Secretary General confident that Trump administration will remain committed to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

Responding to Mr Trump’s criticism, Angela Merkel was characteristically restrained.

Donald Trump revealed how he feels about immigrants in general, and Syrian refugees in particular, by referring to the Syrian refugees invited into Germany by Chancellor Angela Merkel as “illegals”. “We Europeans have our fate in our own hands“, Ms. Merkel told reporters in Berlin.

“My positions are also known”, she said.

On Monday, in an extensive interview with the Times of London and the German tabloid Bild, US President-elect Donald Trump placed a question mark over the cornerstones of the post-war European order.

Trump offered mixed messages about the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation defense alliance, saying that he had called it “obsolete” in the past, and calling it “very unfair to the United States” that most nations were not meeting their voluntary defense spending commitments.

He said: “I do believe this, if they (EU countries) hadn’t been forced to take in all of the refugees, so many, with all the problems that it. entails, I think that you wouldn’t have a Brexit”.

He asserted: “I respect her and like her but I think it was a mistake”.

German public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk reported Monday on some of the reaction in Germany to Trump’s comments.

NATO’s collective defense agreement requires all member countries to come to the aid of any member state that is attacked.

One of the first things he will do is take away the sanctions the U.S. imposed after the attack from 2014 of Crimea.

Taking an aim at the Republican president-elect without mentioning his name, Hollande said that the relations between the United States and Europe “have always been founded on in the same principles and values”.

Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said after meeting in Brussels on Monday with colleagues from across Europe, that they were “agitated and astonished” by his latest comments.

Asked whom he trusted more, Merkel, a longtime United States ally, or Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump called it a draw – at least for now.

Mr Trump said last week that he was not opposed to lifting sanctions if Russian Federation was “really helping us”.

His comments come despite him prompting fears of a new arms race late past year when he said America needed to “greatly strengthen and expand” its nuclear capability.

“Other countries will leave” the European Union in future, Mr. Trump prophesied, largely due to the pressure the bloc was put under following a significant rise in migrants and refugees arriving. Millions have been displaced by the civil war in Syria and the fight against ISIS in Iraq.

In his comments on refugees, he pointed the finger of blame at Merkel for allowing refugees without documents into Germany.

“I worry most that if the United States doesn’t remain constant and strong, and a good ally to the countries of Europe, that [Russian president Vladimir] Putin will try to take advantage of that, and divide the alliance”.

“We are going to move away from, I guess, a kind of Twitter diplomacy, and then into a reality”, said Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen, adding that reality could be “perhaps more hard than what is going on on Twitter”.

Trump has called the Iran nuclear non-proliferation accord “one of the dumbest deals I have ever seen”.