Angela Merkel Comes to Washington

(Nov. 3) -- As the first German chancellor in more than a half-century to address a joint session of Congress, Angela Merkel had history on her side Tuesday. Few politicians can speak more convincingly than this former East German physicist of "the overwhelming gift of freedom" that materialized with the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, making her remarkable political career possible.

But Merkel faces a more practical challenge in tearing down the wall between the U.S. and Europe on Afghanistan and climate change, chief among a range of issues. "It's time for the real Angela Merkel to please stand up," said Michael Haltzel, a former senior staff member at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and now senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations. "She has the potential to be a great leader of Europe, but she has to assert herself."

There is evidence that she knows her time has come. Merkel has had her invitation from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for months, but she waited for a moment of strength and symbolism to act on it. After being sworn in for a second term last week, she now heads a new coalition much more supportive to her moderately conservative yet pragmatic brand of politics than the fractious one she shared with the Social Democrats since 2005.

Her electoral victory has helped elevate Merkel to Obama's leading partner in Europe, partly by default. Polls give British Prime Minister Gordon Brown almost no chance of winning elections next year, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy's sometimes flighty dynamism still hasn't amounted to a real claim on European leadership.

That leaves Merkel to take control in her understated way. At a meeting of European Union leaders in Brussels last week, she was the decisive figure in blocking former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's bid to be the first president of the European Union when a reform treaty finally takes effect later this year.

Merkel got a standing ovation from congressional Democrats -- and stony silence from the Republicans -- when she used her most evocative prose to push for globally agreed cuts in carbon emissions. "Just as we had the might in the 20th century to bring down a wall of barbed wire and concrete," she said, "today we have the might to get over the walls of the 21st century, the walls in our heads, the walls of shortsighted self-interest, the walls between the present and the future."

In fact, there is far more consensus in Europe for an agreement at the United Nations climate conference in December in Copenhagen. Merkel knows the chances are slim to nil that U.S. legislators still enmeshed in the health care debate will endorse an American position on global warming by then.

"We have become realists" regarding Copenhagen, the chancellor said before she left for Washington. She has no illusion that a full-blown treaty governing emissions will emerge next month. What she does want is an international binding agreement setting up a political framework for further progress, and even that will be hard to get.

On Afghanistan, Merkel also has scant room to maneuver. "There's a vacuum now as the Obama administration decides on its policy; no one in Europe is going to put a foot forward now on more troops," said Jeffrey Anderson, director of the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University.

But that hiatus won't last long. Until now the mainstream political parties have generally agreed to maintain -- but not increase -- Germany's contingent of 4,100 troops in Afghanistan. But the pressure to pull out could increase as public frustration grows and the Social Democrats move into opposition. "The government is going to be forced to come up with a public rationale for being in Afghanistan," said Anderson. "It can be done, but it has to come from leadership."

Haltzel agrees. "Right now there is no German or European politician expressing how important Afghanistan is for Europe," he said. Once he decides what the United States will do there, Obama might well be hoping that's a task that Angela Merkel will take on.