German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Friday the day after meeting with Donald Trump at the White House that he encountered discussions open to the U.S. government and was convinced that Washington remains committed to NATO.
Meers described his Oval Office meeting as constructive but also frankly extending the lunch, noting that the two leaders expressed different views on Ukraine.
“Yesterday, at the Oval Office meeting, I expressed a distinctly different position on the topic of Ukraine, with the one Trump accepted, not only without objection, but we discussed it in detail again at lunch,” Meers said in Berlin after returning.
Thursday’s White House meeting marked the first time the two men sat down in person. Merz, who became prime minister in May, avoided the kind of confrontations in the Oval Office that had tripped up other world leaders, including Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine and Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa.
The two leaders were open with a pleasant attitude. Meles presented Trump with a fixed birth certificate from President’s grandfather Friedrich Trump, who immigrated from Karstadt, Germany. Trump calls Meles a “very good person.”
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He said the U.S. government is willing to discuss, listen and accept different opinions.
He added that the conversation should be done in two ways: “Let’s stop talking about Donald Trump with raised fingers and wrinkles on the nose. You have to talk to him, not about him.”
He said he also met with senators on Capitol Hill to urge them to recognize the scale of Russia’s heavy duty.
“Please look at how Russia’s arms are going, what they are doing right now; you obviously don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “In short, you can talk to them, but you can’t let yourself be scared. I don’t have that tendency anyway.”
Merz said fluent English highlighted the need for transatlantic trust and said he reminded Trump that allies are important.
“Whether we like it or not, we will depend on the United States of America for a long time,” he said. “But you also need partners in the world, Europeans, especially Germans, to be the most suitable ones.”
“This is the difference between a dictatorship and a democracies: an authoritarian system has subordinates. Democracies have partners – those partners we want to be in Europe and the United States.”
He reiterated that the United States remains committed to NATO, especially as Germany and others increase their defense spending. Trump has suggested in the past that the United States may abandon its commitment to the coalition if its member states do not meet defense spending targets.
“I have no doubt that the U.S. government is committed to NATO, especially now we all say we are doing more. We are making sure we can defend ourselves in Europe, too, and I believe that expectation is not unreasonable.”
“We have been freelance riders of American security assurance for years and we are changing that now.”
& Copy 2025 Canadian Press
