Merkel warns Trump against ‘destroying’ UN
‘I believe that destroying something without having developed something new is extremely dangerous,’ Merkel said at a regional election campaign event in Bavaria
FRANKFURT AM MAIN: GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday warned US President Donald Trump against “destroying” the United Nations.
“I believe that destroying something without having developed something new is extremely dangerous,” Merkel said at a regional election campaign event in Bavaria.
The veteran leader -- a close ally of Trump’s bugbear Barack Obama while he was president -- added that she believed multilateralism was the solution to many of the world’s problems.
Trump failed to see the possibility for win-win solutions, she said, instead seeing only one winner from any international negotiation.
In his second appearance before the UN’S annual gathering last week, Trump told the General Assembly that he and his administration “reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.”
“Global governance” is a form of “coercion and domination” that “responsible nations must defend against”, he charged.
Merkel’s opposing view to the US leader puts her in the same camp as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who warned before Trump took the podium in New York Tuesday that “today, world order is increasingly chaotic”.
Rising nationalism and a winnertake-all attitude is undermining the cohesion of Europe, Merkel said, two days after US President Donald Trump rejected globalism and touted “America First” in a United Nations speech.
Without naming Trump or his nationalist, protectionist approach, Merkel told fellow conservatives at an event of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin that the European Union and Germany were facing a watershed moment.
Trump has threatened to pull the United States out of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), potentially undermining one of the foundations of the modern global economy, which Washington was instrumental in creating.
The tycoon-turned-president has also questioned the value of the NATO alliance, the centrepiece of transatlantic security cooperation for almost seven decades.
“Perhaps the most threatening development for me is that multilateralism has come under such pressure,” Merkel said. “Europe is facing attacks from the outside and from the inside.”