There was an awkward moment on Sunday, when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili stood next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Tbilisi and thanked her for having “initiated” plans to bring his country into NATO.

Anyone who followed NATO’s last summit in Bucharest back in April knows that it was Merkel who broke with Washington and spearheaded opposition to such a move.

Shifting uncomfortably, Merkel couldn’t help but interject: “Give credit where credit is due,” she said curtly, taken aback by Saakashvili’s strange distortion of her stance.

The moment was instructive, underlining one of the main reasons why Berlin remains opposed to giving Georgia a seat in the military alliance anytime soon.

Merkel continues to view Saakashvili and his U.S.-backed bid to join NATO with a good dose of scepticism — a view reinforced by the Georgian president’s actions and rhetorical eruptions since his violent showdown with Moscow began earlier this month.

Last week, the Georgian president drew parallels between Europe’s reaction to the conflict and its appeasement of Hitler in the run-up to World War Two — not the best way to win friends.

Merkel did offer Saakashvili some of her most encouraging language to date on his NATO aspirations, saying Georgia was on a “clear path” to membership. But it would be wrong to read too much into that.

One senior German official told me that Merkel warned President George W. Bush repeatedly last year about relying too heavily on Saakashvili. 

“Don’t tell me you told me so,” Bush sheepishly told the German chancellor, this official recounted, after the Georgian leader declared a state of emergency in November and cracked down on opposition protesters.

That challenge to Saakashvili faded and he was reelected to a new term as president in January in a vote deemed broadly fair, but that did not allay German concerns about his fitness to lead. Some officials in Berlin and other capitals may be quietly hoping Georgians rise up against Saakashvili again in the wake of his brief but bloody war with Russia. 

Perhaps NATO can avoid another embarassing public spat over Georgia’s bid when it meets in Brussels at the end of the year. By then, tensions in Georgia’s breakway provinces may have eased somewhat, along with Moscow’s readiness for confrontation.

More likely, NATO will struggle again to paper over its divisions on Georgia, particularly if Republican John McCain — a friend of Saakashvili and ardent supporter of his government — wins the U.S. election one month before the summit.

Obamamania has hit Germany hard, but many here are wary of the big show the Democratic presidential candidate will put on in Berlin on Thursday, when his speech at the “Victory Column“ could attract hundreds of thousands.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Die Zeit magazine that the “young and open” Obama was raising hopes of a renewal in transatlantic relations and for that reason he should be heeded.

But Eckart von Klaeden, a foreign policy expert for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, recalled that Germans had seen big political events like Obama’s speech before. Hundreds of thousands had turned out for Helmut Kohl and Willy Brandt during during German unification , but the message was clear: “Euphoria in politics is an invitation to disappointment.”

Obama is at least not like Bush, seen by many Germans as a war-monger, said Manfred Guellner, head of the Forsa opinion polling group. “There is a lot of hope associated with Obama. People hope he’ll be a peace, rather than a war president.” But the charismatic Democratic senator will find that if he asks Germany to get more involved militarily in Afghanistan or even Iraq, “the positive feeling towards him could change very quickly”.

Josef Joffe, editor and publisher of Die Zeit, agreed that Iraq and Afghanistan could well lead to “dissonances” with Obama. “Germany’s Obamamania has disappointment written all over it,” he wrote in his Newsweek blog.

In fact, opined one official in Merkel’s office, it would be much better for Obama to give a low-key speech at a university or think tank. That way, the risk of disappointment will be lower.

Wolfgang Rossbach, a pensioner who lives near the Victory Column where Obama will speak, was rather more upbeat, saying: “He’s black and he’s new. And he promises to change things. I think that’s good.”

Thomas Schmania, sweeping the sidewalk near the Victory column,  expected Obama to try to create a “Kennedy moment” on Thursday, harking back to former U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech in which he told a cheering Berlin audience: “Ich bin ein Berliner!”. “Obama won’t be able to top that. A line like that, you get that once in history,” he said.

So there you have it.  A new Kennedy moment or a disappointment waiting to happen. What do you think?

It hasn’t garnered as much attention or generated quite the same excitement as the nomination battle between U.S. Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did, but Germany’s Social Democrats are tying themselves in equally torturous knots over who will lead their party into the next election.

Like their U.S. counterparts, the centre-left SPD has two main candidates vying for the right to challenge for the country’s top job. But the similarities between the American and German contests end there.

While Obama and Clinton wore their political ambitions on their respective sleaves, the SPD contenders — party chairman Kurt Beck and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier – are doing their best to play down their desire to go up against popular conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2009.
 Ask either one of them if they want to take on the popular “Angie” and they invariably dodge the question — not exactly the burning sense of purpose that we saw in Barack and Hillary.

Their hesitancy and the party’s reluctance to commit to a candidate before the end of this year has opened the door to almost daily speculation in the German media about which of the two will step up.

That uncertainty has prompted just about every politician in the SPD to voice his or her own opinion on the matter, pulling those aforementioned knots even tighter.

Andrea Nahles, a leading SPD leftist, said this weekend that Beck’s her man. Other deputies in parliament are pushing for Steinmeier, concerned about their own fates if the unpopular Beck leads the party into the election battle.

Former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is reportedly pressing behind the scenes to get his protege, Steinmeier, chosen in the hopes of avenging his agonisingly narrow 2005 loss to Merkel.

Sigmar Gabriel, the environment minister, warned in Berlin daily Tagesspiegel on Monday that any SPD candidate would be doomed unless the party sorts out its own messy policy divisions first.

If some German media are to be believed, the “Kanzlerkandidat” decision was sealed back in late April when Beck and Steinmeier held a “clandestine” meeting in the back garden of a coffee shop in west Berlin.

A photographer, who just happened to be present, caught the two looking cheerful and united – far more cheerful and united in fact than Obama and Clinton ever looked.

The sole picture of the meeting (Steinmeier has a cafe latte and pack of Marlboro reds in front of him and Beck an espresso and important-looking red dossier) has been analysed closely for clues about which way the decision could go.

Right now, Steinmeier is the odds-on favourite. He is more popular with voters than Beck and has done a competent job as Germany’s top diplomat. But the bespectacled, white-haired foreign minister is more technocrat than politician. He’s never won an election at any level and it’s rather hard to imagine him stirring up the party faithful at campaign rallies like his mentor Schroeder could.

Beck, by contrast, is a political veteran with a common touch who has scored a series of impressive victories over the years in his rural home state of Rhineland-Palatinate. If only his credibility both inside and outside the party weren’t crumbling because of his spotty leadership and flip-flops on cooperation with a new far-left party.

Ultimately, while the U.S. Democrats were spoiled for choice when deciding who to send up against Republican John McCain, the SPD looks paralysed by the fear that neither of its candidates can lead the party to victory against Merkel’s conservatives.

Perhaps one way to solve that would be for the SPD to inject a little more American-style  competitive fire into the race and rely a little less on traditional German-style consensus.

At the Munich Conference on Security Policy back in 2003, Joschka Fischer stared down Donald Rumsfeld and told him what he thought about Washington’s case for invading Iraq.

“I am not convinced. That is my problem,” the feisty German foreign minister told a glaring Pentagon chief.

Five years on, Iraq has dropped down the agenda of this high-profile annual gathering of foreign policy and defence experts, but it still casts a long shadow over U.S. efforts to press its policy in Europe.

This year in Munich, the focus has been on Afghanistan. U.S. officials, spearheaded by Rumsfeld’s successor Robert Gates, have pressed European nations to send more troops there and take a more active role in repelling a fierce Taliban insurgency.

On Sunday, Gates made a case for Afghanistan that might have made even Fischer proud — but Iraq is getting in the way.

“Our mistakes in Iraq have made it hard to convince Europe to do more in Afghanistan,” Lindsey Graham, Republican U.S. Senator from South Carolina told me. “These are two different conflicts but they are lumped together here.”

That’s partly the Bush administration’s fault. It has lumped Afghanistan and Iraq together under the banner of its “global war on terror”.

As long as Bush remains in office, it will be hard for European leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel to convince their deeply sceptical publics that a stronger commitment is needed in Afghanistan.

When a President Clinton, McCain or Obama comes knocking, it may be tougher to resist.

Gen. John Craddock, NATO’s supreme allied commander, Europe, surprised American reporters by using soccer to explain his problems in Afghanistan.

Craddock,  a four-star U.S. Army general, says he does not have as many troops as he needs and too many nations place restrictions on how their soldiers can operate.

“It’s kind of like we’re a soccer team that’s two players short and I can’t move the defenders of midfield to attack and I can’t move the forwards back to defend,” he told members of the Pentagon press corps travelling with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

One American reporter joked he was impressed the Belgium-based commander had been in Europe so long that he could use soccer metaphors.

But Craddock felt the analogy came in handy in explaining his problems to European governments.

“They understand that here. They don’t understand football,” he said, referring to the American game.

As the travelling Pentagon press this time contains a Scotsman and a French reporter, his point was not entirely lost on his audience on Sunday.