When the US delegation to the Munich Security Council starts meeting with foreign leaders there on Friday, the German leader hosting the international event won’t be on their calendars, Politico reported on Thursday.
A German official told the political news website that US Vice President JD Vance does not plan to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during the three-day event, even though Scholz represents the country with the second-highest level of military contributions to Kyiv, and Russia’s three-year invasion of Ukraine is the primary topic of that conference. It is also the country putting on the annual conference, which stars Friday at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in the Bavarian capital.
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The official noted, however, that Vance and Scholz did already meet at an AI summit in Paris on Monday, but that the German administration felt snubbed that the highest-ranking US official would not be meeting with them at their own event.
The unnamed official summed up the American attitude to Politico as: “We don’t need to see him, he won’t be chancellor long.”
Another official who was asked to speak anonymously and is not in Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), added that Vance’s gesture was “disrespectful towards Germany.”
“I can’t stand Scholz but he is still our chancellor,” the politician said. “But it fits… the Trump administration doesn’t care about its allies.”
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Instead, Vance is expected to sit down for about 20 minutes with Scholz’s opponent in the 2025 federal elections, Friedrich Merz, whose Christian Democrat (CDU) coalition is widely expected to remove Scholz and the SPD from power. In the last elections, the SPD and left-leaning Bundestag allies edged out the center-right by just more than one percent.
Vance is also scheduled to meet with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, but his role, much like that of the president of Germany’s World War II ally, Italy, is largely ceremonial. Like much of the remaining royalty in Europe, those heads of state have relatively little say in government affairs.
Overall, an Eastern European official observed to Politico, “This is an embarrassing setback that just shows how Germany isn’t taken seriously as a major power player in Europe by the Trump team.”
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