https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...r-hands-angela-merkels-defiant-reply-to-trump
'Europe's fate is in our hands': Angela Merkel's defiant reply to Trump
Chancellor joined by French president in making curt comments about the US president-elect’s remarks about Germany, EU and Nato
Merkel to Trump: Europe’s fate is ‘in its own hands’
Philip Oltermann in Berlin
@philipoltermann
Monday 16 January 2017 19.54 GMT
First published on Monday 16 January 2017 19.07 GMT
Angela Merkel and François Hollande have responded curtly but defiantly after Donald Trump cast further doubt on his commitment to Nato and gave strong hints that he would not support EU cohesion once in office.
“We Europeans have our fate in our own hands,” the German chancellor said after the publication of the US president-elect’s interviews with the Times and German tabloid Bild. “He has presented his positions once more. They have been known for a while. My positions are also known.”
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In the Times interview, Trump complained that Nato had become “obsolete” because it “hadn’t taken care of terror” – a comment later welcomed by the Kremlin. He suggested that other European countries would follow in Britain’s footsteps and leave the EU.
Hollande, the French president, retorted by saying Europe did not need to be told what to do by outsiders.
“Europe will be ready to pursue transatlantic cooperation, but it will based on its interests and values,” Hollande said on Monday. “It does not need outside advice to tell it what to do.”
Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said the criticism of Nato had caused concern in the political and military alliance. “I’ve spoken today not only with EU foreign ministers but Nato foreign ministers as well and can report that the signals are that there’s been no easing of tensions,” he said.
Other senior members of Merkel’s government were quick to defend Germany’s policies after Trump criticised the chancellor’s handling of the refugee crisis and threatened a 35% tariff on BMW cars imported to the US.
Responding to Trump’s comments that Merkel had made an “utterly catastrophic mistake by letting all these illegals into the country”, the deputy chancellor and minister for the economy, Sigmar Gabriel, said the increase in the number of people fleeing the Middle East to seek asylum in Europe had partially been a result of US-led wars destabilising the region.
BMW factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
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BMW factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Photograph: Bloomberg/via Getty Images
“There is a link between America’s flawed interventionist policy, especially the Iraq war, and the refugee crisis; that’s why my advice would be that we shouldn’t tell each other what we have done right or wrong, but that we look into establishing peace in that region and do everything to make sure people can find a home there again,” Gabriel said.
“In that area, Germany and Europe are already making enormous achievements – and that’s why I also thought it wasn’t right to talk about defence spending, where Mr Trump says we are spending too little to finance Nato. We are making gigantic financial contributions to refugee shelters in the region, and these are also the results of US interventionist policy.”
John Kerry, the outgoing US secretary of state, also responded tartly to Trump’s criticisms of Merkel, warning him he would need to rein in his views once he took office.
“I thought, frankly, it was inappropriate for a president-elect of the United States to be stepping in to the politics of other countries in a quite direct manner,” Kerry told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “As of Friday, he’s responsible for that relationship.
“But I think we have to be very careful about suggesting that one of the strongest leaders in Europe - and one of the most important in respect of where we are heading - made one mistake or another.”
Gabriel, who is expected to run as the centre-left candidate against Merkel in Germany’s federal elections in September, said Trump’s election should encourage Europeans to stand up for themselves.
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“On the one hand, Trump is an elected president. When he is in office, we will have to work with him and his government – respect for a democratic election alone demands that,” Gabriel said.
“On the other hand, you need to have enough self-confidence. This isn’t about making ourselves submissive. What he says about trade issues, how he might treat German carmakers, the question about Nato, his view on the European Union – all these require a self-confident position, not just on behalf of us Germans but all Europeans. We are not inferior to him, we have something to bring to the table, too.
“Especially in this phase in which Europe is rather weak, we will have to pull ourselves together and act with self-confidence and stand up for our own interests.”
The German foreign ministry rejected Trump’s criticism that creating “security zones” in Syria would have been considerably cheaper than accepting refugees fleeing the war-torn country.
“What exactly such a security zone is meant to be is beyond my comprehension and would have to be explained,” said Martin Schäfer, a spokesman for the German foreign ministry.
Brexit supporters at a pro-EU rally.
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Brexit supporters at a pro-EU rally. Trump said Brexit vote was a good thing. Photograph: Luke MacGregor/Reuters
Schäfer also rejected Trump’s labelling of the EU as a “vehicle for Germany”. He said: “For the German government, Europe has never been a means to an end but a community of fate which, in times of collapsing old orders, is more important than ever.”
Hints of a fundamental shift in US trade policy sent shockwaves through German politics and business.
In his interview, Trump indicated that he would aim to realign the “out of balance” car trade between Germany and the US. “If you go down Fifth Avenue, everyone has a Mercedes Benz in front of his house, isn’t that the case?” he said. “How many Chevrolets do you see in Germany? Not very many, maybe none at all … it’s a one-way street.”
Asked what Trump could do to make sure German customers bought more American cars, Gabriel said: “Build better cars.”
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Shares in BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen fell on Monday morning following Trump’s comments. BMW shares were down 0.85%, shares in Daimler were 1.54% lower and Volkswagen shares were trading 1.07% down in early trading in Frankfurt.
All three carmakers have invested heavily in factories in Mexico, where production costs are lower than the US, with an eye to exporting smaller vehicles to the US market.
A BMW spokeswoman said a BMW Group plant in the central Mexican city of San Luis Potosi would build the BMW 3 Series from 2019, with the output intended for the world market. The plant in Mexico would be an addition to existing 3 Series production facilities in Germany and China.
But Gabriel said on Monday that a tax on German imports would lead to a “bad awakening” among US carmakers since they were reliant on transatlantic supply chains.
“I believe BMW’s biggest factory is already in the US, in Spartanburg [South Carolina],” Gabriel, leader of the SPD, told Bild in a video interview.
“The US car industry would have a bad awakening if all the supply parts that aren’t being built in the US were to suddenly come with a 35% tariff. I believe it would make the US car industry weaker, worse and above all more expensive. I would wait and see what Congress has to say about that, which is mostly full of people who want the opposite of Trump.”
http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/16/14285232/trump-eu-nato-interview
Trump just threatened to dismantle the European-American alliance as we know it
Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchamp Jan 16, 2017, 2:05pm EST
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(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Donald Trump just lobbed a grenade into the normally staid world of European-American diplomacy, using a joint interview with two of Europe’s biggest newspapers to call NATO “obsolete,” predict that the European Union would fall apart and announce that the US wouldn’t really care if it did, and threaten to potentially start a trade war with Germany over BMW’s plans to build a manufacturing plant in Mexico.
For good measure, Trump also criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of Washington’s closest allies, while hinting that he’d be willing to lift the sanctions imposed on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has rattled many in Europe by annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and threatening to use force against other of his neighbors.
Merkel, Trump said, had made a "catastrophic" mistake by allowing more than a million refugees into her country, a decision that has seriously dented her popularity at home. The president-elect also said hinted that he’d be willing to remove the sanctions on Russia if Putin agreed to reduce his nuclear stockpile (which is almost literally the opposite of what the Russian leader has been talking about).
"They have sanctions against Russia -- let's see if we can strike a few good deals with Russia,” Trump said in the joint interview. “I think there should be less nuclear weapons and they have to be reduced significantly, that's part of it.”
The remarks forced Secretary of State John Kerry to spend one of his last days as America’s top diplomat repairing the damage that Trump has done before even taking the oath of office. In an interview with CNN, Kerry said it was "inappropriate" for Trump to "be stepping in to the politics of other countries in a quite direct manner."
Kerry is right to be worried. Bashing NATO and the European Union, and alienating Germany, is a plan for tearing apart US relations with the EU — for weakening the agreements that underpin America’s status as the sole superpower and that maintain peace on the European continent.
It also means that Trump is talking about radically reshaping US foreign policy in a way that would significantly boost Putin’s influence while leaving America’s allies scrambling to figure out where they stand and how much they can trust in the future stability of an international system that haa brought unprecedented economic strength and stability to the continent for decades.
“What Trump proposes is [American] geopolitical suicide,” Daniel Nexon, a professor at Georgetown who studies great power politics, writes at the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog. “Make no mistake: you should be very worried right now.”
The allied West — and how Trump is already weakening it
After World War II, the United States and its allies attempted to create a new world — one defined by rules and order, in which such a devastating war could never happen again.
A Western alliance, NATO, was designed to deter Soviet aggression. International institutions, like the UN, were set up to allow countries to resolve differences peacefully. Global financial institutions, like the General Agreement on Trade and Tarriffs (which would become the World Trade Organization), were designed to prevent countries from reimposing the self-defeating trade barriers that made the Great Depression far worse than it had to be.
For the past 70 years, these institutions have worked astonishingly well. In his joint interview with the Times of London and German’s Bild newspaper, Trump basically takes aim at all three pillars of those systems: military, political, and economic.
Start with NATO. In the interview, Trump reiterated his claim, first made during the campaign, that NATO was obsolete because it didn’t pay enough attention to terrorism and because other members didn’t pay enough to fund it. He claimed that he’d been proven right.
“I took such heat, when I said NATO was obsolete,” Trump says. “And then they started saying Trump is right.”
That’s not when European leaders have been saying in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s speech. Speaking to reporters in Brussels before a meeting of top EU diplomats, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the comments had caused "astonishment and agitation" within the military alliance.
That’s because NATO works through commitment: Members pledge that an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all. As Trump calls the value of the alliance into question, other states might question whether he would actually defend a NATO ally if attacked — especially since, during the campaign, he said he might not. If countries don’t believe in that promise, then it stops serving as a deterrent — potentially encouraging Russia to menace a NATO member-state.
“The United States president-elect is actively working to increase the risk of military escalation and war in Europe,” Thomas Rid, a professor at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, tweeted in response to the interview.
Trump would be perfectly happy if the EU crumbled
That’s the military component, the first leg of the world order’s tripod. Trump’s comments on the European Union — one of the cornerstone international institutions of the post-war order — are even more startling. Trump actively predicted that the EU would fall apart, and suggested that the US wouldn’t really care if it did.
“The EU was formed, partially, to beat the United States on trade, OK?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t really care whether it’s separate or together.”
Here you see Trump’s basic mindset at work — the world is a series of zero-sum tradeoffs. If the EU serves European countries well, economically, then it must be bad for the United States. Hence he won’t try, as President Obama has, to use US influence to prevent more countries from leaving the European Union.
Trump’s view is wrong on the economics. But perhaps more scarily, it’s ignorant of the politics.
See, the European Union was designed as much more than a free trading bloc. Its architects designed it, very explicitly, as a way of unifying Europe politically. The closer Europeans are economically, and the more a sense of a shared European identity there is, the less likely that France and Germany, say, are to see each other as military threats.
This, in fact, has worked. Europe is what scholars Barry Buzan and Ole Waever call a "security community," a place where countries "stop treating each other as security problems and start behaving as friends." That is directly tied to European integration, which established a set of post-war institutions that make international disputes more like normal politics. The Europeans take their problems to each other and their shared institutions, such as the European Commission and Parliament.
Because they spent the immediate post-war years forcing themselves to take to those institutions, Europeans proved that they can work, and thus made them far more appealing options than conflict. Europeans' fundamental beliefs about how European states should treat each other has transformed with the EU's institutions.
After the Euro and refugee crises, the rise of anti-EU far-right parties, and Brexit, this pacifying institution is facing unprecedented threats. Now, Trump is signaling that he won’t wield the US’s peerless influence to try to ward off said threats. That’s strike two against the world order.
Strike three is Trump’s plan to attack the German auto industry. In the interview, Trump proposes to slap a 35 percent tax on BMW imports to the United States as a form of retaliation for building a plant in Mexico.
“I would tell BMW if they think they’re gonna build a plant in Mexico and sell cars into the US without a 35 per cent tax, it’s not gonna happen,” he says. “What I’m saying is they have to build their plant in the US.”
Here you see Trump replaying a domestic policy move of his — bully specific companies into putting more manufacturing plants in the United States by threatening economic problems if they don’t comply.
But BMW isn’t an American company, it’s a German one. If the United States slaps this kind of tariff on a German company, Germany will likely retaliate against the United States. This is the early stages of what economists call a “trade war” — where countries make trading with each other harder to punish one side’s protectionism.
This, too, is an assault on the post-war order. Trade, like the EU, has both an economic and political function. Its political function is to bind Western countries together, to align their interests and prevent trade wars that would slow down growth globally. By attacking a key company in one of America’s most important allies, he risks not only damage to the US economy — but alienating a critical partner in managing the global economy and keeping trade open.
Military, political, economic — this interview is a blueprint for war on the international order.
“Putin’s wish list”
There is only country that benefits from all of these moves: Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Putin’s fundamental foreign policy goal is to restore Russia’s place as one of the world’s most powerful and influential nations. To do so, he wants to restore global politics to the way it was in the 19th century — when European countries saw each other as rivals rather than partners. This kind of “balance of power” world order would allow Russia to divide European powers by forming selective partnerships with some against the others — thus restoring Russian greatness.
Putin’s Russia is too weak, in political and military terms, to accomplish this on its own. The logical end point of Trump’s stated policies, regardless of whether that’s what he intends, is a fractured Europe that would be far less capable of standing up to Putin.
“Every [foreign policy] position Trump takes, starting from total ignorance around [a] year ago, is on Putin's wish list,” Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess master and dissident, tweets. “Brexit, Ukraine, NATO, EU, Merkel.”
Trump’s stated policy ideas, if implemented, would have the effect of accomplishing much of what Putin has dreamed of, but that the Russian leader may have never have thought possible.
Now, with Trump taking office in a few days, it all seems very frighteningly real. Trump is proposing isolating America from its allies, and isolating these allies from each other. The only power that benefits is Russia, perhaps America’s most significant strategic rival. There is a country that Trump may soon make great again. The problem is that it’s not the US.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...047072-dbe6-11e6-b2cf-b67fe3285cbc_story.html
European leaders shocked as Trump slams NATO and E.U., raising fears of transatlantic split
By Michael Birnbaum January 16 at 1:44 PM
BRUSSELS — European leaders grappled with the jolting reality of President-elect Donald Trump’s skepticism of the European Union on Monday, saying they might have to stand without the United States at their side during the Trump presidency.
The possibility of an unprecedented breach in transatlantic relations came after Trump — who embraced anti-E.U. insurgents during his campaign and following his victory — said in weekend remarks that the 28-nation European Union was bound for a breakup and that he was indifferent to its fate. He also said NATO’s current configuration is “obsolete,” even as he professed commitment to Europe’s defense.
Trump’s attitudes have raised alarm bells across Europe, which is facing a wave of elections this year in which anti-immigrant, Euroskeptic leaders could gain power. Most mainstream leaders have committed to working with Trump after his inauguration Friday, even as they have expressed hope that he will moderate his views once he takes office. His continued hard line has created a painful realization in Europe that they may now have to live without the full backing of their oldest, strongest partner. The European Union underpins much of the continent’s post-World War II prosperity, but skeptics have attacked it in recent years as a dysfunctional bloc that undermines finances and security.
“We will cooperate with him on all levels, of course,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin. But she said Europeans will need to take responsibility for themselves.
“We Europeans have our destiny in our own hands,” she said.
The full ramifications of a potential breakdown in transatlantic ties are so extensive, they are difficult to total. U.S. guarantees form the backbone of European security. The United States and the 500-million-people-strong European Union are each other’s most important trade partners. For decades, European nations and the United States have worked tightly together on issues of war, peace and wealth.
Trump appears skeptical that the European Union matters to American security or economic growth.
“People want their own identity, so if you ask me, others, I believe others will leave,” Trump said of the European Union in a weekend interview with the Times of London and Germany’s Bild newspaper. He said he did not care about the E.U.’s future. “I don’t think it matters much for the United States,” he said.
“You look at the European Union, and it’s Germany. Basically a vehicle for Germany,” Trump said, meaning Germany had used the free-trade bloc to sell its goods to the disadvantage of others. He added that Merkel had made a “very catastrophic mistake” in opening Europe’s doors to migrants and refugees.
And he offered no special credit to European nations for being long-standing U.S. allies, saying he will trust Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin alike at the outset of his presidency.
“I start off trusting both,” he said. “But let’s see how long that lasts. It may not last long at all.”
Trump offered mixed messages about the NATO defense alliance, which is dominated by the United States, calling it “obsolete” and saying it is “very unfair to the United States” that most nations are not meeting their voluntary defense spending commitments. “With that being said, NATO is very important to me,” Trump said.
The Kremlin embraced Trump’s comments, with a spokesman agreeing that NATO is obsolete. British leaders also welcomed Trump’s willingness to negotiate a trade deal in the wake of their nation’s departure from the E.U.
But among most U.S. allies, Trump’s attitudes “caused astonishment and excitement, not just in Brussels,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told reporters Monday in Brussels, where he was meeting with other European foreign ministers at a previously scheduled gathering. Coming directly from a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Steinmeier said NATO had listened to Trump’s comments “with concern.”
The incoming U.S. president is the first American leader since World War II not to support European integration. The European Union has long been considered to be in the U.S. interest, since it created a unified market for U.S. businesses, provided a bulwark against communism during the Cold War and helped quell the bloody slaughter that cost U.S. lives, among others, in the first half of the 20th century. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the European Union expanded eastward into formerly communist nations, a development that leaders there say helped bring rule of law and stability as they modernized their economies.
Steinmeier said Germany is trying to assess what U.S. foreign policy will actually be. For example, James Mattis, the retired Marine general nominated to be Trump’s defense secretary, offered straightforward support for NATO and skepticism of Russia at his confirmation hearing last week.
Other leaders said Europe’s future does not rise or fall based on attitudes in the White House.
“What we are looking for is a partnership based on common interests with the United States,” E.U. foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told reporters. “We always like to be in good company, but we determine our policies by ourselves.”
Some analysts noted that after Britain’s vote last June to leave the European Union, support for the E.U. in other nations increased. They wondered whether Trump’s frontal challenge to the bloc might have a similar effect. But one said that if global instability rises as a result of Trump’s unpredictable policies, the stress could weigh on the already taxed European Union.
“Over the last decades, the United States has played a huge stabilizing role. And when this stabilizing role of the U.S. around the world falls away, because they’re doing transactional deals, that will create lots and lots of messes which will implicate European interests,” said Stefan Lehne, a former Austrian diplomat who now works at Carnegie Europe, a Brussels-based think tank.
One prominent U.S. advocate of European unity was concerned about Europe’s ability to weather the Trump tsunami.
As the European Union battles skeptical forces, “U.S. cheerleading and support has been welcomed,” outgoing U.S. Ambassador to the E.U. Anthony Gardner said last week. “If there isn’t someone like a [Secretary of State John F.] Kerry or an Obama . . . reminding people of the importance of the European Union, then there’s a vacuum.”
French leaders, who face tough presidential elections in April, also appeared to be scrambling to handle the fallout. Trump allies have expressed support for the anti-E.U., anti-immigrant National Front party, whose leader, Marine Le Pen, is doing well in opinion polls. Le Pen lunched in the basement of Trump Tower last week in the company of a man who has served as an informal conduit for Trump’s contacts with Euroskeptic European leaders, although the Trump transition team denied any formal meeting with the French politician.
“The best response is European unity,” said French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. “As with the case of Brexit, the best way to defend Europe is to remain united. This is a bit of an invitation that we are making to Mr. Trump. To remain a bloc. Not to forget that the force of Europeans is in their unity.”
But the most wishful approach to Trump’s declarations may have come from Luxembourg, where the nation’s top diplomat said he hoped Trump was still in campaign mode.
“One must hope that the statements of candidate Trump starting Friday will go in a different direction,” said Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn. “If the risks are summed up, it would be very destabilizing, which is not in the interest of America.”
Stephanie Kirchner in Berlin contributed to this report.