MUNICH: German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued a stark warning on Saturday against abandoning international political structures, calling for treaties rejected by the US to be rescued.
“We cannot simply break them down,” she said in a wide-ranging address to the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, observing that there were “a great many conflicts that challenge us.” The comments by Merkel, who is in the twilight of her political career as she prepares to step down as chancellor in 2021, were seen as a clear rebuke to the actions of US President Donald Trump.
Her lengthy address was seen as a high point of the annual conference and drew a standing ovation from the crowd, including some 30 heads of state and government and around 90 government ministers, including US Vice-President Mike Pence.
She called for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) to be saved after the US announced earlier this month it was withdrawing effective August 2, citing repeated Russian infringements over years.
The US withdrawal was “inevitable,” Merkel said, while noting that it was a matter of interest that a “treaty that was basically made for Europe, a disarmament treaty that affects our security, is being cancelled by the US and Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union.”
But Pence repeated his demand for the three European countries party to the treaty — Germany, Britain and France — to
withdraw from it.
Merkel suggested rather that China should join in arms limitation talks to create a new, expanded version of the INF in order to save it. While Beijing has strong reservations on limiting its missile capability, disarmament was an issue that everyone should be concerned about, Merkel said.
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