refusing to be provoked by her
armpit-farting teenager. All this during just one week – dare we
dream that the right kind of body language is finally winning the
silent battle of the words in the White House?
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Merkel’s
Ivanka moment
German
chancellor was willing to put up with a lot to make her Washington
visit a success.
By MATTHEW
KARNITSCHNIG 3/18/17, 1:19 PM CET Updated 3/18/17, 4:38 PM CET
BERLIN — In the
end, Angela Merkel couldn’t hide it. Seated next to Ivanka Trump at
a White House meeting with business leaders on Friday, the German
leader tilted her head in the first daughter’s direction as Ivanka
spoke, a look of bewilderment tinged with disdain enveloping her
face.
“Why are you
here,” Merkel, never a good pretender, seemed to be thinking.
On a day filled with
awkward moments, probably none was more cringe-worthy to German eyes
than the picture of the president’s glamorous daughter, prim as an
American Girl doll, perched next to no-nonsense Merkel as she praised
her father’s commitment to job creation. “Ingenuity, creativity
often comes from the determination of the private sector,” Ivanka,
who hawks handbags and jewelry over the Internet, told the meeting of
blue-chip CEOs.
Whatever her true
feelings, the world’s most powerful woman, relegated to a prop for
Ivanka’s Twitter feed, did her best to play along. Too much was at
stake.
Merkel’s strategy
In the run-up to the
Merkel-Trump meeting, some observers predicted the issues that divide
them — immigration, the president’s plans to build a wall along
the Mexican border and free trade — could derail the visit.
Yet Merkel’s main
aim on the trip was prove to Donald Trump that Germany was a friend,
not a foe. She resolved to avoid contentious topics to the degree
possible and focus on the bonds that have held the transatlantic
alliance together for decades.
To that end, Merkel
brought along CEOs from some of Germany’s biggest companies,
including BMW and Siemens, to intone their continued commitment to
U.S.-based production. She repeated Berlin’s promise to spend more
on its defense and thanked the U.S. for the central role it played in
reinventing Germany after the war.
However unsavory
Merkel and her countrymen may find Trump, Germany has no viable
alternative to the U.S. partnership, either in economic or security
terms.
The strategy appears
to have succeeded. Trump praised Germany’s vocational training
system as a model for the U.S. Though he stopped short of calling for
even closer business ties, something German industry had been hoping
for, Trump stressed the importance of strong trade between the two
countries, as long as it was “fair.”
“We don’t want
victory, we want fairness,” he said.
While he didn’t
endorse the European Union, as Merkel had hoped, he reiterated his
“strong support” for NATO, with the usual caveats that alliance
members “pay their fair share.”
All in all, it was
the best Merkel probably could have hoped for.
If Trump wants this
to go well, he should make Merkel feel at home in Washington. A
humble lunch of meatballs and potato salad is one way of making that
happen.
Given Trump’s
repeated and harsh insults of Merkel and her refugee stance during
the campaign and afterwards, a warm embrace would have been both
unrealistic and unconvincing. Most of this disharmony was non-verbal.
Merkel shot Trump a skeptical glance during the press conference, for
example, when he quipped that both of them appeared to have been
wiretapped by the Obama administration. Trump either didn’t hear or
ignored her when she suggested they shake hands in front of reporters
(they had shaken hands at other times on Friday).
Germans don’t like
Trump. Nearly 70 percent do not think it’s good that he became
president. So for Merkel, who faces a tough reelection fight this
year, cozying up to him was never her intention. A polite Teutonic
distance is what the home crowd wanted to see. And that’s exactly
what they got.
‘Cautiously
friendly beginning’
Optics aside, the
most notable aspect of the meeting was that it was fairly mundane.
“Nothing about it
was sensational or out of the ordinary,” conservative German daily
Die Welt concluded. “But in the anything-but-normal Trump era,
normality itself can be a sensation.”
The overall tenor in
the German press was that while the first Merkel-Trump meeting was
far from relaxed, it wasn’t as bad as some feared. The liberal
Süddeutsche Zeitung described the encounter as “a cautiously
friendly beginning.”
Trump and Merkel
will never be bosom buddies. What Merkel is counting on is a
productive relationship.
However unsavory she
and her countrymen may find Trump, Germany has no viable alternative
to the U.S. partnership, either in economic or security terms.
If a few pained
grins and a stilted photo-op of with Ivanka are the price Merkel has
to pay to preserve the U.S.-German relationship, so be it.
The ceremonial Oval
Office handshake notwithstanding, Merkel got what she came for.
“We had a
conversation where we also tried to address areas where we disagree,
but we tried to bring people together and find a compromise that is
good for both sides,” Merkel said.
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