Germany is back. After eight years in which Berlin's foreign policy consisted largely of niggling the United States, cozying up to Russia and off-shoring its European policy to Paris, newly-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel has signaled a 180-degree about-turn. In a hard-hitting and unusually blunt speech Saturday to the Munich Conference on Security Policy, the center-right leader sketched out an ambitious foreign and defense policy for Germany over the next four years. "A united Germany is ready to shoulder more responsibility above and beyond the alliance area to secure stability in the world," Merkel told relieved delegates, who have become accustomed to German statesmen querying U.S. policies or engaging in torturous debates about sending soldiers abroad.To give former Chancellor Gerhard Schroder credit, his red-green government paved the way for Berlin's more muscular foreign and security policy of late. German troops are already present in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Sudan, the Horn of Africa, the southern Caucasus and Palestine -- a situation unthinkable a decade ago when the Bundeswehr was constitutionally barred from intervening overseas. They are also helping train Iraqi officers and provide the highest share of troops in NATO's new rapid reaction force. But Merkel, an East German who grew up under communist rule, wants Berlin to play an even more proactive role on the world stage. Like her predecessor, Gerhard Schroder, the Christian Democrat chancellor believes NATO should become the prime political body where transatlantic issues are discussed. Instead of letting controversial topics like Iran, energy security and the Mideast peace process fester, the Brussels-based alliance should tackle them head-on, she said. "A body that doesn't discuss political issues is not going to be able to reach a shared understanding of what its threats are," she told over 300 delegates to the annual security summit, who included U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.
Merkel also believes alliance leaders should agree a new strategic concept at a summit in 2008 to replace the one drawn up in Washington almost a decade ago. Unlike Schroder however, the new center-right chancellor is instinctively enthusiastic about the 26-member military alliance and optimistic about its potential to guarantee security and spread stability. "Do we want to give NATO the primacy to conduct necessary political consultations or do give it a more secondary role?" she asked. "I believe it has to be the primary forum and other routes have to be taken when a decision cannot be taken within NATO."
Schroder, a political opportunist who won a second election by campaigning against the war in Iraq, was always careful not to offend Moscow or speak out against corrupt and oppressive regimes in other parts of the world. Merkel has no such qualms. She lashed out at Russia for using energy supplies as a political tool in former Soviet republics like Georgia and Ukraine and even queries whether Europe is living up to its human rights rhetoric with China. But the recently elected chancellor, who enjoys 80 percent approval ratings, reserved her harshest words for the radical Islamist regime in Iran. Adopting a muscular tone rarely used by German leaders, Merkel likened recent remarks of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which he denied the Holocaust and called for Israel to be wiped off the map, to the rise of the Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Stating that Germany had learned from its history, she said Berlin would not tolerate a nuclear Iran.
Merkel's black and white view of politics is more reminiscent of her self-confessed hero Ronald Reagan than any of her recent predecessors. She warned the extremist group Hamas, which won last week's Palestinian Authority elections, to renounce violence and recognize Israel or face ostracism and even waded into the debate about Danish newspaper cartoons of Mohammed, saying Berlin stood by Copenhagen.
Merkel's speech was warmly received by Munich regulars, who in recent years have seen Rumsfeld clash openly with former foreign minister Joschka Fischler and a stand-in for Schroder question the relevance of NATO. Former U.S. defense secretary William Cohen told Merkel: "The tone, tenor and substance of what you said is quite different from what we have heard before...and we in the United States are very grateful."
Urging Berlin to show the same activism of new NATO members like Romania, U.S. Senator John McCain told new defense minister Franz Josef Jung: "Germany has been a bit quiet on the world stage in recent years, and yet it could assume a true leadership role within NATO -- one commensurate with its role as a leader of Europe."
So far, most of Merkel's lofty paeans to freedom and democracy remain at the rhetorical level and her ambitions will inevitably be tempered by career diplomats and a Social Democrat foreign minister who was Schroder's chief-of-staff for eight years. But American officials are at least relieved that she views foreign policy through the same prism. "Chancellor Merkel is raising issues of freedom, democracy and development as part of German and European foreign policy," said U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick. "For those of us who work closely with Germany, this is a change from the previous focus on stability."
Not everything Merkel says and does is music to Washington's ears -- she used a recent White House meeting with President George W. Bush to condemn U.S. policy towards terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay and has ruled out sending German troops to Iraq -- but at least the chancellor is willing to engage in a robust debate with the United States rather than snipe from the sidelines or attempt to brush differences under the carpet. "We need to hold a dialogue on rights versus security" she said. "If we don't hold this dialogue then slowly but surely we will move apart."