[Mb-civic] Merkel's Middle Way - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post
Op-Ed
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Thu Jan 19 10:35:25 PST 2006
Merkel's Middle Way
Chancellor Charting New Role for Germany
By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, January 19, 2006; A19
Angela Merkel chilled Vladimir Putin's Kremlin this week only a few days
after she thawed the Bush White House. The back-to-back visits were an
accident of scheduling. But they signal the determination of the new
German chancellor to put her own stamp on the foreign policy of Europe's
strongest country.
She hopes to end three years of strained if not hostile relations
between Washington and Berlin, as well as the lavish displays of
camaraderie and complicity that united German and Russian leaders.
Merkel is out to rebalance these key relationships -- but from a new
vantage point.
This is a tale of two cities reacting to the changes Merkel has begun to
chart since emerging as chancellor from September's electoral deadlock.
Showing surprising toughness and skill, she put together and now directs
a "grand coalition" of Germany's two major left- and right-wing parties.
In Washington, Merkel made a point of speaking -- both in public
statements and privately to President Bush -- of the strong "friendship"
that links the two NATO allies. In Moscow on Monday, she avoided such
displays of personal or rhetorical warmth. Instead Merkel spoke of "the
strategic partnership" that Germany wants to maintain with Russia.
She thus reversed the visible sentiments and priorities of her
predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder. That change was not lost on Putin. At
their joint news conference, the Russian president called Merkel "my
colleague" instead of "my friend," the term he always used for Schroeder.
The contrast in tone that Merkel's long weekend of diplomacy evoked in
Washington and Moscow was striking. On Friday, when their staffs joined
Bush and Merkel after a 40-minute, one-on-one conversation, Bush
emphasized to his aides that the two leaders had quickly become "George"
and "Angela" to each other. Merkel was to be treated as his friend.
The changes in atmospherics will go only so far in changing substance,
of course. Merkel will not alter Germany's refusal to send troops to
Iraq, and she faces huge obstacles at home to increasing defense
spending, as the United States urges.
Moreover, she was still compelled -- as she said she would be before
leaving Berlin -- to raise with Bush the troublesome subjects of secret
CIA kidnappings and hidden prisons in Europe and the imprisonment regime
at U.S. facilities in Guantanamo Bay.
But she carefully cast her comments as the concerns of a friend who was
worried about the damage being done to the U.S. image abroad -- much as
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has done in recent conversations with
Bush, according to U.S. officials. And when the president responded with
a forceful declaration that he had to take every precaution to prevent
terrorist attacks on Americans, Merkel listened respectfully.
For Bush -- even more than for most presidents -- all politics is
personal. He has told aides he could have forgiven Schroeder for
opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but not for allegedly misleading
Bush by promising not to use Iraq as a campaign issue in Germany's 2002
election. Schroeder used little else, and won.
Merkel's habit of explaining big points through her own life story -- a
51-year-old former East German physicist, she grew up in a communist
dictatorship and came to politics only after Germany's reunification in
1990 -- also seemed likely to bond her more closely to Bush than to
Putin, who served as a KGB officer in East Germany.
"She can talk to any Russian she wants to, in fluent Russian. Putin
monopolized Schroeder with his KGB-taught, fluent German," one U.S.
official observed approvingly. In Moscow this week, Merkel met with
citizens critical of Putin's rule and pressed the Russian leader on the
war in Chechnya.
But Merkel is not nostalgic for the Cold War or for an American
protectorate over Germany, which it created. She recognizes that
Germany, which imports more than one-third of its energy from Russia,
has to maintain a good working relationship with Putin's country.
In remarks to an enthusiastic group of American dignitaries at the
German Embassy here last week, Merkel tossed out an intriguing thought:
At times she might be able to play "the role of a mediator" for
Washington and Moscow, and "certainly not the role of someone who
polarizes" relations between the two powers. She did not mention Gerhard
Schroeder's name. She did not have to.
How a mediator's role would work is not clear. But Merkel's clear-eyed
realism about both Washington and Moscow makes her an interesting new
and potentially stabilizing force of leadership in a world sorely in
need of that quality.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/18/AR2006011801872.html
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