Episode 130: Germany’s Transatlantic Coordinator on U.S.-German Relations
Jeff Rathke
President of AGI
Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.
Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.
Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an M.P.P. degree from Princeton University and B.A. and B.S. degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.
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Metin Hakverdi
Member of the German Bundestag (SPD)
Metin Hakverdi was a Distinguished Visitor at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University during the summer of 2019. He is a Member of the German Bundestag from the Social Democratic Party. In May 2025, he was named Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation.
Metin Hakverdi has been a member of the German Bundestag since 2013. He went to high school in Simi Valley, California, from 1985-86, studied law at the Christian-Albrecht- University in Kiel and the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and was licensed to practice as a lawyer in 2000. In the Bundestag, he is a member of the Committee for the affairs of the European Union and the Finance Committee. Hakverdi is Chairman of the Working Group on USA/North America within the SPD Parliamentary Group. He is a member of the German-U.S. Parliamentary Friendship Group in the German Bundestag, the Atlantik-Brücke e.V., and Global Bridges e.V. Metin Hakverdi has published numerous papers on the future of work, the liberal order, and populism in academic journals and newspapers.
Mr. Hakverdi's work during his time at AGI focused on issues of structural economic change, equitable transition, and their influence on the political system, voting and democratic institutions. He concentrated on changes that have affected the energy, steel, and automobile industries in the industrial belt of the United States. Mr. Hakverdi also assessed future structural changes that will come with advances in automation, digitalization, and globalization as well as the effects of competition.
Mr. Hakverdi conducted field travel between Detroit and Pittsburgh, where he conducted interviews with residents of the region on the structural changes of the past, their influence on the population, and their expectations and hopes for the future. Ultimately, these interviews were made public in Germany, in order to better explain to a German audience the relevance of economic structural changes in the U.S. for an important cross-section of Americans. Many similar structural changes have taken place in German industries as well (coal, shipping/harbors, etc.), so the individual experiences of Americans can contribute to a deeper transatlantic understanding—not only of institutions and national interests, but a sense of a shared destiny in democratic and open societies in times of international competition and turbulence.
Germany’s defense commitments are beginning to match the ambitions of the Zeitenwende, and Germany’s increased investments in European security are being noted in Washington. In his first visit to the United States in his role as Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation, Member of the Bundestag Metin Hakverdi (SPD) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss how Germany’s new approach to burden-sharing is impacting the wider U.S.-German relationship, his impressions from meetings with political leaders in the Midwest, and how, despite differences, the Merz government and Trump administration are working to find common ground.
Host
Jeff Rathke, President, AGI
Guest
Metin Hakverdi, Member of the Bundestag (SPD), Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation
Transcript
Jeff Rathke
Welcome to all of our listeners. I’m really pleased to have Metin Hakverdi with us today for this episode of The Zeitgeist. Metin, welcome.
Metin Hakverdi
Hi.
Jeff Rathke
Metin Hakverdi is the Transatlantic Coordinator for the German government. He is also a member of the German Bundestag, where he has been since 2013 directly elected from Hamburg, member of the Social Democratic Party, and someone who has been involved in transatlantic relations for many years as a legislator, as a former distinguished visitor at the American-German Institute, which is when we really first got to know each other back in 2019, but also as someone who spent time in the United States as a student in high school and university. So, someone who has decades invested in the relationship of the United States and Germany, and so it’s great to have you here.
Metin Hakverdi
Thank you for having me.
Jeff Rathke
You are here in Washington on July 25th and it’s the end of a week-long trip, but you’ve also been here with the German defense minister a couple of weeks ago, so that gives us a lot to talk about. But first, maybe just so our listeners understand: what does the Transatlantic Coordinator do?
Metin Hakverdi
Yeah, that’s a good question. I have difficulties answering it. So, my first job is to deepen the relationship between the United States and Germany. But I like the job description as being a translator on both sides of the Atlantic. I like that one better.
Jeff Rathke
We have had to the privilege of talking with some of your predecessors on this podcast, Peter Beyer and Michael Link from the CDU and the FDP respectively, and it strikes me that one of the important function of the Transatlantic Coordinator is that of course you have a home in the Foreign Office, and you are in that sense representing the government. You also have the freedom of a member of parliament to speak about things as you see them and to speak sometimes a bit more freely than a government official might. Is that a use you intend to make of this position as well?
Metin Hakverdi
I hope yes. I hope yes. It depends on the issue, of course. My goal is not to talk differently than other members of the government, but sometimes there’s a little more room for maneuvering. Yeah, maybe yes.
Jeff Rathke
And maybe to be a bit candid, perhaps. I was struck by that aspect as well when I was watching the contribution that you made to the debate in the Bundestag on the day that Friedrich Merz traveled to the United States. This was just a few weeks ago. He had his first visit as chancellor to Washington, met with President Trump in the Oval Office, and there was a Bundestag discussion of transatlantic relations that day. You hit a number of different notes, and I think together they make an interesting story. One thing you said was, “despite all the noise, despite the irritations, despite the at times, raw tone, the interests on both sides of the Atlantic unite us. The interest may not be identical, but in the major issues, the common overlapping interests dominate.” You went on to say that transatlantic relations are more than just shared interests. Freedom, human rights, the rule of law, separation of powers. These are the core of the Atlantic Revolution on both sides of the ocean—the American and the French revolutions—and their power continues to affect us. And then you also talked about the importance of democracy. I think maybe we’ll come back to that because the way that the United States administration and others in Europe talk about questions of democracy is starting to diverge. But before we get to that, let me ask what your impressions have been from this week that you’ve spent, your first visit in this capacity to the United States. Where do you see the accents and priorities that you want to bring to this role?
Metin Hakverdi
We are now in Washington, DC, obviously, but the beginning of my first trip in this position was not to the coasts, not to the big cities, but to Missouri, to the heartlands. And that was a very distinguished choice to go there for the first time for several reasons: for German heritage, because of a longstanding history of ties from Germany to the state of Missouri; because of the political situation in Missouri, Missouri is a red state; because of the future developments of German investments, economic interests and other particular ties, and I’ve never been to Missouri. It’s one of the eight states I haven’t traveled to so far. So, I took one off the list. Seven are left. That was also one smaller reason.
Jeff Rathke
Do you know which seven those are?
Metin Hakverdi
Yeah, of course.
Jeff Rathke
Can you rattle them off?
Metin Hakverdi
I hope I don’t forget one. So, it’s the two Dakotas, Hawaii, Alaska, Florida, and—which did I forget now? Montana, and Idaho, of course.
Jeff Rathke
OK, well, I’m sure Senator Rish will look forward to welcoming you in Idaho.
Metin Hakverdi
Actually, in Idaho— I went to high school in Southern California one million years ago and this one friend of mine I went to high school with moved from California to Idaho. So this is a long-standing promise to visit him, so yeah. That will be…
Jeff Rathke
OK, alright. So listeners in those states, be on the lookout for a visit coming soon, as they say, to a theater near you, Metin Hakverdi.
So, you started off in Saint Louis, but that was not your first trip this month. You were also with Defense Minister Pistorius as part of his delegation, when he met with his American counterpart Pete Hegseth. One of the things that you were talking about is the changing shape of support for Ukraine, where Germany is taking on a greater role and where there are new arrangements being put in place. Does this reflect a change in the security relationship between the United States and Germany? Can you put this in a bigger context for us, how that visit and the meeting between Boris Pistorius and Pete Hegseth reflects that changing relationship?
Metin Hakverdi
I think you have to put it in perspective with the chancellor’s visit to Washington earlier. So, after this administration got into office in Germany and obviously earlier this year in January in the White House. Those are the first meetings, so we would have had this particular situation even if it wasn’t for the challenges in Ukraine that they meet for the first time after everybody takes office. But with all the challenges we had in the past—and it’s still going to be really challenging support for Ukraine—my sense of all those meetings, and the third meeting is probably the NATO summit in in The Hague earlier, is that there is a there is a more positive path on our side and I would say western side to overcome challenges we had before. I find it slightly optimistic in the communication, but also what is decided on the ground.
Jeff Rathke
And a big part of that, of course, is the major step that the German Bundestag took to amend the Constitution and allow for new borrowing in order to meet defense spending targets. If I look at the projections, you know, frankly, in the past there have been targets agreed (2014, the 2% target), but the financial planning for the budget over the out years never matched up with those aspirations, and now it does. When I look at the targets in the budget for the next five years, actually, you see a quite rapid increase. So, do you feel this is different now than previous commitments to enhance Germany’s contribution to European security?
Metin Hakverdi
Well, of course, on the German side. But just one step back. It’s also the situation on the ground in Ukraine. The government of the Russian Federation doesn’t seem to be willing to compromise as maybe some in the administration of the White House expected or wished it to be, so that’s also a reality check. But you’re right, the big next step I would say in the Zeitenwende was the amending of our Constitution and with all my talks here in Washington and elsewhere in the United States, I always try to explain it. And it’s difficult because I’m a member of the Budget Committee so I can talk about this for hours and days. So, without giving you a constitutional lecture on how the debt ceiling works in Article 150 of our Constitution, what it means to get a two-thirds majority in our parliament where we are polarized, not as much as in the U.S. Congress, because we don’t have a two-party system, but still, the room for maneuvering is not the same as it used to be for so-called parties of the middle. With all those challenges, we managed to have a big, huge change in our constitutional, budgetary, financial setup that solves a lot of those challenges we had in the past. You mentioned 2014 and the and the 2% goal and that it didn’t really work out in our mid-term planning for this huge gap in 2018, which was a big issue that we have budget plans, which do not fulfill at the end of the Sondervermögen we established in 2022. So, those are fundamental details, but they are details. We had the debate about burden sharing before 2014; we had debates about burden sharing in the 80s and 60s of the last century, right? So, it is a permanent debate in the transatlantic relationship in spite of the fact that there are new challenges around. New challenges meaning, of course, the situation in Ukraine, but also you can call it “pivot to Asia” or “new priorities” or other challenging issues on the globe. It’s an old issue, burden sharing with partners and allies, and we’ve done a great step forward, and I will not get tired of explaining that to my American friends. Experts on the German politics and on German constitution know what a big step that was. But sometimes it’s because everybody has its own system of how budgets are getting developed. This is the biggest step for Germany to become a sovereign and better partner internationally since 1989 at least.
Jeff Rathke
Well, it’s remarkable when the commitment at the NATO summit in The Hague was to reach this new target of 5 percent, or 1.5 plus 3.5 percent within ten years. But if I look at the German financial planning, it is set to reach that in five or six years, at least for the 3.5 percent of GDP defense spending, so a very different picture than we’ve seen in the past.
Metin Hakverdi
Well, Jeff, you remember the time when we were getting out our calculators and trying to prove that we are getting to the 2 percent in some sense, and sometimes people in Washington challenged that calculation. Now we’re at a point where it is accepted in DC not only that we are reaching the spending goals, but that Germany gets into this leadership position. Leadership is, as you know, a difficult word in the German political sphere, generally speaking, not only because of our history, but also because of the European Union, and that we are a multilateralized system. But things are just urgent. So now we are doing that, and this has been recognized also by this U.S. administration. And very, very positively recognized by individuals of this administration that were super critical toward Germany in the past—super, super critical—and they really responded in the best way, if you look at the challenges that are out there in the future, to be a trustworthy partner on both sides of the Atlantic or a more trustworthy partner than in the past.
Jeff Rathke
One of the roles of diplomacy, of course, also is to find ways to address differences of opinion, different policies, conflicting interests. And this brings me back to another thing that you talked about in the Bundestag setting the stage for the first visit of the chancellor to the United States and that is, you spoke to the criticism that some people in the U.S. administration had made toward Germany on democracy and free speech issues. You made the point that Germany has its own strong traditions since the end of the Second World War in democracy, in defending fundamental rights, essentially rejecting the criticism. But how does that sort of rough tone that you hear sometimes from Washington now, toward Germany on those fundamental values issues, how does that land in Germany? How does it strike you? How does that fit into your role as coordinator to deal with those difficult issues?
Metin Hakverdi
Well, thank you for really listening and reading what has been said in that debate in the Bundestag. This is the beginning of May when that debate happened. And this was under the deep impression of the German public on the speech of JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference and of other statements of the administration. And it was also at a time where we agreed to amending the Constitution early, before we had the coalition treaty, right? It was very early. You need the two-thirds majority.
Jeff Rathke
It was actually the previous Bundestag which did it before they left office.
Metin Hakverdi
But it was a process of really getting to the point that you are having that set up, having a budget plan, having a spending plan, having all those numbers we have now. To have a NATO summit, to have this leadership position, it’s a process. So, this was just one day in that process , I would say, since the election in February.
But it was the day when Friedrich Merz traveled to the U.S., and JD Vance’s speech was, as you remember, in February before the election. So if I look at those months, I would say the challenges of different, not ideas, but issues of what is allowed under a democratic government and in between democratic states is always an issue. But the tone I heard here this week and particularly with our meeting in the Pentagon with Boris Pistorius Monday last week, we are much further in our dialogue about the role of Germany and the U.S. with those future challenges. Much more about interests. Much less, if at all, the issues of free speech concerning the support from outside for the AfD in Germany. You witnessed that debate in Germany. I haven’t heard this at all, not one single time, during my time here, this visit and the visit last week.
So yes, it is an issue. It’s a permanent issue, but whether it’s a serious deep problem depends on the situation, depends on the issue, depends on our strategic outlook for the future. And I think after this debate at the beginning of May, we’ve had all these steps. We have a budget plan now. We have a development in Ukraine and the Russian Federation that was not really inspiring and not really supporting a more cooperative way toward Russia. On the opposite, I think members of this administration in the U.S. are now realizing that it’s not that easy dealing with Russia as they as they wished it to be.
On the basis of common interest, we worked on our room for maneuvering accepting differences. And by the way, the differences are still there in a more technical way: take digital services, take the ,so to speak, vetting process of free speech under European rule for social media. Those problems are still out there. But you can read, there are libraries full of constitutional comparisons of freedom of speech from flag burning to pornography. Those are the classics in comparative law and constitutional law. Those will be still out there, but whether it will lead us to the fundamental question of, “Is Germany still a democracy?” versus “Is the United States still a democracy?” I would say clear, “Yes, it is at this point.” It could be challenging in the future as well, so we will all have a close look at this.
Jeff Rathke
I’m going to wrap it up there because I’m sure we will hear more from you, Meitn Hakverdi, in the future, whether it is here at AGI (perhaps again on this podcast), but also in your role as an interpreter of the United States to Germany and Germany to the United States. We look forward to hearing a lot more from you in that capacity. Thank you for coming by.
Metin Hakverdi
Thank you.
Jeff Rathke
And we look forward to having all of you listeners with us on the next episode of the Zeitgeist.
