The best sneer so far at Merkel, is that she imagines that all of Germany is her house, and she is a “crazy cat hoarder lady”, except with immigrants. So she’ll do *anything* for her little pets.
I believe that Merkel was trying to rebuild Germany with allies from old WWII friends. Merkel would like to see Germany once again as the power house of Europe. Germany and I suspect Japan see the US as an enemy as in the days of WWII without the warfare.