German Chancellor Angela Merkel said today that the European Union will make every effort to avoid a trade war with the US and underlined her country\u2019s commitment to raise defence spending gradually \u2013 another point of contention with Washington.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump\u2019s administration has imposed tariffs on EU steel and aluminum imports and is mulling whether to add tariffs on cars, trucks and auto parts, something that could be painful for Germany with its major auto industry.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is worth every effort to try to defuse this conflict so that it doesn\u2019t turn into a real war, but of course there are two sides to that,\u201d Merkel told the German parliament, noting that the head of the EU\u2019s executive Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, will soon travel to the U.S.<\/p>\n
She added that the good functioning of the world economy depends on countries working together as partners, and also questioned the value of measuring surpluses and deficits by trade in goods alone. If digital services were included, she said, it\u2019s likely that the US would have a trade surplus with Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is almost old-fashioned only to count goods and not to count services,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The US is also pressing Germany over what it considers insufficient defence spending ahead of NATO\u2019s July 11-12 summit in Brussels. In 2014, NATO allies agreed to stop cutting defence budgets, start spending more as their economies grew and move toward a goal of devoting 2 per cent of GDP to defense within a decade.<\/p>\n
Germany\u2019s current spending amounts to 1.24 per cent of GDP. Merkel said that, though spending is rising, \u201crelative to what others are doing in terms of their gross domestic product, that is far from sufficient.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added that \u201cthat is why we have committed to spend 1.5 per cent of gross domestic product for this by 2025,\u201d and defended Germany\u2019s position.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said today that the European Union will make every effort to avoid a trade war with the US and underlined her country\u2019s commitment to raise defence spending gradually \u2013 another point of contention with Washington. President Donald Trump\u2019s administration has imposed tariffs on EU steel and aluminum imports and is mulling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36157,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36158,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36156\/revisions\/36158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}