President Joe Biden is welcoming Germany’s long-serving Chancellor Angela Merkel to the White House with a warm embrace, favoring face-to-face diplomacy even as pronounced differences remain between the two countries on issues that threaten Washington’s diplomatic and security agenda.
Biden is the fourth president to host Merkel, who will step down from office in September at the end of her 16-year tenure. Her swing through Washington on Thursday, the first by a European leader since the new administration took office, will cap months of overtures by top Biden officials. “The U.S. has no better friend than Germany,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last month, while Biden called the relationship “stronger than ever.”
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Biden recently nominated Amy Gutmann as U.S. ambassador to Germany. Guttman is president of the University of Pennsylvania, where Biden held an appointment before running for office. The move follows a long U.S. tradition of sending a university president to Berlin.
Still, hurdles remain between Berlin and Washington. One major disagreement is the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which runs between Russia and Germany. Another is over the United States’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, a 20-year deployment where Germany had the second-largest force. And U.S. officials have sought to pull Germany into closer alignment on China, the European powerhouse’s largest trading partner.
Relations between the two countries frayed under former President Donald Trump, whose ambassador to Berlin, Richard Grenell, publicly courted Merkel’s political opponents.
Trump also levied steel and aluminum tariffs on Germany and sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 project.
In an effort to heal the rift, Biden, overruling objections from Congress and some top aides, recently waived sanctions on the near complete multibillion-dollar energy project. The issue hasn’t gone away, however.
On Capitol Hill, the push to confirm Biden’s State Department nominees has ground to a virtual halt amid Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s objections to the pipeline diplomacy.
Thirteen nominees are in limbo with their Senate confirmation stalled as Cruz attempts to push Biden to reverse the decision.
On Thursday, the president will have met with two prominent proponents of the pipeline, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Merkel, but not with a principal opponent, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who objects on security grounds. Though Biden has invited Zelensky to meet with him at the White House, a date has not been set, a White House official told reporters on Wednesday.
Merkel has said it is unlikely they will find a solution this week but that she would put pressure on Russia to ensure Europe’s security is not compromised by the project.
Billing the trip as a “working visit” with a staunch ally, the White House on Wednesday said Biden and Merkel would discuss the full range of issues facing their countries, with the pipeline just one of several differences.
Germany has refrained from echoing Washington’s vocal positions on trade with China, which have continued through the Trump administration and into the Biden’s.
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Outside the White House Thursday, protesters staged a coordinated “die-in” in support of a trade waiver on coronavirus vaccines, which Germany opposes.
While the White House supports negotiations for this, a waiver “alone won’t result in the scale and the speed that we need to end the pandemic,” the White House official conceded.
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Tags: News, White House, Joe Biden, Germany, Angela Merkel, Nord Stream II, Russia
Original Author: Katherine Doyle
Original Location: Nord Stream pipeline, vaccines, and China top Biden’s agenda with German leader Merkel
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