Mathias Döpfner’s new memoir The Trade Trap is part policy manifesto, part declamation of political beliefs.

NOVEMBER 7, 2023

With every political campaign comes a political memoir, a piece of fluff to facilitate its subject’s electoral ascent or public rehabilitation. This genre has a familiar, even predictable structure: part policy manifesto; part declamation of political beliefs, rich in pathos; part memoir, to prove that the author has access to the world’s most powerful people and deserves to be among them. Mathias Döpfner’s The Trade Trap: How to Stop Doing Business with Dictators is a variation on this genre, an announcement that its author, CEO of one of Europe’s largest media companies, is campaigning for something.

Döpfner, the head of the Berlin-based Axel Springer SE, has spent the last several years trying to conquer the U.S. market with the acquisition of Politico and Insider (still better known as Business Insider), among other sites and publications. After a set of scandals involving him and Springer — prominently investigated by the New York Times and the Financial Times — he has every reason to try to convince Anglophone elites that he is both a serious “thought leader” (we don’t say “intellectual” anymore, do we) and an establishment figure to be trusted. Of course, the book’s possible instrumental value does not invalidate its core proposal, which comes down to weaponizing trade in what Döpfner — just like U.S. President Joe Biden — portrays as a new global conflict between democracies and autocracies. In fact, there is a lot to be said for this idea — not least that the failures of Döpfner’s own Germany to bring about political transformations through trade with dictatorships show the need for an alternative approach that’s more morally and politically consistent.

Döpfner is one of Germany’s most controversial figures, working at the intersection of media, business and politics. After earning a doctorate in musicology, he first made his name as a cultural critic and then as an editor of various broadsheets, including the center-right Die Welt. In 2000, he joined the business side of Axel Springer SE, publisher of Europe’s bestselling daily, the tabloid Bild, and was appointed CEO two years later. From the beginnings of the company in 1946, Axel Springer, its founder, had committed his publications to staunch anti-communism, unconditional support for the state of Israel, and pursuit of the goal of German reunification (which is why the company’s high-rise headquarters were built right next to the Berlin Wall in the mid-1960s). Springer, and Bild in particular, were anathema to the New Left student movement (in a famous incident, protestors set fire to trucks that were about to deliver the paper) no less than left-liberal intellectuals, who swore never to publish even in the more sophisticated center-right broadsheets Springer owned.

Springer was never quite as influential as Rupert Murdoch (there is no equivalent of Tony Blair having to fly to meet Murdoch on a small island off of Australia to get his blessing before the 1997 elections). Still, the position of his company in Germany has been stronger than that of any media company in the U.S. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder boasted that all he needed to govern successfully were two of the Springer tabloids and Glotze, a colloquial term for TV. Angela Merkel, Germany’s leader from 2005 to 2021, no doubt benefited from the major “Refugees Welcome” campaign Bild launched in the fall of 2015 under an editor who wanted to make the tabloid look less like a toxic right-wing rag (three years later, Bild also ceased featuring photos of topless women).

Over the last several years, Döpfner has pursued international expansion and bet unreservedly on digital media. He has also cultivated his personal image as a Renaissance man overseeing the liberalization of the Springer brand as a whole. An avid art collector, he created a museum for “freedom” inside a villa next to Berlin’s Glienicker Brücke (known to Cold War aficionados as the Bridge of Spies); 2019 saw an exhibition of 45 works from his own collection, under the title “Nude: Female Bodies by Female Artists.” Any future luxury endeavors of this kind would be helped by the fact that, in 2020, Springer’s widow gifted him a large number of shares in the company as well as all her voting rights, making him a billionaire who could determine the fate of the company almost single-handedly (the other owners are U.S. private equity firm KKR and a Canadian pension fund).

“I love democracy,” Döpfner writes, telling readers that democracy “is the opposite of Auschwitz.”

Yet the image of the open-minded global entrepreneur was shattered by two recent, successive scandals. In 2021, news broke that Döpfner’s protégé at Bild, Editor-in-Chief Julian Reichelt, had apparently abused his power over female journalists; an extensive investigation by the Financial Times suggested that Döpfner and other Springer leaders had consistently mishandled the affair. Only when the scandal seemed to result in a major lawsuit in Los Angeles (a bad look in the eyes of U.S. investors, just as Springer was trying to close the Politico deal) was Reichelt relieved of his responsibilities (and sent on his way, reportedly, with a 2 million euro severance package).

But that was not the end of it. In April of this year, the respected German weekly Die Zeit published text messages and other internal Springer communication from Döpfner (the material, it was widely assumed, had been leaked by Reichelt). The messages revealed not only a curiously crude style — Döpfner mixed English and German liberally, with typos throughout — for a man assumed to be a subtle aesthete; they also revealed a visceral hatred of Merkel (apparently, Döpfner had long tried to prove through a special investigative team at Springer that she had connections to the Stasi or the KGB). There were contemptuous asides about East Germans (he appears to have considered them as fated to be either fascists or communists, since they had missed out on American reeducation), apocalyptic fears of Germany’s decline (he claimed that Merkel’s measures against COVID-19 — a mere flu dangerous only for the elderly, according to Döpfner — were destroying the market economy) and a strange need to reaffirm his own political beliefs (one text read: “Und natürlich: Zionismus über alles. Israel my country”).

Most shockingly, the leaked messages showed that Döpfner appeared to be instructing editors about how to influence political outcomes: Driven by deep animosity vis-à-vis the Greens, the progressive environmentalist party, he apparently hoped that Springer papers could boost the fortunes of the Free Democrats, the party devoted to promoting midsize business and “market freedoms” — to no avail.

The Trade Trap, apart from being a calling card to members of U.S. policy circles, is perhaps an attempt by Döpfner to come clean about his political beliefs and character as he goes about creating what is modestly called “the leading digital media company of the democratic world” (as of now, no German edition of the book has been announced). “I love democracy,” Döpfner writes, telling readers that democracy “is the opposite of Auschwitz.” The book’s main point is to dispel any notion that autocracies are better for business than democracies. He illustrates the idea with plenty of anecdotes featuring him and various world leaders. He recalls how in 2004, when he attempted to take over the British Daily Telegraph, he paid a visit to 10 Downing Street, where he tried to learn from Blair how German ownership of one of the U.K.’s venerable broadsheets would be perceived; Blair, Döpfner remembers, made polite, evasive remarks, stressing that he did not have the authority to say. By contrast, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s strongman, instantly helped with some of Döpfner’s investments that had been facing antitrust obstacles; Erdoğan simply made a few phone calls from a special lounge at Ankara Airport. The same Erdoğan, however, eventually cracked down on Springer’s major business partner in Turkey, Aydın Doğan, who apparently had been insufficiently deferential to the government.

Döpfner considers the hope that free trade could erode autocracies a long-standing illusion, which began in the early 1970s, when German Social Democrats proposed an opening to the Eastern bloc under then-Chancellor Willy Brandt — a policy that came to be known as Wandel durch Annäherung: “transformation through careful rapprochement.” This imperative eventually morphed into Wandel durch Handel, “transformation through trade,” and, even worse from Döpfner’s point of view, Wandel durch Verflechtung: “transformation through some form of entanglement.” The worst culprit of promoting the latter, according to Döpfner, was — no surprise here — Merkel (who in his view also failed to push the country into the digital age, spend enough on defense and organize the distribution of refugees across Europe properly in 2015).

For Döpfner, Merkel’s crucial strategic mistake was to shut down German nuclear reactors after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, thereby drastically increasing the country’s dependence on Russian gas. She failed to see, Döpfner writes, that her move would leave the country vulnerable to President Vladimir Putin’s “gas geopolitics” and, among other things, eventually encourage the Russian autocrat to invade Ukraine. She also was happy for major German companies to invest massively in China (most scandalously, Volkswagen operates a factory in Xinjiang, with the company’s CEO pretending that he has never heard about any Uighur internment camps). In fact, it was exports to China that ensured Germany did so well economically after the financial meltdown of 2008 and during the European debt crisis; today, Volkswagen sells 40 percent of its vehicles in China, and Chinese purchases make up a third of sales for BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

… Döpfner’s proposal is transformation through no trade. He wants to dissolve the WTO and have the West form a “Freedom Trade Alliance,” membership of which would depend on countries observing the rule of law, human rights and (largely undefined) carbon dioxide emission targets.

Döpfner does not mention it, but one could add an example even closer to home that illustrates Merkel’s choice of ignoring political dangers for the sake of prosperity: For years, she supported Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as he was steering his country away from democracy. Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi were all too happy to invest in Hungary, as they enjoyed what one observer called “Chinese conditions”: low wages and no pesky trade unions or overly onerous environmental regulations. The end result is that the European Union — supposedly founded on the “European values” of democracy, the rule of law and human rights — now contains an autocracy (or “Audi-cracy,” as another observer has put it). Merkel, once the most powerful politician in Europe, let all this happen, apparently in the name of an imperative of economic success über alles. Döpfner suggests that Merkel knew what she was doing and just hoped that the steep price for what he calls “change through opportunism” would never come due.

Döpfner says he thinks that even after the invasion of Ukraine, the West still has not properly learned its lesson. It has failed to appreciate what a mistake admitting China to the World Trade Organization has been (China’s membership meant “transformation through trade” all right, but the transformation was all in China’s favor and helped it to move to a totalitarian system under President Xi Jinping). Weak leaders in the democracies, Döpfner charges further, keep underestimating their adversaries. Beijing, Döpfner holds, will not limit itself to expanding its influence through dollars and deals (as in the Belt and Road Initiative) or data (through its leadership in artificial intelligence, driven by basically unlimited data collection — i.e., surveillance — at home); he believes that Xi may well make a military move on Taiwan at some point soon.

Given these perils, Döpfner’s proposal is transformation through no trade. He wants to dissolve the WTO and have the West form a “Freedom Trade Alliance,” membership of which would depend on countries observing the rule of law, human rights and (largely undefined) carbon dioxide emission targets. The hope is that a drastic decoupling from autocracies — really turning off the oil and gas taps — would encourage them to change, or at the very least nudge crucial countries that are trying to play both sides (India is the most important one) to unambiguously join the cause of freedom.

Döpfner leaves his big idea unencumbered with policy details (those, as he writes, are for others to work out). But to his credit, he concedes that those forming his Freedom Trade Alliance would first take a significant economic hit, which would make the proposal a hard sell to democratic publics. He counters that worry with two arguments: First, the damage for autocracies would be even larger (Russia, he claims, would face a 9.62 percent drop in prosperity, though it is hard to see how one could have such precise numbers, given the many variables involved); and second — and of existential importance for the West — “an orderly reduction of our codependency right now is smarter than waiting on a war with China.”

Döpfner does not hesitate to write in his book that “democracy is embarking on a new kind of enslavement. It is the enslavement of the free mind to authoritarian thought patterns.” So China is totalitarian, but the woke mob is also really, really dangerous? Seriously?

But will citizens in democracies be prepared to make the necessary sacrifices? Döpfner worries that we are all becoming flabby: Government spending sprees during the pandemic and in response to the war in Ukraine have supposedly left us simply too satisfied with “government-sponsored capitalism,” resulting in recessions without real unemployment. What’s worse, Western publics might lose not only their economic vigor but also their desire for freedom — they are willing to put up with “the constraints of political correctness” and “restrictions on freedom” for the sake of staving off climate change (which, in one of the leaked messages, Döpfner said he welcomed because “phases of warmth” have always been better for civilization than cold ones).

The discordance between Döpfner’s public remarks and private texts raises doubts about his promise to bring “nonpartisan journalism” to the U.S.; it also undermines his declaration that The Trade Trap is “as impartial and ideologically unpredictable as I am.” In fact, the book not only contains the studied symmetry or “bothsidesism” for which U.S. journalism has rightly been criticized (e.g., Donald Trump is destroying democracy, but three professors at a liberal arts college are also really, really dangerous — that kind of false equivalence); beyond the tired right-wing talking points, it also gives hints of the apocalyptic mentality that the leaked messages so vividly demonstrate: Döpfner does not hesitate to write in his book that “democracy is embarking on a new kind of enslavement. It is the enslavement of the free mind to authoritarian thought patterns.” So China is totalitarian, but the woke mob is also really, really dangerous? Seriously?

Döpfner’s main point — that, contrary to Milton Friedman, the business of business is not just business — is an important one, and as overblown as some of his animosity toward Merkel might seem, a critical revision of her image as the last truly rational and liberal defender of the Free World is also well under way among many of Döpfner’s compatriots. One does not have to share all of his über-hawkish views on China to agree that trade can create dangerous dependencies, and that it is indeed naïve to think autocrats will not at some point use the leverage “entanglements” can give them. But his points would have had more of an impact had he not tied them to a vanity project. It’s interesting to learn that Putin resents having his country be treated like an American colony (or so he told Döpfner in a conversation the two had in the Kremlin, in German). It’s less interesting to learn that Döpfner has met every recent U.S. president except Trump, and that George W. Bush, according to Döpfner, was the most “authentic,” a real “servant of democracy” (Springer papers took a resolutely neoconservative line in 2003, in the run-up to the Iraq War). But it’s positively distracting to have Döpfner boast at length about his long friendship with Henry Kissinger or recount in detail a friendly chat after hours with Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister from the Greens, the bête noire of Döpfner’s papers. But maybe, as with American campaign books, some audiences will be duly impressed.