BERLIN — German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s one-day visit to Washington today includes meetings at the White House and a news conference alongside President Donald Trump, but it is a businesslike affair that seems more duty than pleasure for both leaders.
Merkel arrives with deadlines looming on two crucial issues. Trump has made May 12 his cutoff for deciding whether to pull the United States out of the Iran nuclear accord. Meanwhile, a European exemption from Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs expires Tuesday.
Yet there is little sign Merkel can get Trump to back down from decisions he sees as part of his populist promise to help American workers and secure better international deals.
And for Trump, Germany’s pointed refusal to join the allied air assault on Syria this month is the latest on a list of grievances that include what he calls grossly unfair treatment of U.S. automakers.
“I don’t think we should raise the bar of expectations too high,” said Peter Beyer, coordinator of trans-Atlantic relations for Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union.
Merkel will not get the kind of flourishes accorded to French President Emmanuel Macron’s state visit earlier in the week, and there will be no golf in the Florida sunshine, as when Trump played host to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last week.
Trump has one welcome gift for Merkel: confirmation Thursday of a U.S. ambassador to Germany after months of delay.
Ric Grenell was nominated last year for a post considered crucial to U.S. diplomacy. Although Trump blamed the long vacancy on political gamesmanship by Democrats, many in Germany and elsewhere saw it as a sign that Trump had discounted the U.S. relationship with Europe’s most populous country.
Merkel and Trump have scant personal chemistry and talk less frequently than any U.S. and German leaders in recent memory. Until a call in March, the two leaders went five months without direct communication.
Grenell shares Trump’s deep skepticism about the Iran deal, calling it “a direct blow to the U.N.’s credibility” and the negotiations that led to it “a colossal and dangerous waste of time.”
Beyer said Merkel would try to persuade Trump that “there is no Plan B. If the U.S. is out, then this thing is probably dead.”
