[Mb-civic] Merkel's Middle Way - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060119/3cbcfacf/attachment.htm