BERLIN, 21 September 2003 — German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s unsuccessful attempt to pull off a major diplomatic coup in Berlin yesterday leaves him embarrassingly empty-handed when he heads to New York for a face-to-face meeting with President George W. Bush next week.
Instead of extracting a last-minute compromise from President Jacques Chirac on the issue of Iraq’s future, Schroeder was unable to budge the French leader.
And instead of cementing the bitter rift Franco-British rift over Iraq, Schroeder was left standing between a grim-faced Chirac to his right and a grimly smiling British Prime Minister Tony Blair to his left.
The tension was almost palpable as the three men used nearly identical vocabulary — in three languages — to explain at a joint news conference that they had failed utterly to set aside their differences.
The failure of the Berlin summit to close the gap on Iraq fulfilled the worst fears of analysts in Germany who note that relations between Germany and the United States have been icy ever since the German leader split with Bush over Iraq a year ago in the run-up to his narrow general election win.
Schroeder is flying to New York for the UN General Assembly opening session and will meet face-to-face with Bush there on Wednesday. It will be a brief meeting — a scant 30 minutes — and now analysts say Schroeder will go into it utterly empty-handed.
He had hoped to be able to present himself as the mediator between Blair and Chirac in reaching a compromise amenable to Bush, according to analysts in Berlin.
Instead, analysts are now convinced that Saturday’s summit has produced nothing to change Bush’s well-known view that Schroeder is a write-off among US allies.
Now Schroeder will be going into his meeting with Bush able only to state that he and Chirac are still unanimous in their rejection of Washington’s proposed resolution on Iraq.
Bush will recall that, after meeting with Chirac in Dresden earlier this month, Schroeder said the US initiative for a new UN resolution to give the world body a bigger say in Iraq was “neither dynamic enough nor sufficient.”
Last weekend, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — including France and Britain — failed at a meeting in Geneva to agree on practical steps to transfer political power to the people of Iraq. Germany is currently a non-permanent member of the Security Council.
Ties between Germany and the US have been icy since last September when Schroeder made opposition to the war a major issue in his re-election campaign.
Germany has vowed not to send troops to Iraq but, in an apparent olive branch, Chancellor Schroeder earlier this month offered to train Iraqi police in Germany.
Normally a meeting of the US and German leaders would be routine but since the summer of 2002 Schroeder and Bush have only met three times for brief handshakes and strained small-talk at the NATO Prague summit in November, in St Petersburg in May and at that G-8 summit in Evian, France in June.
German officials admit there have been no phone calls between the two leaders.
