Bush calls chancellor
President Bush called German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to express his condolences about the deaths over the weekend of four German soldiers in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan. It was a gracious and necessary call, and it broke, with the exception of a pro forma handshake at the G-8 summit, more than six months of icy silence on Bush’s part toward the German leader.
Schroeder got crosswise with the White House by a political campaign that verged on America-bashing and by opposing, along with French President Jacques Chirac, the U.S.-led war on Iraq.
The circumstances of the call, however, dramatized the point that we are, after all, long-standing allies and really do need each other’s help. The Germans are an important ally – and, even at the low point in relations with the United States, willing to assume a peacekeeping role in Afghanistan. The attack showed that those duties are far from over.
Similarly, the French have taken on a difficult and dangerous mission in Congo as the head of a European Union peacekeeping force. The history of peacekeeping missions in Congo has been too little, too late and too timid. If Congo is to be rescued from anarchy, the United States may find itself backing a call for a larger, more aggressive multinational peacekeeping force, one that would necessarily include the French and Germans.
Chirac and Schroeder’s opposition to the Iraq war, sometimes verging on obstructionism, rankled the United States. But both are freely elected leaders of open democracies, and their opposition clearly reflected the will of their voters. We may think it was wrongheaded, but it doesn’t change the fact that we have a lot of global issues in common that require cooperation and civility.
We trust that at some more auspicious occasion down the road it will be Schroeder who picks up the phone.