Merkel after G7 says Germany cannot ‘completely depend’ on US

German Chancellor Angela Merkel told supporters on Sunday that her country could no longer “completely depend” on the U.S. as a reliable partner. She said that Europeans “must really take our destiny into our own hands,” Agence France Presse reported.

“The times in which we could completely depend on others are on the way out,” she said at a campaign rally in Munich. “I’ve experienced that in the last few days.”

Merkel’s comments on Sunday underscored her frustration after a tense meeting with President Trump at the Group of Seven summit a day earlier. At the summit, Trump declined to pledge support for the Paris climate deal, and Merkel called climate talks with the president “unsatisfying.”

{mosads}

The G7 meeting followed a NATO summit in Brussels on Thursday that left Merkel and other European leaders similarly irked. There, Trump berated fellow NATO members over their failure to spend at least two percent of their GDP on defense, the number the alliance agreed upon in 2014.

But also absent from Trump’s speech was a mutual defense pledge — a commitment to the principle that an attack on one NATO member state is an attack on all. The White House later told reporters that such a commitment “goes without saying.”

Merkel also made a jab at Trump during her speech at NATO headquarters on Thursday, criticizing “the building of walls” as detrimental to society. Trump has long vowed to build a massive border wall between in the U.S. and Mexico.

“It is not isolation and the building of walls that make us successful, but open societies,” she said.

Germany is considered one of the U.S.’s most vital allies in Europe. While Merkel said on Sunday that it was important for Germany to maintain friendly relations with the U.S. and the United Kingdom, the country “would have to fight for our own future ourselves.”