Current Events and U.S. Diplomacy - Assignment Example

Though most of these relationships are positive and peaceful ones, there are some relations that are not so good. This is especially apparent with US relations with many Arab countries in the Middle East. This relationship culminated with the twin tower attacks on 9th September 2011 by Arabic terrorists, and the US response to the attacks by invading Afghanistan, and later on Iraq, in order to quash any terrorist groups intent on attacking the USA. One country whose diplomatic ties have seen developments since the cold war ended with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 is Germany.

During the cold war, the Berlin Wall separated east and West Germany, and by extension separating Eastern and Western Europe. Therefore, Germany was in the midst of all the chaos that marked the cold war decades. The two separate parties had completely different ideologies, and this difference split Europe between those two camps, hence a physical separation in form of a wall was built to separate them. After the fall of the Berlin war, most countries changed their political ideologies to those of Western Europe.

Germany, which had been split into two, had difficulties settling into being one large country with Western Europe ideologies, especially concerning democratic rule. The reason for this was due to the fact that the elements that advocated for socialist and communist rule were still resisting the inevitable change that was prevailing in the country. However, in the end, the western ideologies and democracy prevailed (Stiftung, 2003). Germany’s cold relations date back to the Second World War when the two countries were indifferent camps.

USA allied with Britain and other countries to end the Nazi rule in Germany and brought the Second World War to an end. After the fall of the Berlin wall, the USA was a very significant force in ensuring that peace was brokered between the two former camps of eastern and western Germany. Furthermore, the US retained a large number of its military personnel in Germany after the end of the cold war to protect its trade, educational and other institutional interests in the country. This was, however, a friendly agreement between the two countries.

When the USA invaded Afghanistan after the September 2001 attacks, Germany sent troops to back up the NATO forces in bringing down the middle eastern country, which was seen as protecting the terrorist attacks mastermind Osama bin Laden and other terrorists operating under the A Qaeda emblem. However, the relations between USA and Germany turned sour when the then German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder refused to back the USA in invading Iraq, opting for more diplomatic and peaceful solutions to the problem.

This problem was neutralized when the US-backed Angela Merkel became chancellor. Recently, the relations between the USA and Germany have had tensions again after a series of secret documents from the US embassy in Germany were leaked to the public by Wiki leaks. In these documents, information passed between the US embassy in Berlin and the USA painted a bad picture of the leadership in Germany, especially of the current chancellor, labelling her names. Furthermore, the leaked information criticized nearly the whole German cabinet and leadership, with very few pro-American members left untainted (Norton, et al., 2011).