Foreign Policy Whiz KidBiden
...Candidate for president in 2020. I'm not working for you. Don't be such a horse's ass....
will open the door for possible joint sanctions against China and Russia over human rights
...which are often intentionally defined so widely as to be meaningless...
and other abuses, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on Tuesday.
He said the trans-Atlantic partners should act together to defend their common interests and values and lamented the lack of coordinated action under former president Donald Trump
...the Nailer of NAFTA...
Trump's presidency was marked by intense pressure on Germany over its failure to meet defence spending obligations as mandated by the NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A collection of multinational and multilingual and multicultural armed forces, all of differing capabilities, working toward a common goal by pulling in different directions...
military alliance, Germany's insistence on buying Russian natural gas, and trade policies.
Trump also angered European powers by pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, reached when Biden was vice president in Barack Obama
My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you'll join with me as we try to change it...
's administration, as well as exerting pressure to ban China's Huawei from European 5G networks.
"I hope that we will be able to return to a common trans-Atlantic position on targeted sanctions, something that was not possible over the last four years," Maas told an event on U.S.-German relations organised by the Brookings Institution.
Germany has imposed sanctions on Russia with its European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
partners over Moscow's arming of separatist forces in Ukraine and attacks on opponents of President Vladimir Putin
...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances...
Chancellor Angela Merkel
...chancellor of Germany and the impetus behind Germany's remarkably ill-starred immigration program. Merkel used to be referred to by Germans as
Mom. Now they make faces at her for inundating the country with Moslem colonists...
has defended the almost completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline to bring Russian gas to Germany as a commercial project. She rejected Trump's demands to ditch it and buy liquefied gas from the United States, instead of being dependent on Putin's Russia for energy.
Germany has in recent months taken steps to meet U.S. concerns, extending its military mission in Afghanistan and planning to sail a warship across the South China Sea, where the Washington says freedom of navigation is threatened by China.
Last year Germany enacted an IT security law setting high hurdles for makers of telecommunications equipment for next-generation networks, like China's Huawei, though the legislation falls short of a blanket ban on using products made by the Chinese state-owned manufacturer - as demanded by Washington.