In Germany, panic fears of offending Donald Trump

Friedrich Merz dreams of a tour with Donald Trump in Kallstadt, the German village of the American president's ancestors, on the Rhineland-Palatinate wine route. "I'll go with him," the chancellor has already planned, hoping to succeed where Angela Merkel has repeatedly failed: to attract the billionaire to the Rhine region, which his grandparents left at the end of the ^19th century for New York. Even if it isn't honored, the invitation has been extended, and the gesture testifies to the new chancellor's continued commitment to the transatlantic connection, and even to his growing resistance to freeing himself from American patronage.

After the long weeks of the election campaign, which suggested that Friedrich Merz was drawing conclusions from Washington's retreat, the former candidate appears to be following in the footsteps of his predecessors. At the end of his term, particularly battered by Donald Trump, Angela Merkel wondered if he was...