She is a representative of US establishment.

Her husnand was Stanford prof. and she lived in US quite sometime, some of her children were born in US(us citizen at least used to be). Under Merkel, she was defence minister, because of her phd thesis plagiarism,. didn't have good reputation. She was not picked as Merkel's successor.  However, EU has an unofficial rule---- lost domestically goes to EU leaders, look at  who are on the EU, Nato boards, former Belgian PM, Dutch PM, Norway, Portugal, Germany....