Trump has justifiably put Germany at the heart of both problems. Accounting for a quarter of the EU economy, that country sets the pace to the market taking $283.5 billion of American goods exports — nearly one-fifth of the total, and more than double of all U.S. sales to China. Germany also hosts America’s largest military installations in Europe.

Taken in that perspective, Germany’s $64 billion trade surplus with the U.S. is small beer. Trump can easily find ways with Berlin to stop and reverse that trade imbalance because Germans are ready and eager for a constructive dialogue.

Washington and Berlin have to look much beyond the narrow-minded trade skirmishes. With their two economies representing half of the industrialized world’s demand and output, they have to work closely to strengthen the trans-Atlantic security architecture so that the Western world order can deal with powerful new players.

Several recent examples of what happens when the U.S. and Germany don’t work together come to mind.

Think of the ravages caused in the early years of this decade when Germany imposed fiscal austerity on European countries already sinking into deep recessions. The soaring unemployment and poverty that followed paved the way for populist movements that have currently taken power — or are seriously threatening the established political forces — in a number of EU member states.

Washington did nothing to prevent those absurd policies that devastated the market for its huge export sales, and an area critical to its national security.

Greece and the EU’s current migration debacle are two more examples where the U.S. chose to stand aside while Germany wreaked havoc with the destiny of an entire country, compromised the stability of the NATO alliance and endangered peace and prosperity on a continent that lit up the world twice in the last century.

With an apparently clueless Washington, utterly frightened by Berlin’s plans, in the summer of 2012, to throw Greece out of the euro area, France had to step in to put a stop to German mischief.