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  Merkel's G-8 Tour de Force: Germany's Green Chancellor

Merkel's G-8 Tour de Force Germany's Green Chancellor

By Gerd Langguth

Part 2: Merkel's Master Stroke

Merkel wisely smoothed the way out of his Iraq dilemma for Bush. She already helped him a few weeks ago during the EU-USA summit on April 30. There, a general agreement on a new trans-Atlantic economic partnership allowed Bush to present himself as a politician who is moving the revitalization of trans-Atlantic relations forward.

And by accepting the offer Merkel made him in the course of their negotiations in Heiligendamm, Bush has shifted away from his previous rigid oppositional stance on climate change and taken a great step towards a responsible US climate policy.

For the first time, he recognized, as a government leader, that the follow-up agreement to the Kyoto Protocol -- an agreement partly concerned with the further curbing of CO2 emissions -- needs to be reached under the auspices of the United Nations. And along the way, Bush was also able to begin discussing the possible resolution of the dispute over the US's planned missile defense shield with Putin.

But the actual master stroke of Merkel's summit diplomacy consisted in the formulation of the agreement, which spared the US president a commitment to concrete reductions in CO2 emissions, while at the same time persuading all the G-8 countries to endorse an irreversible process to reach a post-Kyoto agreement.

Merkel's method consisted in making all her colleagues participate in this process on the basis of the far-reaching recommendations of the International Panel for Climate Changce (IPCC), the organization created by the UN and charged with investigating the effects of human-induced climate change. Merkel thereby committed all summit participants to a common process towards Kyoto II.

True, Merkel did not succeed in committing her friend George -- or Vladimir, for that matter -- to cutting greenhouse gas emissions exactly by half by the middle of the century. But she is hoping that no one will "escape" such a commitment -- one which barely seemed achievable before the summit -- in the long run.

With the outcome of the summit, she has come a great deal further than most observers had predicted. Characteristically, she took a considerable personal risk: Before the summit, she announced an ambitious climate protection program, thereby raising the political bar very high -- and setting a benchmark by which the possible failure of her efforts would also have been measured.

The fact that she was not able to achieve all of her goals does not detract from her skill in negotiating. Bush will have to remember his commitments when the environment ministers meet in Bali to discuss a follow-up agreement to the Kyoto Protocol at the end of the year.

If Merkel should now also achieve the feat of solving the question of the European constitution at the EU summit in June, she will have achieved more on the international stage in two years than even her most sympathetic observers would have thought possible.

But those who believe the German chancellor's international authority has only to do with her currently being president of the G-8 and EU are mistaken. As German chancellor she embraced her international role more quickly than her predecessors Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder did -- even if the future will increasingly see her having to confront a mood that depicts her international appearances as an escape from the political lowlands of gray domestic politics.

In addition to everything else she has achieved, Merkel has also shown her coalition partner in the German government, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), that she takes the lead in mastering the detail when it comes to decisive issues. All Environmental Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who belongs to the SPD, can do in the face of this is look on in amazement and applaud -- not to mention Merkel's possible challenger, SPD party leader Kurt Beck.

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