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Outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with President Joe Biden at the White House on Thursday, as growing concern over Berlin moves away from a “west-facing” geopolitical alliance and turns more to openings towards his Russian and Chinese rivals as trading partners, US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell.
Grenell, who served under President Donald Trump, told “The Story” on Thursday that despite statements from the White House, Biden will likely honor concerns about Russia’s completion of the Nordstream pipeline to the Merkel nation.
Host Martha MacCallum said the White House said Biden would “raise his objections to the pipeline with Merkel and stress the importance of developing concrete mechanisms to ensure that energy is not used as a waste. coercive tool in Europe and Ukraine “.
Grenell dismissed the claim, saying the problem is instead at the heart of what he called Merkel’s departure from a “west-facing alliance” that Germany has developed since the end of World War II. world and more seriously since the reunification of the country on November 9, 1989.
“I think Biden will say those words, and not really know what they mean exactly, and everyone will keep going,” Grenell replied.
“They have already dropped the sanctions. The Germans are happy to have Russian gas. It’s a disaster.”
OPINION: GRENELL ON MERKEL AND THE TRAGIC EVOLUTION OF THE WESTERN EUROPEAN ALLIANCE
Grenell said he loved Chancellor Merkel, 66, on a personal level and that she had been a good leader overall. However, he reiterated that she had brought Germany “into an alliance which is no longer facing the West”.
He said the international community was celebrating her term regardless of the fact that she sometimes considered herself, as TIME magazine described her in her 2015 Personality of the Year profile, as the “de facto leader of the world. ‘European Union’, despite other factors. .
“She likes the idea of an EU-US alliance, not a Western alliance. [The Germans] want to be friends with everyone. They have a huge surplus. They want to keep buying and trading with China, ”Grenell said.
“What Chancellor Merkel has done is to move Germany and Europe away from an alliance turned towards the West and it is Germany first. Or not, the Germans share their bulk surplus and you get a big no. She’s responsible for reducing the EU “
Merkel has said she will step down from the Chancellery later this year. In the post-1949 system of government, the Chancellor is not directly elected by the German people but by the Bundestag – or the German Parliament.
Merkel is a member of the CDU or Christian Democratic Union, a moderate / center-right faction – and has been chancellor since 2005.
The main candidates in the September elections are German Vice-Chancellor Olaf Scholz, left-wing Social Democrats, as well as Nordrhein-Westfalen Governor Armin Laschet representing the CDU – and Bundestag members Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel representing the party right-wing populist Alternative for Germany.
The AfD candidates are known to favor a German break with the EU, Reuters reported.
On “The Story,” MacCallum went on to refer to a full article Grenell wrote earlier today for Fox News Opinion, in which he further explained that Germany is making disturbing overtures away from the West. :
“Merkel has always struggled to explain exactly why his country had a budget surplus when it failed to meet its financial commitments to NATO defense. She also didn’t explain why Germany exactly ignored European concerns that it was feeding Russia’s beast with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline partnership.
As US Ambassador to Germany during the Trump administration, I spent much of my time trying to convince America’s largest country of European allies that some of their political positions were incompatible with a West-facing Alliance.
I left wondering why the German government does not share the Western Alliance’s view that the Kremlin and the Chinese Communist Party will not ultimately converge with the values and interests of Western Europe. Expecting them to do so will only increase the likelihood that the two hostile powers will succeed in further marginalizing the West.
“A few [the candidates for chancellor in the 2021 election] said the German elections will be held in September, said they did not want to choose between China and the United States, “Grenell added in” The Story “.
Merkel will be a prominent guest at a White House dinner on Thursday. The guest list also included Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., And 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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