BERLIN — Germany’s conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz returned with confidence from Washington on Friday, expressing certainty about U.S. President Donald Trump remaining committed to Europe’s security and being open to discussion with its allies.
“My conclusion from this encounter is different from perhaps the public image,” Merz said during a business summit in Berlin, following his inaugural visit to the White House the day before. “This American government is open to discussion, listens, is prepared to accept other opinions … You can talk to them. But you can’t let them intimidate you,” he added.
Merz’s visit was broadly focused on three main topics: U.S. support for Ukraine, the future of NATO and Europe’s trade negotiations with Washington.
When asked about concrete outcomes, Merz said he had “no doubt at all that the American government is committed to NATO” and that the White House and the Chancellery would strengthen their bilateral trade partnership.
“We will be advising two representatives who are now talking intensively with each other about German-American trade relations embedded in the European framework,” he said. “The lunch was worth its weight in gold for that.”
Merz said he will extensively brief European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen later on Friday. The European Commission is working to strike a far-reaching trade deal with Trump, who doubled tariffs on steel and aluminum to 50 percent this week.
In the run-up to his visit, Merz had prepared for an ambush of the kind endured by the leaders of Ukraine and South Africa. It appeared to work.
“It wasn’t a press conference, but a good show in the Oval Office,” Merz said about the encounter, during which Trump called Merz “a very good man to deal with” and voiced optimism that the U.S. would eventually reach “a good trade deal” with the European Union. Trump also said he had no plans to remove any of the nearly 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany.
“These are concrete, I hope, reliable statements from the U.S. president that Friedrich Merz will come back to and can be built on,” Jürgen Hardt, the lead parliamentarian on foreign policy from Merz’s conservatives, told Welt TV. “The message was ‘We are good friends,’ and what more could we want?”
Metin Hakverdi, the German government’s transatlantic relations coordinator, also expressed optimism in comments to Tagesspiegel.
“There is still a lot of work ahead of us in the transatlantic relationship,” said the politcian from the center-left Social Democratic Party, Merz’s junior coalition partner. “But this good relationship will help us to successfully tackle the major challenges in the world together with the Americans — especially the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine.”
But, precisely on that issue, Trump suggested it might be good to let Russia and Ukraine continue to “fight for a while,” a marked turn from his many promises to end the war on his first day in office. That position was also in sharp contrast to the approach taken by Merz, who has repeatedly stated Russia should be the forced to the negotiating table by strengthening Kyiv.
Germany’s Green Party, who are in opposition, were split on their assessment of Merz’s trip. While foreign policy lawmaker Robin Wagener congratulated the chancellor in a post on X for having found “strong words on Ukraine in DC,” his party colleague, Deborah Düring, criticized Merz for pandering to Trump and said the visit was a missed opportunity to stand up for human rights, the rule of law and democracy.
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