nearly 20-year mission<\/a> in Afghanistan, launched in response to the September 11 attacks on the U.S., 59 German soldiers lost their lives.<\/p>\n\u201cWe will not allow this mission, which we also carried out in the interests of our ally, the United States of America, to be disparaged and belittled today,\u201d Merz said to sustained applause. \u201cI would like to say once again to our soldiers on duty and at their bases today that your service was and is valuable.”<\/p>\n
Given Germany\u2019s ongoing dependence on U.S. military power for its own defense, Merz has been reluctant to openly criticize Trump even as he warns that Europe must prepare to go it alone as the U.S.-led global order crumbles.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, he urged the German public and European allies to seek to preserve the alliance with the U.S. to the degree possible.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe should not recklessly jeopardize established alliances,\u201d Merz said. \u201cThe transatlantic alliance and transatlantic trust are still valuable in their own right today. For us in Germany, this is particularly true.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, Merz is pushing to make Germany more militarily independent of the U.S. Shortly after becoming chancellor last May, Merz vowed to take more responsibility for Europe’s defense by building the strongest conventional army in Europe.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe are, in fact, a normative alternative to imperialism and autocracy in the world,\u201d Merz said. \u201cWe have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":728464,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[2881,1395,6641,32,2000,299,805,1945,1824,1195,12337,48,332,811,49,771],"class_list":{"0":"post-728463","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-afghanistan","9":"tag-china","10":"tag-competitiveness","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-eu","13":"tag-europe","14":"tag-foreign-policy","15":"tag-friedrich-merz","16":"tag-germany","17":"tag-growth","18":"tag-missions","19":"tag-rights","20":"tag-russia","21":"tag-security","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115978186447672309","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=728463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/728464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=728463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=728463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=728463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}