EU trade deal will take a toll on German economy, finance minister says
German Finance Minister, Lars Klingbeil said he wished for a different outcome.
BERLIN - German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil is dissatisfied with the European Union's (EU) trade deal with the United States, as he thinks it will take a toll on Germany's economic growth, he said on July 30.
'I have no illusions about it, it is rather growth-weakening,' Mr Klingbeil said in the presentation of the 2026 draft budget, lamenting that the EU was 'too weak' in the negotiations.
The US struck a framework trade agreement with the EU on July 27,
imposing a 15 per cent import tariff on most EU goods.
'I would have wished for a different outcome,' Mr Klingbeil said. 'Still, all in all, it is good that there is an agreement with the US, that there are no further escalations.' REUTERS
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Dr Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the quandary is a familiar one for US presidents. 'President Trump's excuse-making over Gaza resonates with a long line of presidents who were pressured to address humanitarian catastrophes,' Dr Wertheim said. That pressure comes from a sense of moral duty in the country's DNA, dating as far back as John Winthrop's 1630 'City on a Hill' sermon, in which he told Puritan Massachusetts colonists that 'the eyes of all people are upon us'. As the United States grew in power and wealth, so did its sense of obligation to people in need everywhere. Before he became a free-market Republican president, Herbert Hoover ran a federal foreign aid programme that sent food to famine-stricken Soviet Russia in 1921. 'Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!' he declared. 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Still, the crisis in Gaza has echoes of past humanitarian crises that left presidents wringing their hands over how to respond. President Bill Clinton took office in 1993 as a champion of human rights and international institutions. But when machete-wielding Hutu militias started to slaughter ethnic Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, he rejected calls for US action. Scarred by the deaths of 18 American soldiers on a peacekeeping mission in Somalia, Mr Clinton feared that even modest steps could escalate dangerously. Unchecked, Hutu killers carried out the genocide of an estimated 800,000 Tutsi. Mr Clinton later said he regretted not doing more to stop it. Mr Clinton also hesitated as Serbian forces slaughtered civilians in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s, rebuffing direct pleas from the likes of Elie Wiesel by saying the problem did not warrant risking American lives. 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