ANGELA AT THE WALL:

On November 16, 2016, eight days after Trump was elected, Barack Obama flew to Berlin to meet with Merkel; it was the last foreign trip of his Presidency. Obama and Merkel had not started out as good friends, but they had become as close as two public figures could be. Over dinner in the Adlon Hotel, they discussed the shocking events of the previous few months, particularly Great Britain's referendum to leave the European Union and Trump's victory running on the slogan "America First." Through the windows of their private dining room, Merkel and Obama could see the floodlit Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of a reunified Berlin.

Merkel, who was nearing the end of her third term, confided that she reluctantly felt that she had to run again, in order to be a buffer against Trump, Brexit, and the surge of right-wing populism throughout Europe. Obama urged her to do so. "Obama was obsessed with the fate of Europe during his last year in office," Charles Kupchan, who served as Obama's top National Security Council adviser on European affairs and accompanied him on the trip, told me. After the election, the situation seemed even more urgent. "His view was that Merkel was needed to keep Europe together," Kupchan said. "He was afraid that, without Merkel, Humpty Dumpty was going to fall off the wall."

The dinner was emotional. Obama later told Benjamin Rhodes, his deputy national-security adviser, that he had said to Merkel that the Trump Presidency would be like a storm. Obama told her to just "try to find some high ground," and hold on to it, Rhodes recalled to me. By the time they said good night, three hours later, it was the longest that Obama had been alone with another world leader in his eight years in office. In an adjoining room, advisers to Merkel and Obama were concluding their own dinner. Rhodes offered a rueful toast: To Angela Merkel, he said, now "the leader of the free world."

Rhodes was not the first to bestow this title on Merkel. When Time named her its Person of the Year, in 2015, it called her "Chancellor of the Free World," citing her decision to take in more than a million refugees. Merkel's immigration policy infuriated Trump, and he seized on it to help define his candidacy for the White House. "I told you @TIME Magazine would never pick me as person of the year," Trump tweeted. "They picked person who is ruining Germany." He often brought the Chancellor up on the campaign trail in 2016, saying at a rally in March, "What Merkel did to Germany, it's a sad, sad shame."

Before the election, Henry Kissinger had visited Berlin, and he advised German officials to arrange a meeting with Jared Kushner, which they did, although the German policy élite, like the rest of the world, didn't think Trump would win. "We were extremely poorly prepared for this," Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German Ambassador to the United States, who now heads the Munich Security Conference, told me. "I think everybody has been in quite a state of shock."

After Trump was elected, other world leaders schemed to play golf with Trump or schmooze him at Trump Tower. Merkel, for her part, released a statement, at once congratulating the President-elect and subtly announcing their differences. It spoke of "common values," including "democracy, liberty, respect of the law and of human dignity."

The foreign-policy establishment, in both Washington and Berlin, told Merkel and her advisers that Trump was sometimes unpredictable and volatile, but not an existential threat. He was ignorant, but would be constrained by his staff. He didn't really mean what he said. One veteran of Republican Administrations recommended "strategic patience," telling a senior German diplomat to ignore the tweets and focus on policy. Other Europeans received similar advice and came to similar conclusions. Rob Malley, a senior Obama adviser on Europe, who now heads the International Crisis Group, said, of the French, "Their view was that you shouldn't take irreversible steps as the result of a reversible Presidency."

From the start, Merkel entertained no illusions that Trump could be easily managed. Still, she had surmounted serious differences with Trump's two predecessors, George W. Bush and Obama, and became close partners with both. When Merkel took office, in late 2005, Germany had not moved past its antipathy for Bush, whose invasion of Iraq had opened a rift with her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder. But Merkel and Bush got along, and their unlikely friendship was captured for the cameras when Bush gave her a back rub at a G-8 summit. With Obama, a decisive moment came in 2014, when Russia illegally annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Obama and Merkel worked together to form a coherent response to Putin's aggression, imposing sanctions and demanding peace talks. By 2016, they spoke as often as once a week and had what advisers for both leaders told me was a genuine personal and intellectual connection.

Russia figured heavily in the dinner conversation at the Adlon: Trump was threatening to abandon the Ukraine policy and embrace Putin. Obama's lobbying that night to get Merkel to run for a fourth term was, I've been told by German sources, critical in her considerations. "I think the Chancellor listened very carefully to what [Obama] said," a senior German official told me. As Rhodes recounts in his memoir, "The World as It Is," when Obama left the country, on November 18th, he thought he saw a tear rolling down Merkel's face as she said goodbye. Obama turned to Rhodes and said, "Angela, she's all alone." Two days later, Merkel announced that, because of "insecure times," she was running again. However, she cautioned those who hoped that she would be a foil for Trump and the Trump-friendly forces throughout Europe: "No person alone, not even the most experienced, can turn things to good in Germany, Europe, and the world, especially not a Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany."

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