BERLIN — Friedrich Merz embarks on his first trip to the Persian Gulf region as chancellor Wednesday in search of new energy and business deals he sees as critical to reducing Germany’s dependence on the U.S. and China.
The three-day trip with stops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates illustrates Merz’s approach to what he calls a dangerous new epoch of “great power politics” — one in which the U.S. under President Donald Trump is no longer a reliable partner. European countries must urgently embrace their own brand of hard power by forging new global trade alliances, including in the Middle East, or risk becoming subject to the coercion of greater powers, Merz argues.
Accompanying Merz on the trip is a delegation of business executives looking to cut new deals on everything from energy to defense. But one of the chancellor’s immediate goals is to reduce his country’s growing dependence on U.S. liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which has replaced much of the Russian gas that formerly flowed to Germany through the Nord Stream pipelines.
Increasingly, German leaders across the political spectrum believe they’ve substituted their country’s unhealthy dependence on Russian energy with an increasingly precarious dependence on the U.S.
