Merkel’s Germany faces watershed moment with US

Bloomberg

There is a corner of Berlin where the golden age of US-German relations lingers on.
Visitors to the Allied Museum on Clayallee — a boulevard named for General Lucius Clay, commander in chief of US forces in Europe after World War II — are greeted by a propeller aircraft that flew in supplies to West Berlin during the Soviet blockade of 1948-49, ensuring the city remained an island of western freedom in a sea of communist control.
An exhibition called “How enemies became friends” features the military uniform and wedding dress of a postwar German-American couple. There’s also a self-made parachute US pilot Gail Halvorsen used to drop Hershey bars to Berlin’s children, earning him the nickname “The Candy Bomber.”
“This is still very much considered the good America,” said Florian Weiss, curator of the museum founded in 1994 as a thank-you to the US for its protection during the Cold War
and financed by the German government. “The idea that the United States has defended our freedom is still very much alive here.”
A quarter century later, that sentiment is wearing thin in the era of Donald Trump. Beyond the museum grounds, in Berlin and across Germany, belief in what Weiss called “the myth of America as the protector of freedom and democracy” is evaporating under a sustained onslaught by the US president.

Volatile Moment
It’s an unsettling shift for Germany and a risk for Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose traditional allegiance to the US has her on a collision course with Washington. While she isn’t alone in struggling to adapt, Trump’s attacks on everything from German car exports to migration policy make it particularly difficult for Germany’s chancellor of 13 years to respond.
“We’re looking at the most volatile strategic moment in the history of the federal republic, with no strategic solution in sight,” said Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, vice president of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin.
“There’s a realisation that things are going to get much worse before they get better.”
Trump vs. Merkel For all of the recent clashes, US-German alienation has been brewing for a while.
Early contacts with Trump’s White House left the chancellery in Berlin shocked about an administration that seemed dismissive of traditional trans-Atlantic ties, with a complete disregard of history. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said “the global order we’ve known and grown accustomed to” is dead.
Trump’s latest attack on Merkel’s migration policy illustrates the point. Wading into German politics, he said Germans “are turning against their leadership” and that crime
had increased since Europe’s refugee crisis, even as German government data show a historic drop in 2017.
The estrangement isn’t entirely one-sided. Germany has faced demands from several US administrations to boost defense spending to the NATO benchmark of 2 percent of gross domestic product, a target Merkel says the country won’t reach in the foreseeable future. The conflict is likely to heat up again ahead of a NATO summit in Brussels in July that Trump is expected to attend.