The new German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, made an excellent impression in Washington last week. He thoughtfully presented President Trump with an exact copy of the birth certificate of his grandfather, Herr Trumpf, who emigrated to America and became a hotelier catering to the mining community in the Northwest, though contemporary on dit was that his hotel had more of the characteristics of a bordello. The progress of that family in the new world is one of the most astonishing of the millions of vertiginous socio-economic successes of those who made the transition from the stratified and bloodstained soil and society of Europe to the meritocratic abundance of the new land of The Pursuit of Happiness.
Angela Merkel was ultimately a crushing disappointment to Germany’s friends in the United States as to Germany itself. Her submission to the outrageous demands of German Greens, the shutting down of Germany’s advanced nuclear power program, harassment of the German automobile industry, her appeasement of the Kremlin, both in refusing worthwhile defensive weapons to Ukraine and in attempting to make Germany an energy vassal state of the Russian natural gas industry, was an outrageous stance for the leader of the principal European economic power in NATO. She had every opportunity, including her electoral success, to be a worthy heir of Konrad Adenauer, the founder of the Federal Republic, and Helmut Kohl, the modern unifier of Germany, the greatest German chancellors since Bismarck.
Merkel narrowly defeated Merz for the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union in 2002, and Merz gradually withdrew from politics and spent 15 years as a very successful commercial lawyer and corporate advisor and put into practice his vigorous trans-Atlanticist views. He is that most refreshing type of Euro-integrationist who, unlike the school of Edward Heath and Jacques Delors and even Helmut Schmidt, all of whom saw “an ever-closer union” as ultimately a rival to the United States and reassertion, after a century of fascism and communism and World Wars, and the Cold War, of Western Europe’s supremacy in the world. Chancellor Merz sees Europe and America as allies, working closely in the common interest of Western values throughout the world.
In a sense and in proportion, and although his sabbatical from politics was lucrative, they were in political terms his wilderness years like Winston Churchill between his departure as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1929 and his return to the Admiralty in 1939, and Charles de Gaulle, waiting at Colombey from 1946 to 1958 for the Fourth Republic to flounder to an end as he had predicted it would. The contemporary political leader he most admired was Ronald Reagan, the chief author of the great and bloodless strategic victory of the West over the Soviet Union and international communism, of which the greatest single benefit was the reunification of Germany.
He twice subsequently attempted to gain the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union unsuccessfully in the declining phase of the somnolent Merkel era, and his ultimate elevation as leader of that party and now as Federal Chancellor constitutes both a formidable triumph of perseverance and a reorientation of that party from inert, torpid, and flaccid waffling to a revival of the Atlanticist vision and the reorientation of Europe as a market economy enterprise zone. Because of the contemporary prominence of anti-Israeli agitation in the West and the Gaza War, and particularly the joint declaration by French President Macron, British Prime Minister Starmer, and the new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney two weeks ago, threatening Israel with sanctions if it did not end its military activities in Gaza and announcing their inexplicable joint intuitive fantasy that a cease-fire would miraculously cause Hamas to be evicted from its tyrannical governance of that benighted cauldron, a statement Merz did not sign but partially endorsed, there was considerable curiosity in the United States about his views on these matters.
The new chancellor responded very persuasively that any imputation of anti-Semitism was doubly repugnant to Germans for reasons too infamous to require elaboration, and he and his government would in no circumstances or under any conditions do anything that could reasonably be construed as anything other than fiercely opposed to anti-Semitism, but that that did not require him to be in lockstep with every action of the government of Israel. Logically, he is correct: Of course, someone critical of the government of Israel need not be in conventional terms anti-Semitic and I’m sure the German Chancellor is not an anti-Semite. (Neither are Macron, Starmer, or Carney.)
But calling upon Israel to end its offensive and particularly appending the fatuous claim that doing so would mean the end of Hamas, effectively and presumably deliberately means the retention of Hamas in power in Gaza and the indefinite continuation of the terror campaign directed against the State of Israel from Gaza. After all that has gone on, it is difficult to consider that anything other than an anti-Semitic position, particularly distressingly so when such an opinion emanates from a person who undoubtedly sincerely abominates anti-Semitism. Merz is going to have to pick and choose a little more clearly between and among his objectives. Possibly the German leader can be both a Euro-integrationist and a trans-Atlanticist, a delicate balance, especially in Germany. But being a Philo-Semite and an advocate of the retention of Hamas in power in Gaza is almost impossible. There is a grave danger that such an effort will be ineffectual in all respects.
Chancellor Merz appears to be a good and capable man, the most impressive German leader since Kohl, but no one can suck and blow at the same time.
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