Thread: Trump’s pro-Saudi, pro-Russia, anti-Europe foreign policy

Trump’s pro-Saudi, pro-Russia, anti-Europe foreign policy

By Ishaan Tharoor May 31 at 1:00 AM

To state the blindingly obvious: President Trump's European visit did not go well. The reported tidbits of his gruff exchanges with European leaders — combined with images of bemused dignitaries cringing through a series of awkward photo ops — were evidence enough, but the statements that followed the trip confirmed it.

At a Bavarian folk festival on Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel dropped a rhetorical bombshell. Given “what I've experienced in recent days,” she said, the days when “we could completely rely on others are over to a certain extent.” Merkel announced it was time for Europeans “to take our fates in our own hands.” And while emphasizing the importance of “friendship” with the United States, she clearly emerged from her various meetings with Trump with a strong conviction: “We have to fight for our own future, as Europeans, for our destiny.” She repeated that line on Tuesday when pressed on the matter by reporters.

Merkel's remarks are likely an indication, wrote German magazine Der Spiegel, “that she is losing hope that she can ever work constructively together with Trump.” After all, the American president used his pulpit at NATO headquarters to scold his European counterparts about not paying their fair share — but specifically did not reaffirm the United States' commitment to defend alliance members if attacked.

And at the Group of Seven summit in Sicily over the weekend, Trump balked at reiterating U.S. support for the 2015 Paris climate accord. That led to a sharp rebuke on Monday from German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who contrasted that impasse with Trump's warm visit to Saudi Arabia and the $110 billion arms deal inked between the two nations.

“Anyone who accelerates climate change by weakening environmental protection, who sells more weapons in conflict zones and who does not want to politically resolve religious conflicts is putting peace in Europe at risk,” said Gabriel. Trump fired back on Tuesday, lashing out at Germany for its supposed unfair trade policies and insufficient defense spending.

“As a result of this trip, American influence, always exercised in Europe through mutually beneficial trade and military alliances, is at its rockiest in recent memory,” concluded Post columnist Anne Applebaum. “The American-German relationship, the core of the transatlantic alliance for more than 70 years, has just hit a new low.”

The friction is striking, especially when held up against Trump's more congenial time in Riyadh. “Europeans think they are now being treated worse by Trump than countries like Russia or Saudi Arabia,” said Stephan Bierling, a German expert on transatlantic relations at the University of Regensburg, to my colleague Rick Noack.

The antipathy toward Trump is not restricted to Germany. On Monday, a photo surfaced on official Norwegian Twitter accounts showing the prime ministers of Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and Finland all clutching a soccer ball. It was interpreted as a jab at Trump's surreal photo op at the inauguration of a counterterrorism center in Riyadh.

Newly elected French President Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, made a point of sharing a white-knuckle handshake with Trump and likening the American president to autocratic rulers elsewhere. “Donald Trump, the President of Turkey or the President of Russia are of a mindset of power relations, which doesn't bother me,” said Macron. “I don't let anything go. That's how one makes oneself respected.”

He followed up on Monday with another striking act. While sharing the stage with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Paris, Macron upbraided the Russian leader for Moscow's violations of human rights and dissemination of propaganda through state-funded media.

Macron “set a welcome tone for European dealings with Russia, especially in the context of an unreliable U.S. administration and multiplying questions about the dealings of Trump’s entourage with Moscow,” beamed an editorial in Britain's Guardian newspaper.

The tough talk on Trump is partly meant to appeal to European voters who are also unimpressed by the American president. But, as PostEverything's Dan Drezner notes, the Trump administration doesn't seem equipped or even inclined to counteract the negative reactions across the pond. Even the State Department has done little to mollify Merkel.

“What’s truly impressive about [State's] silence is the apparent lack of comprehension by Trump’s foreign policy team about why Merkel would have fired these shots,” wrote Drezner. “Trump’s ignorant rhetoric and brash demeanor virtually guarantee that elected leaders in large advanced industrialized democracies will benefit from resisting Trump.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.6cc646fdc999

“What’s truly impressive about [State's] silence is the apparent lack of comprehension by Trump’s foreign policy team about why Merkel would have fired these shots,” wrote Drezner. “Trump’s ignorant rhetoric and brash demeanor virtually guarantee that elected leaders in large advanced industrialized democracies will benefit from resisting Trump.”

LOL!! Then let them benefit! We don't care. We wish no harm to Europe. Many Americans are unhappy with trade deficits and EU policies promoting massive immigration, open borders, and refugee programs that threaten the US if we go along. Many Americans are unhappy with the Paris Accord, the emphasis of fighting Climate Change at the expense of Americans while everyone else benefits. Many Americans are unhappy with Socialist Globalist Policies that Europe seems intent on not just using within their countries, if they like it, have at it, but pushing this crap on the United States and calling US names and looking down their Elitist noses at US when these policies are not suitable to the American Economy, American Workers, or American Political System.

Many Americans are fed up with trade deficits as well and we have them with almost every major EU country with Germany leading the pack at $65 billion last year for their country alone. Many Americans are sick and tired of listening to Europe wail about "alliances" that don't cost them anything, where the US taxpayer and American Lives carry the load of Europe's defense. And the majority of 30 states of the United States have had it with the leaders of other nations disrespecting our President and his Trump Supporters.

So if Europe thinks they're gaining any favors with their choice of responses to the NATO and G7 meetings last week, they can sit around their Palaces complaining, joking and acting like drunk 3rd graders who lost the game all they want. God knows we've seen plenty of that in our own country with the Hillary Shrills who still can't get over their election losses, but it's not going to change the American Resolve to fix our own country and right the wrongs that caused our demise. For those who don't understand what American Resolve means, well, you're soon to find out.

When American Resolve is in motion as it is now, there is no Better Friend nor more Terrifying Enemy than the United States.

Trump, Germany's Merkel clash over trade, NATO and 'Western values'

By Benjamin Weinthal
Published May 30, 2017
Fox News

Germany and the U.S. emerged from Memorial Day weekend in a war of words, as Chancellor Angela Merkel and her coalition partners attacked America’s reliability as a world power and President Trump fired back on Twitter.

Merkel said at a beer tent rally in Munich Sunday that Germany cannot "fully rely" on the U.S., and that continental Europe “really must take our fate into our own hands.”

Martin Schulz, head of Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD), which is Merkel's coalition partner in the federal government, went further, calling Trump a "destroyer of all Western values."

“The chancellor represents all of us at summits [NATO and G7] like these,” said Schulz, seen as a challenger to Merkel in the upcoming September election. "I reject with outrage the way this man takes it upon himself to treat the head of our country's government.”

Trump countered on Tuesday, renewing his allegation Germany doesn't pay its full, 2 percent of GDP share toward defense -- a requirement of NATO membership. He also rapped the European economic powerhouse for its trade policies.

“We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military," Trump tweeted. "Very bad for U.S. This will change"

Economists agree with Trump that the U.S. trade gap favors Germany by $67.8 billion per year. That trade deficit is the second largest after China's $310 billion advantage over the U.S.

Trump has confronted Merkel over her country's failure to meet the NATO guidelines for defense expenditures. Germany is one of the 23 NATO members that has not met the 2 percent goal of defense spending. The European economic powerhouse ranked 15th among NATO members, spending a mere 1.2 percent of its gross national product on military defense.

The U.S., Greece, Poland, Britain and Estonia are the only NATO members who meet (or exceed) NATO’s criteria for armed forces spending. A Politico story published last week, titled "Trump's right about Germany," said "Merkel's economic policies really are hurting the U.S.”

It is not the first time that anti-American rhetoric has played a role in a German election campaign. Former social democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder mobilized voters around anti-American sentiments to win the 2002 election. In his memoir, “Decision Points,” President George W. Bush accused Schröder of reneging on German support for the U.S. in the Iraq war. That touched off a war of words between Bush and Germany’s then justice minister.

When he was foreign minister, Germany's current social democratic president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called Trump a "hate preacher." Steinmeier’s successor as foreign minister, the social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel, has pivoted away from the U.S and toward the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just days after the U.S and other world powers reached a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015 to curb its atomic program, Gabriel went to Iran with a delegation of business leaders. He made a second trip last year to jump-start business deals with Iran.

This past week, Gabriel was engulfed in scandal after inviting a hard-line anti-Western, anti-U.S. Iranian cleric to the foreign ministry for a conference promoting religious peace. The extremist Iranian religious leader Hamidreza Torabi, a key organizer of the Quds event in Berlin, an anti-Western rally calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, appeared at the foreign ministry event.

Torabi sponsors buses for pro-Hezbollah and pro-Iranian regime activists to travel to Quds, which also serves as a gathering spot for boycott campaigns against Israel.

Although the U.S. has designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, Merkel has declined to outlaw the Lebanese militant group. There are 950 active members and supporters of Hezbollah in Germany.

The Israeli Embassy told Fox News that Germany should have never invited Torabi to the conference.

“Any person who incites violence has no place in a dialogue that uses religions as a bedrock to bring peace, tolerance and understanding between people, nations and religions,” the ministry said. “Moreover, there is no doubt that a person who incites violence against Israel and Jews in the name of God, in the city of Berlin, has no place in such a dialogue, certainly not one organized by the German government.”

Torabi, who heads the Islamic Academy of Germany, held a poster in downtown Berlin at the 2016 anti-Israel Quds rally urging the “rejection of Israel” and terming the Jewish state “illegal and criminal.”

Benjamin Weinthal reports on human rights in the Middle East and is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @BenWeinthal

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017...rn-values.html

Trump is right on the trade issue and he is right on the NATO funding problem. So why is our CORRUPT MEDIA favoring Germany and the EU instead of defending and standing up for our own country and citizens like Trump is doing? Why would our President be mocked and criticized by the US CORRUPT MEDIA for standing up for the United States in our meetings with European leaders?!!!

It's mind-boggling.

In 2016, we had a $28 billion trade deficit with Italy, a $15 billion a year trade deficit with France, but we have small trade surpluses ($1 billion) with the United Kingdom (Great Britain Et Al) and Belgium ($16 billion, probably related to NATO)!! Thank you UK and Belgium!!

So all the countries like Germany, France and Italy who are criticizing Trump are also the countries robbing US on trade. These problems have to be fixed.