WORLD NEWS A9
Thursday 19 January 2017
Anxious European leaders seek an early audience with Trump JULIE PACE KIRSTEN GRIESHABER Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) — European leaders, anxious over Donald Trump’s unpredictability and kind words for the Kremlin, are scrambling to get face time with the new American president before he can meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose provocations have set the continent on edge. One leader has raised with Trump the prospect of a U.S.-European Union summit early this year, and the head of NATO — the powerful military alliance Trump has deemed “obsolete” — is angling for an in-person meeting ahead of Putin as well. British Prime Minister Theresa May is working to arrange a meeting in Washington soon after Friday’s inauguration. For European leaders, a meeting with a new American president is always a sought-after — and usually easy-to-obtain — invitation. But Trump has repeatedly defied precedent, making them deeply uncertain about their standing once he takes office. Throughout his campaign and in recent interviews, Trump has challenged the viability of the EU and NATO, while praising Putin and staking out positions more in line
with Moscow than Brussels. “There are efforts on the side of the Europeans to arrange a meeting with Trump as quickly as possible,” Norbert Roettgen, the head of the German Parliament’s foreign committee and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, told The Associated Press. In fact, eager to stage an early show of Trans-Atlantic solidarity, Donald Tusk — the former Polish prime minister who heads the EU’s Council of member state governments— invited Trump to meet with the EU early in his administration, according to a European Union official. But a senior Trump adviser essentially rebuffed the offer, telling the AP this week that such a gathering would not be a priority for the incoming president, who wants to focus on meetings with individual countries, not the 28-nation bloc. Trump backs Britain’s exit from the European Union, casting the populist, antiestablishment movement as a precursor to his own victory. In a recent joint interview with two European newspapers, Trump said of the EU, “I don’t think it matters much for the United States.” Such rhetoric alone was enough to set off alarm bells in Europe. And Trump’s praise for Putin and prom-
German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2017. European leaders, anxious over Donald Trump’s unpredictability and coziness with the Kremlin, are scrambling to get face time with the new American president before he can meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose provocations have set the continent on edge. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)
ise of closer ties to Moscow have deepened the uncertainty. Trump has raised the prospect of dropping U.S. sanctions on Moscow and has appeared indifferent to Russia’s annexation of territory from Ukraine. The hacking of his opponents during the U.S. election, and Trump’s dismissal of the CIA’s warnings about Russia’s involvement, added a dose of spy drama. Trump’s sentiments mark a dramatic shift in Repub-
lican views of Europe, just a generation after George H.W. Bush famously greeted the collapse of the Iron Curtain by calling for a “Europe whole and free.” Trump’s top national security adviser has been in close contact with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., conversations that have involved setting up a phone call between the Putin and the president-elect, transition officials have said. But Trump currently has no
plans to meet with Putin, according to the senior adviser, who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the transition team’s internal planning. Aides vehemently denied a recent report in The Sunday Times of London that Trump’s first foreign trip would be a summit with Putin in Reykjavik, Iceland, the site of a Cold War meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.q
German vice chancellor condemns populist’s Holocaust remarks KIRSTEN GRIESHABER Associated Press BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s vice chancellor on Wednesday harshly condemned remarks by a prominent member of the nationalist Alternative for Germany party, who suggested ending the country’s decades-long tradition of acknowledging and
atoning for its Nazi past. Sigmar Gabriel wrote on Facebook that even though he knows the AfD party thrives on provocation, the comments by Bjoern Hoecke, who leads the party in the eastern state of Thuringia, were “shocking.” “This is not just some kind of provocation,” Gabriel wrote. “We must never let
this kind of demagoguery be undisputed.” Hoecke had called the Berlin memorial to the millions of Jews killed in the Holocaust a “monument of shame.” He told party supporters in the eastern city of Dresden that no other country would erect such a memorial in its capital and called instead for Germany
to take a “positive” attitude toward its history. He also said Germany needs to perform a “180-degree turn” when it comes to remembering its past. Nazi Germany was responsible for the murder of more than 6 million Jews and other minorities before and during World War II. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe is located in downtown Berlin near the city’s landmark Brandenburg Gate. It’s an uneven field of thousands of concrete slabs, comparable to a gigantic graveyard. Gabriel said Hoecke had insinuated that dealing with the country’s Nazi past belittles Germans, but that the opposite was correct.q