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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Washington and Berlin are going through a painful breakup -- and this time, it may be permanent.
May 5, 2005 | The day before flying to Europe to bridge the deep chasm dividing the Old and New Worlds, President George W. Bush was asked to size up German-American relations.
His answer: "Almost the same as with France."
Ouch.
Have we all really turned into Gaullists just three and a half years after becoming Americans on Sept. 11, 2001? Did German postwar foreign policy really take a decisive turn in the run-up to the war against Iraq? Why did the "Berlin Republic" decide to abandon the intermediary role Germany had traditionally played between its best friends, France and the United States, and side with Paris and against Washington? Does Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Germany really garner part of its legitimacy from its rejection of an American crusade to create a democratic world, albeit one skewered on the end of a bayonet? And, finally, are we seeing the emergence of a new Europe that would resemble the old one vilified by Donald Rumsfeld -- and in truth be much older still: the Carolingian Europe of the Middle Ages? A Europe that might consider itself a counterweight to American hegemony and, dare we say it, provoke, risk or even be yearning for the division of the West?
That's what it boils down to. And the stakes are high. So high, in fact, that the thought alone prompts a rush of reassurance: the culprit, say the appeasers on this side of the Atlantic, is the president sitting in the White House, the Texas cowboy who pervasively polluted the atmosphere with his my-way-or-the-highway demands. Once he and his neoconservative buddies ride out of Washington, the sun will once again rise in the West.
Similar rumblings can be heard from the other side of the Atlantic: Richard Perle, for instance, the notorious neocon "prince of darkness," recently called for "regime change" in Berlin. He expressed his confidence that "once Schroeder leaves the scene, Germany will revert to its accustomed friendliness." The appeasers find nothing unusual in this: Despite the close ties, this is scarcely the first time the atmosphere between the two countries has been poisoned.
Venom has often been exchanged in the relationship between these two best friends.
Former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the architect of Germany's integration with the West, spelled out just what he thought of John F. Kennedy in his no-holds-barred, Rhinish manner: absolutely nothing. A gullible young fool who had evidently been hoodwinked by the Russians. Adenauer's successor, Ludwig Erhard, was mortified by a ranting Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office in 1965. The Texan lambasted the Germans as ingrates who had refused to support their friends in Vietnam. Captured by White House bugs, much of what was discussed between Henry Kissinger and his boss Richard Nixon on Willy Brandt's ostpolitik is not fit to be repeated. The most suitable statement for public consumption was Nixon's cutting appraisal of the German chancellor: "If this is Germany's hope, then Germany doesn't have much hope."
Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the global economist and statesman supreme, dished out criticism the same way his predecessor had taken it. In Schmidt's view, attempting to pin down his transatlantic partner Jimmy Carter, whom he considered -- at best -- a naive do-gooder, amounted to trying to "nail Jell-O to the wall." Helmut Kohl alone appears to have fared well with three U.S. presidents: In 1985 he dragged the first of them, Ronald Reagan, around a war cemetery in Bitburg, something that may have actually represented the start of the "new German normality." With George H.W. Bush, who later mused of making Germany "a partner in leadership," he put together a deal that cemented German reunification. And with the third, the bon vivant Bill Clinton, he ate his way through mountains of Filomena's fettuccine in Georgetown. Are the frictions between Berlin and Washington, which President George W. Bush's recent charm offensive in Mainz failed to smooth, really nothing more than a temporary cloud that will pass when the next leaders emerge on the horizon?
Probably not.
It's doubtful that things can ever be the way they were. A strange foreboding is creeping up on Germans as well as many Americans. A dawning that their nations' "steadfast friendship" rested primarily on identical strategic interests during the Cold War and that the enthusiasm for the United States exuded by much of postwar Germany was offset by misgivings about the alleged excesses of the American dream.
Very slowly, the liberators and liberated of Nazi Germany, those protecting and protected from the Soviet threat, are remembering the words of former British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, that nations don't have friends, just interests.
At the moment, one might say that the two countries' interests and their values are diverging. This is the only explanation for why hundreds of thousands of Germans cheered outside Berlin's Schoeneberg City Hall in 1963 when Kennedy linked the freedom of the whole world to the freedom of that divided city, and why German intellectuals shuddered 41 years later when Bush used the word "freedom" 30 times in his landmark address on transatlantic relations.
But in a speech to the Munich Conference on Security Policy, which German Defense Minister Peter Struck delivered on behalf of the flu-stricken Schroeder, the word wasn't offered once. Instead the speech referred to stability -- or a lack thereof -- no less than eight times. That alone was enough to convince American conservatives that the Germans have little interest in freedom and view continuity as the ultimate priority, even if it means cutting deals with ruthless tyrants. Americans believe that Ronald Reagan forced the Soviet Union to arm itself to death, thereby bringing it to its knees and bestowing freedom upon eastern Europe. Germans believe that Mikhail Gorbachev achieved this in a process they describe as "change through assimilation."
As a result, Germans regard U.S. attempts to enrapture the world with democracy as naive at best, while Americans take a cynical view of Germany's willingness to cooperate even with rivals. So there we are again: with that century-old clash between the American idealism of a president like Woodrow Wilson and a pragmatic European political rationale.
