Chancellor Merkel’s Diplomatic Smarts with a Prickly Small Thing — Why Don’t We Have anyone Like that?

© 2015 Peter Free

 

12 March 2015

 

 

Effective diplomacy about the small points surrounding painful issues can be challenging

 

Few leaders do it competently. Germany’s deliberately drab Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to be a welcome exception:

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will not attend an official ceremony in Moscow on May 9 to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two due to tensions of the Ukraine crisis, government officials said on Wednesday.

 

"In light of the developments in Ukraine, it is impossible for Merkel to take part in the traditional military parade on Red Square," a government official said.

 

However, the chancellor will lay a wreath at the Monument of the Unknown Soldier in the Russian capital one day later.

 

© 2015 Andreas Rinke, Michael Nienaber, and Tom Heneghan, Merkel declines Putin's invite for World War Two commemoration in Moscow, Reuters (11 March 2015)

 

 

The symbolic significance

 

Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin presumably wanted to have:

 

 

(i) the Soviet Union’s defeated German enemy show up to commemorate its World War II loss — primarily at Soviet hands,

 

so as to

 

(ii) further exacerbate the prickliness that rational Germany is currently experiencing with the warmongering United States (over the issue of Russian aggression in Ukraine).

 

Put in a difficult spot by this Russian ploy:

 

 

(a) given her annoyance with American posturing (and its “no skin in the game” geographic distance from a potential European war)

 

and

 

(b) with Putin’s intentional stirring of the Ukrainian powder keg (a nation not too far from Deutschland’s borders)

 

— the Chancellor struck a workable balance by thumbing one Putin eye and caressing the other.

 

 

Civilizational maturity is evident in this German diplomacy

 

On the one hand, Germany notably indicated that it objects to Russia’s aggression (by avoiding the Moscow ceremony).

 

On the other, it signals (with the Monument visit) that it recognizes the approximately 28 million person dead that the former Soviet Union suffered in stopping Germany’s Hitlerian cancer.

 

In other words, “We were wrong then, and you are now.”

 

 

The moral? — Imagine how American leaders would have handled this same situation

 

Lots of self-righteous rabid dog shouting — with (of course) the apparently now obligatory fist-shaking promise of future bullets, missiles and bombs.

 

And can you imagine anyone on our side of the Great Water admitting that we did bad things in the past? (Horrors.)

 

I wish some of our leaders would eventually grow up in Mommy Merkel’s image. With the ability to admit past wrongdoing, while holding firm to currently rational rectitude.

 

Image what it would be like, if American leadership substituted actually functioning brain for hormonal adolescence.