A few people, me included, read into this step Merkel's desire to put an end to using Germany's awful World War II history as a false moral refuge from taking sides and putting troops and convictions on the line in the new century.

The US, Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands provide most of the troops to fend off the insurgency in Afghanistan. Germany's engagement is quite limited and yet public support has fallen to new lows.

[Merkel] has not given a single speech devoted to Afghanistan to the Bundestag, or Parliament. She missed an ideal chance last Friday during a parliamentary debate over renewing the mandates for the German troops based there. But she left the explanation to her not terribly persuasive defense minister, Franz-Josef Jung. And since taking office nearly two years ago, Merkel has traveled neither to Kabul nor to the comparatively peaceful north where most of the German troops are based. Now, under pressure from the opposition, she has finally announced travel plans. But so far, no date has been set. What is baffling is that her attitude is out of line with the rest of her foreign policy agenda.

Dempsey describes Afghanistan as Merkel's "big blind spot," because she has shown more leadership on other issues like Russia and China.

Ulf Gartzke, a visiting scholar at the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, argues in a similar direction in "German Lessons: The Afghan Conundrum" in The Globe and Mail.

Carl Robichaud asks a rhetorical question in Afghanistan Watch: "Last week Germany voted by a 2 to 1 margin to sustain the deployment of its 3,000 strong forces in Afghanistan--for now. But how sustainable is this mission when the public at large opposes the deployment by the same margin?"

Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have invited the Dalai Lama to the White House in 1994 and 2001. German chancellors have avoided upsetting the Chinese. Until now. Angela Merkel hosted a "private meeting" with the Dalai Lama in the chancellory on Sunday, September 23rd.

It was about time! Germany's federal president von Weizsäcker met with the Dalai Lama in 1990 and German foreign ministers Kinkel and Fischer agreed to meetings as well, but Merkel is Germany's first head of government to dare what US presidents have done in the past.
AFP reports that "Merkel signalled that she supported the Dalai Lama's quest for cultural autonomy for the Himalayan region, sticking to the course she steered during a visit to China in August in which she readily tackled human rights issues." Now China has cancelled two top-level meetings in retaliation.

China, however, seems to be doing some good work as well. Like many other papers, The Guardian writes: 

There are reports that China is pressuring Burma to avoid a crackdown. "The Myanmar government is tolerating the protesters and not taking any action against the monks because of pressure from China," a diplomat told The Associated Press. China wants to be seen as a moderating influence ahead of next year's Beijing Olympics.

Related post in the Atlantic Review: Olympics 2008: Only Americans Remind China of its Responsibility for Darfur

The BBC has the list of the top ten most powerful women according to Forbes Magazine. What I find interesting is that there are so many Asian women at the top. Emancipation is certainly not a Western thing. (Via Erkan's Field Diary)

A German expat living in the United States had a closer look at the Forbes list of the 100 most powerful women and noticed: "Depressingly, Angela Merkel is the only German woman in that ranking. There are eight women from China, four from France, three from the Netherlands, seven from the UK, and fifty from the US."

In June, for the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the German Chancellery (Angela Merkel's equivalent of the White House) even summoned the so-called Security Group, a government round that meets only in periods of crisis, and which was this time attended by the state secretaries of the Interior, Foreign and Defense Ministries.
The reason for the special meeting -- which was chaired by Thomas de Maiziere, Angela Merkel's chief of staff at the Chancellery, was a secret CIA analysis that presents a list of reasons why Germany is currently particularly at risk, in the United States government's opinion. Besides Germany's participation in NATO's Afghanistan mission, the reasons include the high number of German Islamists with contacts to Pakistan and the good opportunities for traveling to Western Europe that people returning from the Hindu Kush region enjoy.

As for Hussain al-M., President Pervez Musharraf's diplomats have signaled that the German government could choose whether it wants him or not. The case of the stateless Lebanese man al-M., who holds a permanent residence permit in Neunkirchen, in Germany's Saarland region, is considered especially delicate in Berlin. Government officials still remember all too well another Pakistani detainee for whom Berlin took no responsibility (more...) -- that of German-born Turkish citizen Murat Kurnaz. Kurnaz ended up at Guantanamo.

Many Germans wanted Merkel to do the same on CIA overflights and missile defense. Her decision to downplay these disagreements and focus on common interests has given U.S.-EU ties their biggest boost in a decade.

In unusually harsh language, Bush administration negotiators took issue with the German draft of the communiqué for the meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized nations, complaining that the proposal "crosses multiple red lines in terms of what we simply cannot agree to."

Germany and some of its partners in the Group of 8 leading industrial economies are bracing for a major conflict with the United States at a summit meeting next week, with the Bush administration expected to block a declaration on global warming, European officials said over the weekend. (...) Merkel will hold talks with the U.S. House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, on Tuesday in Berlin in which climate change will be one of the main issues. Pelosi, who recently established a new House committee on energy, said she wanted to find "common ground" over energy with the Bush administration. Pelosi, making her first trip to Europe since her election, said she wanted "to keep the door completely open to working with the president on the issue of energy independence and global warming," according to The Associated Press. The Europeans have great hope that the Democrats in Congress will take a much more aggressive attitude toward climate warming.

But Merkel's tense exchanges with Putin over human rights and other contentious issues at a Europe-Russia summit meeting last week underscore how much has changed - at least in tone.

It is virtually unprecedented in German history for a chancellor to be so unreservedly aligned with the US. Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany, saw America as a guarantor of freedom, but also perceived it as an occupation force. Helmut Schmidt and Willy Brandt, both Social Democratic (SPD) chancellors, were pro-American but innately skeptical.
Merkel, on the contrary, wants to expand Germany's close ties with the United States and is on the verge of making a pact with America the cornerstone of her foreign policy. Indeed, the resoluteness with which she has pursued this goal stands in conspicuous contrast with her government's lack of political progress back home in Germany.
A new beginning in trans-Atlantic relations? Out of consideration for her SPD coalition partners, Merkel has elected not to shine the spotlight too brightly on recent improvements in US-German relations -- indeed, her political modesty is one condition for the policy's success. Should she toot her own horn, she would likely alienate the SPD, her party's partner in Berlin's governing coalition.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will present an especially generous gift during her trip to the United States this week. At a Monday ceremony in the Great Hall of the US Library of Congress, she will hand over to the Americans something Germans would normally be barred from even taking out of the country: a piece of Germany's national cultural heritage. The item in question is a world map drafted by Freiburg native Martin Waldseemüller in 1507. It is a map which shows a rough outline of the new continent, and for the first time uses a name that the immigrants in the New World would eventually adopt for their own: America.

Don't miss the most significant story in the noise around this weekend's 50th birthday bash for the European Union in Berlin. Party hostess German Chancellor Angela Merkel has emerged as the West's most influential and promising leader in her second year in office, due to deeply held principles, good timing and no competition.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, trying to counter the increasingly anti-American attitude of her coalition partners, the Social Democrats, has called on the European Union to find a common position over American plans to deploy part of an anti-missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. (...) In fact, the two parties in Merkel's coalition appear more divided over the missile shield than other EU member states, which have been far less vocal or critical of the U.S. missile shield.  Kurt Beck, leader of the Social Democrats, said this week that the missile defense shield would lead to a new arms race and that it should be discussed within NATO, or even abandoned. (...)
So far, in public at least, U.S. officials have not questioned the tone of any of the criticism from the German left, as was the case after Gerhard Schröder, the former Social Democratic chancellor, narrowly won re-election in 2002 after criticizing the Bush administration's actions toward Iraq.

One of the key points I was trying to make in my Foreign Affairs article was that the Bush foreign policy of 2007 looks somewhat different from the Bush foreign policy of 2002 -- it's more multilateral in both form and substance. This has been a common theme among foreign policy wonks across the ideological divide. However, the word has yet to reach the German Social Democrats. (...) One gets the sense that domestic political calculations are behind the SPD's thinking... much as it was back in 2002.