On Monday, President Barack Obama opened a rare meeting of his National Security Council at the Pentagon, in an effort to put “lipstick on the pig” which is his strategy for fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) abroad and its sympathizers at home. During his press briefing he gave few details about his meeting at the Pentagon, and didn’t even mention that Germany’s leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, on Sunday turned down a request from the United States to provide even more military involvement in the fight against ISIS.
“I believe Germany is fulfilling its part and we don’t need to talk about new issues related to this question at the moment,” Merkel told the German news media about her response to Obama’s request on Saturday.
The German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter sent a letter to Chancellor Merkel asking for an additional military commitment from Germany, just one week after parliament approved a plan to join the anti-terrorism campaign in Syria.