Managing the Merkel Meeting
By Dr. Jackson Janes

A Meeting on New Grounds
While George W. Bush and Angela Merkel have met before, the meeting in Washington next week is the first time she will be greeting the President as Chancellor. No longer the opposition leader she was when she last visited Washington in 2003, Merkel now is head of a complicated and fragile coalition government with her recent campaign rivals, the Social Democrats. In both the domestic and foreign policy arenas, her room for maneuver as Chancellor will be shaped by what the coalition can agree on. Merkel has made it clear that she wants to build a relationship built on trust between Washington and Berlin. Her Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, made the same point during his visit to Washington last November. How successful that effort can be will depend on an often-unpredictable mixture of both domestic politics and foreign policy developments. The challenge for both the President and the Chancellor will be to manage a meeting that sends the right messages to each other and to the public about the reasons these two countries need to be working together.

The White House is preparing a warm welcome for Merkel, who they see as an important partner for the remaining three years of the Bush presidency. Having just been elected Chancellor in November, Merkel has a political trajectory over the next four years, longer than the current leadership in Britain, Italy or France. In addition to picking up support at home in her initial weeks in office, she is quickly emerging as a savvy political player on the European stage. She demonstrated that last month in Brussels by helping to broker an agreement on the EU budget and with a visit to Poland to set a new tone for what have been tense relations between Berlin and Warsaw. She will put her foreign policy skills further to the test when she visits Moscow and Beijing in the near future, where the complicated issues of trade, human rights and energy supplies are all on the agenda.

Symbolic Gestures
Without expecting to announce any new specific policy initiatives, the White House is looking for an opportunity to talk with the new Chancellor about how Germany and the European Union can help deal with these and other challenges. In fact, just talking may be enough of an agenda for this first meeting. Given the emphasis on changing the mood of the relationship between Washington and Berlin, the White House decision to offer the Chancellor a chance to spend the night at Blair House, the White House guest house, is as important a gesture as the extended visit with the President during the next day.

The measure of success of this visit will be reflected in what Chancellor Merkel can take back to Berlin as much as in the chemistry between the two leaders. The well-known importance of the President's personal connections with his counterparts will play a role as he meets with Merkel. Yet it will be equally important for the Chancellor to come across as a person who knows her own mind and the interests of her country when dealing with the superpower. Given the continuing widespread dislike of the President in German public opinion, Bush needs to deliver a public message of having confidence in and respect for the German leader, including an acceptance of differences of views and approaches to the foreign policy agenda. That will help her back home and in Brussels; it will also help Bush develop the basis for a stronger partnership. Chancellor Merkel has called for a transatlantic relationship that is based on trust. A trust-based relationship is always a two-way street and requires equal parts respect to manage it well.

Changing Relations, New Opportunities
During the past decade, there have been a series of developments which have changed the ways Germany and the United States relate to each other. As Germany unified, the European Union expanded, and the United States emerged in the twenty-first century as both all-powerful and still vulnerable, the web of interdependence has been transformed. No longer dependent on the protection of the American military to help defend its borders from Soviet tanks, Germany is now helping others to defend themselves, specifically in the Balkans and Afghanistan. There are many areas in which Germany and the United States find common cause, and others that they can disagree on without risking a total meltdown of the relationship.

During Merkel's presumed four year tenure as Chancellor, German-American relations will have numerous opportunities to mark milestones of post-World War II success stories. The sixtieth anniversary of the Berlin airlift will occur in 2007, the year during which Germany will have the rotating presidency of the European Union and host the G-8 summit. One year later, the same anniversary of the Marshall Plan takes place and in 2009, six decades of the Federal Republic of Germany can be celebrated along with the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.

Those reminders of the success stories in the early years of the German-American relationship should not be occasions for nostalgic looks back in history, but rather catalysts for discussions about how we can continue to build on them in a very different environment today. What do we need to learn from our previous successes and our mistakes to continue a healthy dialogue? How we need each other is different than six decades ago, but that we need each other has not changed. We need to talk about both - the visit of Chancellor Merkel is another opportunity.
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This essay appeared in the January 6, 2006 AICGS Advisor.

Please direct comments to: jjanes@aicgs.org