overtures to Kurt Biedenkopf to serve as an interim leader. Ahead of the party's leadership election in 2018, Biedenkopf publicly endorsed Friedrich Merz to succeed Merkel as chair. Foreign policy In 1985, Rühe strongly urged that Europe's four major powers – France, Britain, Italy and West Germany – formulate a common European position on the Reagan Administration's Strategic Defense Initiative. In 1995, Rühe withdrew an invitation for his Moscow counterpart, Pavel Grachev, to visit Germany after Grachev insulted leading critics of the war in Chechnya. At the time, this was regarded as throwing into question German-Russian military cooperation on European security issues following the country's reunification. During the Grozny ballistic missile attack in 1999, Rühe called for freezing Western loans to Russia. In 2010, Rühe wrote an open letter explaining the strategy of including Russia into NATO to counter balance asian powers. In 2013, Rühe appeared alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and François Fillon at the Valdai Discussion Club. He was quoted by Neue Presse expressing sympathy for Putin and arguing for an intensive dialogue between the German government and "the Kremlin" on the subject of the American proposed "missile defense system". "We are talking as if Iran already had nuclear weapons... we can't continue with deterrence, like during the Cold War." In 2015, he joined other foreign policy experts, including Igor Ivanov and Ana Palacio, in calling for a possible Memorandum of Understanding between NATO and the Russian Federation on the Rules of Behaviour for the Safety of Air and Maritime Encounters between the two sides. In a 2019 interview, Rühe blamed his successor Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg for "having destroyed the Bundeswehr". References 1942 births Living people Members of the Bundestag for Hamburg Members of the Bundestag 2002–2005 Members of the Bundestag 1998–2002 Members of the Bundestag 1994–1998 Members of the Bundestag 1990–1994 Members of the Bundestag 1987–1990 Members of the Bundestag 1983–1987 Members of the Bundestag 1980–1983 Members of the Bundestag 1976–1980 Defence ministers of Germany Members of the Bundestag for the Christian Democratic Union of Germany