Seeker Blog

CFR’s Bernard Gwertzman interviews Josef Joffe, the editor and publisher of Die Zeit. Some of the more illuminating comments:

What is your sense of the brief Bush-Chirac visit?

I think that Chirac, in particular, has a burning desire to mend fences, because he is worried about how long he can keep Schroeder in his pocket: "Might not Schroeder seek better relations with the Americans than I have?" That was a very important impulse driving the meeting with Bush. And, I think, if you want to go beyond atmospherics, look at something which was enormously surprising. Suddenly, you have both the United States and France condemning Syrian imperialism in Lebanon. I would be hard put to find a precedent where the French have linked arms with the Americans. Previously, the basic principle of French policy toward the United States has been, "We are in favor of being against everything the United States favored."

Isn’t Lebanon a unique example, because the French retain a sense of Christian unity with that country?

I understand, but the point is that there has always been a predictable plan in French policy, which is, "Whatever the United States wants, we don’t want it, no matter whether it might serve our interests or not. We are in favor of opposing." That has been the one-sentence policy of the French.

You know Schroeder well. What compelled him to take an anti-Bush line in his 2002 re-election campaign?

That’s a very simple thing. He was running a sinking political campaign. The [rival] Christian Democrats were four, five, six points ahead in the polls. He was desperately casting around for an issue that could reverse that. He knew that in eastern Germany, anti-Americanism was even more rampant than in the west. So he played that card and, as a result, squeezed by with a few thousand votes ahead of the Christian Democrats. That was a wholly calculated electoral gambit which, however, no German chancellor or candidate would ever have chosen before the [1989] fall of the Berlin Wall, when Soviet shock troops were stationed 20 miles outside of Hamburg. There were two reasons. One was a desperate electoral situation. The other was the permissive factor of the loss of strategic dependence on the United States.