Sunday May 28, 2017
German chancellor Angela Merkel has signalled that Europe can no longer count on the US as a reliable partner, reflecting a new transatlantic rift that has emerged after two days of international summits with President Donald Trump last week.
“The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over, as I have experienced in the past few days,” Ms Merkel told a political rally in Munich on Sunday. “We Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands.”
Ms Merkel also told the EU to prepare for a future without the UK once Brexit was complete. “Of course we need to have friendly relations with the US and with the UK, and with other neighbours, including Russia,” Ms Merkel said. But she added, “we have to fight for our own future ourselves”.
The German chancellor was speaking a day after leaders from the G7 nations clashed at a summit in Sicily. Donald Trump, on his first visit to Europe as US president, refused to say whether he would endorse the Paris climate accords, which Barack Obama committed the US to adopt in 2015.
The Paris agreement came into force in November but Mr Trump campaigned for the White House saying he would pull out of the deal.
Ms Merkel had called the discussions “very unsatisfying”, adding there was “no indication that the US will stay in the Paris agreement”. Mr Trump said via a tweet that he intended to decide on the Paris accord next week.
During the trip to Europe, Mr Trump also took aim at Germany for its trade surplus with the US, prompting Ms Merkel to reject the criticism as “inappropriate”.
The US president also clashed with European heads of state earlier in the week at a Nato summit in Brussels, where he berated them for not meeting a target to spend 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence.
Mr Trump, who called Nato “obsolete” in last year’s presidential campaign, failed to endorse the security alliance’s Article 5 commitment to mutual defence, even when standing in front of a monument at Nato’s Brussels headquarters in honour of mutual defence.
The monument commemorated the 9/11 attack in 2001, when all members of the Nato alliance came to the support of the US in its fight against terrorism — the only time that Article 5 has been invoked.
However Lt Gen HR McMaster, US national security adviser, told the Financial Times in Taormina that “it’s a matter of fact the United States stands firmly behind our Article 5 commitment.”
Gen McMaster called it “extraordinary” to expect that Mr Trump should have to make such a commitment, given that the US was a signatory to Nato’s founding treaty in 1949. He said Mr Trump wanted other Nato countries to step up their defence spending, but added: “Everything he does is about strengthening the alliance.”
The comments from the chancellor align with a growing sense within the German leadership that the EU must be more strongly integrated. Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, recently told the FT that Germany’s priority must be “to keep the rest of Europe — without the UK — as close together as possible”.
Ms Merkel, who heads the Christian Democratic Union, is campaigning for a fourth term in an election in September. The chancellor was speaking to the centre-right Christian Social Union, a coalition partner whose members have been critical of her liberal approach to accepting refugees.