Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is set to travel to Washington this week for high stakes talks with US President Donald Trump, German and US officials confirmed on Sunday morning.
This will be the Chancellor’s first in-person meeting with Trump. The pair are scheduled to sit down in the Oval Office on June 5.
Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.
The two leaders have already built rapport through bilateral and multilateral conference calls, including during a direct phone conversation on May 8, which reportedly covered NATO’s future, the goal of ending Russia’s war in Ukraine, and resolving trade disputes swiftly.
Meanwhile, for US-German policy watchers such as Tyson Barker, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, the upcoming Oval Office treatment is “the biggest wild card in personal chemistry for Trump with any leader in the world at this point.”
“It matters a huge deal, because Trump personalizes his foreign policy. It is all mediated through his personal relationships with other foreign policy leaders,” Barker told Kyiv Post’s Washington correspondent.
One advantage Merz has is that he is “nothing like Angela Merkel or Olaf Scholz,” Barker says, explaining that the current German chancellor, unlike his predecessors, is “more comfortable with policy vision… and with the language of power.”
Other Topics of Interest
ISW Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 1, 2025
Latest from the Institute for the Study of War.
He highlighted Merz’s evolving position on Ukraine, noting his initial hesitancy to punish Russia and his current stance. Merz has become more assertive, supporting the use of long-range missiles and providing military assistance to Ukraine.
“He’s in a much better position now… He was somebody, who at the beginning of the war, was hesitant to make bold moves to punish Russia, such as excluding Russian banks from the SWIFT system. But now he’s much more on the other side,” Barker said.
The era of “escalation management” is gone
The German chancellor’s trip comes at a critical moment amid growing concerns on both sides of the Atlantic about the European continent’s security architecture.
In office since May 6, Merz is moving fast to reinforce Western support for Ukraine. The new chancellor has recently announced his decision to officially lift range restrictions on weapons that Germany supplied to Ukraine and declared that Kyiv should not make any concessions.
For Barker, Merz is eyeing “a better long-term solution” for Ukraine than just handing them Taurus systems. “It’s teaching a man to fish rather than giving him fish,” he said.
While Berlin’s position on long-range weapons has now shifted, the US is yet to confirm whether it has lifted all restrictions on missile supplies to Ukraine.
Kyiv Post reported last week, citing two senior officials, that some restrictions were still in place, though Trump was “seriously considering” lifting those. As one official put it, Trump believes the current status quo “does not serve our common interests of bringing Russia to the [negotiation] table.”
After expressing his frustration with Russian leader Vladimir Putin early last week, Trump appeared to set another two-week deadline for the Kremlin, threatening a different response if Putin was still stringing him along.
In the meantime, for policy analysts like Barker, times for US and German leaders – such as former president Joe Biden and his counterpart Olaf Scholz – to engage in “escalation management” in Ukraine are long gone.
“…We’re not even close to that. I mean, right now, we need to get the White House fully behind Ukraine and understand that it is being played. Even [Senator] Lindsey Graham knows it,” Barker said, referring to the leading US Senator’s statements in Kyiv last Friday.
Political analysts have highlighted that Trump’s previous tenure saw significant shifts in security and trade policy that affected European partners.
Barker emphasizes Germany’s important role in the EU’s trade policy and the need for a political decision on the trade relationship.
Trump has threatened to impose 50 percent tariffs on European goods from all 27 member states, though the deadline has now been extended to July 9. Being Europe’s largest economy, for Germany, trade stability isn’t just policy – it’s survival.
Barker suggests that Trump should consider negotiating a deal with Merz to rebalance the trade deficit with Europe through defense exports.
He explained: “If Trump is a skilled negotiator, as he says he is, here’s the deal he should make: He should rebalance the trade deficit with Germany and Europe through the sale of defense debt production for both Germany and Ukraine. The kind of security assistance that was previously coming from the US can be supplemented by European security assistance through two streams. One is the German bilateral stream – now that Germany has that ability because there’s an exemption in the constitution for support for Ukraine. And second is, starting to think about how the Russian sovereign assets can be put to use to support Ukraine in the war and post-war, and I think that’s something you could tie to Putin’s decisions around the next two weeks.”
The upcoming Merz-Trump meeting will also set the stage for broader trade discussions at the G7 Summit, which Trump and Merz plan to attend in Alberta, Canada, on June 15.
“This will also be the moment when Ukraine’s core allies need to chart a way forward on Russian sanctions and military assistance,” Barker adds.
The two leaders are also set to discuss NATO capabilities, ahead of the Alliance’s June 24 summit in The Hague, where they will focus on allied unity and US commitment to Article 5, as well as the five percent with new defense industrial base and infrastructure target guidelines.
“Trump will take credit for Germany’s five percent defense pledge. On this point, watch for announcements of defense purchases and enhanced cooperation from the American defense industrial base,” Barker said.
With Merz’s White House trip, one thing is abundantly clear, as the political analyst concluded: “June will be the month that sets the course for Euro-Atlantic relations for the rest of the decade.”