German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s two-day visit to Washington and President Joe Biden on March 3 is so lacking in press conference, traveling press, state dinners or announced agenda that the New York Times speculated in an article this afternoon that its real subject was “end-game scenarios” for war in Ukraine. It reported that German spokesman for the Christian Democrats (CDU) Friedrich Merz challenged Social Democrat Scholz in a Bundestag speech as to why he had said nothing to Parliament about the purpose of the visit.
The statements made by Biden and Scholz at the White House photo-op before their meetings were so formulaic and so brief that each found it necessary to repeat the same phrases two or three times verbatim just to fill up 30 seconds to a minute. “In lock step,” “as long as it is necessary,” and “great partners” were a few of them.
