The German chancellor greeted the US president’s election frostily but will stress the mutual benefits of free trade amid the White House’s ‘America first’ rhetoric

As Angela Merkel flies to Washington for her first meeting with Donald Trump, the US president’s critics may be hoping the German chancellor will give her US counterpart a lecture on the folly of borders and the values of a free press.

They are likely to be disappointed.

Although Merkel “explained” the Geneva convention to Trump in their first phone call after his inauguration, she is expected to raise the issue of refugees and migration only as part of a wider discussion of the volatile political situation in north Africa when she meets the US president at the White House on Friday, rescheduled from Tuesday due to the snowstorm that hit the eastern US this week.

'Europe's fate is in our hands': Angela Merkel's defiant reply to Trump Read more

“We’ve heard that the president’s favourite pastime is not being lectured,” said one senior German adviser.

And despite Merkel’s own experience growing up behind the iron curtain, Trump’s plan to build a wall along the Mexican border would be treated as a “domestic issue”.

Merkel is visiting the White House as the chair of the G20 and is expected to raise issues including the Nato contributions, the fight against Isis, the peace process in the Middle East, North Korea, developments in the European Union, and Russian activity in Ukraine.

One adviser to the chancellor said that even though Trump had yet to fill all the key posts in the state department, early conversations had made Berlin “optimistic” that the close collaboration of the Obama era could be continued.

US officials said president Donald Trump would ask Chancellor Angela Merkel for advice on how to deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

But at the top of her agenda is a more familiar German priority: selling cars.

Merkel’s delegation will present Trump with a set of figures aimed at illustrating that barrier-free trade between Germany and the US is a “win-win”, rather than a disadvantage for the US. They will remind him of the €271bn of German investment in the US, the 750,000 American jobs created by German companies, the 400,000 cars manufactured by BMW in Spartanburg, South Carolina – the company’s biggest plant.

Friday’s schedule includes a lunchtime roundtable conversation with the CEOs of Siemens, BMW, industrial parts manufacturer Schaeffler, and a group of apprentices undergoing the dual vocational training system provided by these German companies in the US. All of this is intended to convince Trump that Germany is benefiting his country in ways that cannot always be weighed in cash.

America is Germany’s third most important trade partner after China and France, and its biggest export market. In an interview at the start of the year, Trump had raised the possibility of imposing a 35% border tax on German cars.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A BMW X5 moves down an overhead conveyor at its plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the company’s biggest. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Speaking to business leaders in Munich on Monday, Merkel stressed the importance of free trade: “The United States of America is a key trading partner for Germany and for the entire European Union,” the German leader said. “Trade is advantageous for both sides and I’m looking forward to the chance to speak to the newly elected American president about these issues.”

Merkel’s focus on economics is dictated by the fact that the first weeks of the Trump administration have seen trade and national security issues being linked in previously unheard-of ways.

Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro recently depicted US national trade deficits as a national security issue. Meanwhile, German media reported that during a recent trip to Washington, a representative of Wolfgang Schäuble’s finance ministry was approached with an offer of a bilateral US-German arms deal that would allow America to lower its $65bn trade deficit and enable Germany to inch closer to meeting the Nato spending target of 2% of GDP.

Berlin moved quickly to rule out the possibility of bilateral trade talks, stating that “responsibility for trade policy lies with the European Union”. But Merkel’s team will be aware that the rules of the game have changed fundamentally since she was feted for her address to the US Congress in 2009.

Then, Merkel gave an unusually personal speech in which she thanked America for its part in German reunification, making her a perfect symbol of American soft power. But during last year’s election campaign, Trumps supporters railed against the German leader as the embodiment of the liberal, global worldview that their candidate promised to oppose.

Earlier this year, Trump called Merkel’s decision to allow hundreds of thousands of refugees into Germany a “catastrophic mistake”.

The German chancellor, meanwhile, was one of the few international leaders to issue a more critically worded statement after Trump’s election victory, offering her cooperation on the basis that the new US president would adhere to values such as “democracy, freedom, respect for the rule of law and the dignity of humankind – independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views”.

Although Merkel is perceived as a conservative in Europe, one top Trump adviser dismissed the leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic party ahead of her visit as a “typical liberal woman”.

Tyson Barker, a programme director at the Aspen Institute thinktank, warned that under a Trump administration led by advisers who are either unimpressed by liberal value statements or actively opposed to multilateral networks, bilateral approaches could increasingly dominate America’s foreign policy strategy. “It’s an inconvenient fact that bilateral talks with European nations give the US an asymmetric advantage.”

To circumvent the European Commission, Barker said, Trump may be tempted to “Christmas-tree” existing deals with central European states, by adding trade elements to treaties originally designed to protect long-term US investment in former Soviet bloc states.

Rejecting such bilateral deals outright contains its own risk for Merkel’s government, said Hans Kundnani, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “It can refuse to discuss trade on a bilateral level and simply refer to the European Commission, but the danger is that this pushes the US to move to the next step and take actual countermeasures against Germany,” he said.

“Merkel has shown again and again she can handle strong male leaders, including Putin,” said Kundnani. “But this time the situation is different. Germany isn’t in a position to withdraw its support for Trump – in fact, it is even more vulnerable without US support than other EU member states”.

Trump has said that his agenda has two core principles: “Buy American and hire American.”

Explaining Germany’s contribution to the US economy would address the second of these. But worryingly for Merkel, there is little that industrial lobbying can do if he decides to prioritise the first.

Trump recently complained that the automobile trade between the two countries had become “a one-way street”, with Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs lining Fifth Avenue while Chevrolets make up only 0.5% of cars registered in Germany last year.

If she needed a riposte for such concerns, Merkel could do worse than listen to Sven Bartsch-Jürgen, a salesman at Autohaus Kramm – one of only a dozen car dealers in Germany specialising in American cars.

He said that while German customers are still easily lured by the romantic “fog-horn howl” of an American 4x4, selling US cars has become harder in Germany since General Motors decided to sideline Chevrolet in favour of its German brand Opel.

Things might have been different under the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a treaty designed to further ease trade between the US and the EU, he said. But that deal has been put on ice since the Republican presidential candidate voiced his aversion to multilateral arrangements.

“We were looking forward to TTIP: we would have sold more American cars here in Germany,” said Bartsch-Jürgen.

Scrapping the treaty, he said, had been “a complete own goal” for the US.