President Donald Trump spoke by phone Thursday with Chancellor Angela Merkel, the White House said, after breaking with custom and waiting days to congratulate the German leader on her re-election.<\/p>\n
The pair connected after growing questions about a delay in the call between the uneasy allies.<\/p>\n
\u201cPresident Donald J. Trump spoke today with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to congratulate her on her election victory and wish her well in the formation of her fourth government,\u201d said a statement from the White House on Thursday evening.<\/p>\n
The US leader underscored the countries\u2019 \u201cdeep ties\u201d and Washington\u2019s \u201ccommitment to our longstanding, strong alliance.\u201d<\/p>\n
The White House did not immediately congratulate Merkel on her election over the weekend, as is customary, after a campaign which saw Merkel implicitly criticize Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s obviously been a complicated relationship,\u201d said Karen Donfried, president of The German Marshall Fund of the United States.<\/p>\n
That is unlikely to change in Merkel\u2019s fourth term.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor her, clearly this is a critical relationship,\u201d she told AFP. \u201cMerkel is still going to try to make the relationship work to the greatest extent possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOn Trump\u2019s side, my expectation is that he will stay very focused on his two big criticisms, one that Germany doesn\u2019t spend enough on defense and two that Germany has a \u2018massive trade surplus.\u2019\u201c<\/p>\n
According to the White House, Trump and Merkel discussed the Iran nuclear deal and \u201chow to counter Iran\u2019s malign activities in the Middle East,\u201d as well as the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.<\/p>\n
Concerning the Iran deal Merkel has \u201crenewed her support for this agreement, which is an important instrument to prevent Iran from equipping itself with nuclear weapons,\u201d according to a statement released by German government spokesman Steffen Seibert.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Donald Trump spoke by phone Thursday with Chancellor Angela Merkel, the White House said, after breaking with custom and waiting days to congratulate the German leader on her re-election. The pair connected after growing questions about a delay in the call between the uneasy allies. \u201cPresident Donald J. Trump spoke today with Chancellor Angela […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6270,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6269","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\/6269","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=6269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6271,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6269\/revisions\/6271"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}