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After Warily Circling, Trump and Angela Merkel Prepare to Meet
After Warily Circling, Trump and Angela Merkel Prepare to Meet
WASHINGTON —
When President Trump welcomes Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to the Oval Office on Tuesday, their meeting will take on a symbolism unlike any he has held so far: The great disrupter confronts the last defender of the liberal world order.
Mr. Trump and Ms. Merkel are poles apart on issues like immigration and trade; they have circled each other warily since the American presidential election. But both sides, officials said, are determined not to let this first meeting devolve into a clash of competing worldviews.
Ms. Merkel has been studying Mr. Trump’s speeches to get an insight into the new president’s thinking. American officials said Mr. Trump would ask the chancellor for advice on how to deal with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whom, after dozens of meetings over her 11 years in power, she knows better than any other leader in the West.
The threat posed by Russia to Europe could give Ms. Merkel and Mr. Trump a sliver of common ground. The Trump administration is demanding that Germany and its other NATO allies increase their military budgets, a message the Germans appear to be taking to heart, even if their spending still falls well short of what the United States would like.
“You might almost call it serendipity,” said Josef Joffe, the publisher and editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit. “Just as Trump is pushing the Europeans to shape up and pay up, the Germans have quite independently realized they are facing a strategic threat on their eastern border.”
But if Mr. Trump and Ms. Merkel find common cause on NATO, they risk new tensions over trade. Administration officials have railed against Germany’s huge trade surplus with the United States. One of Mr. Trump’s top economic advisers, Peter Navarro, recently accused Germany of exploiting its trading partners by depressing the euro to boost its exports.
Ms. Merkel plans to push back hard on what the Germans view as blatant protectionism. She is bringing a delegation of corporate chiefs from BMW, Siemens and other German companies with major American operations. They will talk about apprenticeship programs to train American workers.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.