The German-American Relationship Illusion

Demonstrators march through Berlin to protest U.S. President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2017. (Omer Messinger/NurPhoto/Getty Images)

 

Germans see relations as negative; Americans see them as positive. What is going wrong?

Germans and Americans have very different ideas of the relationship between their two countries, according to a survey published by the Körber Foundation and the American Pew Research Center last month.

While 73 percent of Germans surveyed described relations with the United States of America as “somewhat bad” or “very bad,” 70 percent of Americans said that relations with the German Federal Republic were “somewhat good” or “very good.”

En Route to New Conflicts (II)

BERLIN (Own report) – In the midst of a phase of the expansion of the EU’s military policy relations with several East and Southeast Asian countries, German Chancellor Angela Merkel will visit Japan. Merkel will arrive March 8 in the Japanese capital, reciprocating Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Germany last year. Tokyo seeks to intensify its cooperation with EU countries – also militarily – to enhance its position in territorial conflicts with Beijing. At the same time, the United States is focusing, to a growing extent, its global policy efforts on eastern Asia and the Pacific Basin. Shortly before Merkel is to visit Japan, a study published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) points out that the interests of several EU countries would be “massively affected should conflicts escalate in this region.” These conflicts are mostly about territorial sovereignty over islands and groups of islands, which recently have become accentuated. SWP proposed that the EU “discuss” what position to take “in case of conflict.”