“The West tore down the Berlin Wall together. And it has been rebuilt — not by the Soviets or the Russians, but by the German establishment,” Vance said in his post.
The heavy criticism from top members of the U.S. administration comes days before a new coalition government, consisting of the center-right conservatives and the center-left Social Democratic Party, is set to take power in Berlin.
One of the main challenges of incoming conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz will be to negotiate solutions to various challenges with U.S. President Donald Trump, including tariffs on the European Union — which threaten to hit the export-oriented German economy particularly hard — and the weakening of the transatlantic alliance on which Germany and Europe have long relied for their defense.
But the latest rift seems to highlight a growing estrangement between the two governments.
“You should reverse your course by hollowing out AND exploiting the rules based international order for the disadvantage of Ukraine and NATO,” Roderich Kiesewetter, a prominent lawmaker of Merz’s conservatives, wrote in a reaction to Rubio’s tweet. “Europe needs a Churchill to contain you,” he said.
The Foreign Office in Berlin also responded sharply by saying that “this is democracy” and that Germans had “learnt from our history that right-wing extremism needs to be stopped.”
