United States President Joe Biden receives the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on Friday, with which the central European country wants to thank the friendship between the two countries.
German President Frank Walter Steinmeier’s office said today that Germany wants to “honor President Biden’s services to German-American friendship and the transatlantic alliance, which he has significantly shaped in all his positions over five decades and strengthened, in particularly in the face of Russian aggression against Ukraine”.
Biden, who was a senator from the State of Delaware from 1997 to 2009 and vice president of the United States from 2009 to 2017 before becoming president in 2021, is the second American president to receive this award, after George H.W. Bush in 1993 for services rendered to the union of Germany.
The ceremony will be on Friday morning at Bellevue Castle, where he will be received with military honors by Steinmeier as part of the US President’s one-day visit to Germany, during which he will also hold a conversation with the President and the German chancellor.
Biden lands in Berlin late Thursday afternoon in Berlin to visit German officials, but no longer as a two-day state visit as planned before the US president postponed his trip to Germany last week due to upon the arrival of Hurricane Milton.
The state visit would have been the first by a North American President to Germany in 40 years.
In any case, this will be a farewell trip for the leader of the main world power before leaving the White House in January and a good opportunity to reiterate in Europe his support for Ukraine and transatlantic security, according to German sources.
In July, both countries announced, in a joint statement, US plans to deploy long-range weapons, such as the Sm-6 and Tomahawk, and hypersonic weapons under development on German territory from 2026, advanced military capabilities which will contribute to European deterrence against threats such as Russia.
Biden’s visit does not imply the rescheduling of the summit of heads of state and government of around fifty of Ukraine’s Western partners that would have been held last Saturday at the North American air base in Ramstein, in southern Germany.
That meeting will be held at a later date, but it is not yet known whether it will be at the leaders’ level, which has forced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to separately explain to some of Kiev’s European partners Kiev’s so-called ‘victory plan’.
This plan has military components and security guarantees, such as the request for immediate membership of NATO, in order to improve its position at the front and force Russia to sit at the negotiating table, to achieve the complete withdrawal of Russian troops from the territory Ukrainian, among other requirements.
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