The U.S. president remains popular with much of Germany, but there's no question the Obama euphoria that swept the country five years ago has faded. 
 
 President Obama stands next to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in front of Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on June 19. (Photo: Michael Kappeler, AP) Story Highlights President Obama called for a reduction in nuclear stockpiles 
 
 Obama addressed a crowd of 6,000 invited guests at Brandenburg Gate 
 
 European attitudes toward Obama have shifted 
 
 BERLIN — With the iconic Brandenburg Gate at his back, President Obama urged Berliners in a speech Wednesday to embrace the common values that bind America and Germany, and to carry forth the spirit of freedom that defines the once-divided city. 
 
 "It is citizens who choose whether to be defined by a wall or whether to tear it down," Obama told cheering crowds before the 18th-century city entrance. "We can say here in Berlin, here in Europe, our values won." 
 
 Fifty years after President Kennedy delivered his legendary "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a Berliner") speech in the former West Berlin, Obama said he was proud to stand on the eastern side of the wall. 
 
 Kennedy gave his famous speech when the Berlin Wall — erected by the Soviet Union to cut off communist East Germany from democratic West Germany — was still standing. With the wall gone since 1990 and Germany reunited, Obama urged Berliners to take an active role in helping to protect freedom and democracy around the world. 
 
 "We must acknowledge that there can at times be complacency among our Western democracies," he said, as many waved American and German flags and shouted in approval. "Complacency is not the character of great nations." 
 
 As he spoke, Obama's wife, Michelle, and daughters, Sasha and Malia, toured the famous front line of the Cold War at Checkpoint Charlie, the former guard station between East and West Germany, and visited the memorial of the Berlin Wall. 
 
 Joined by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, Obama addressed 6,000 invited guests and dignitaries on a hot day under a bright sky. When he talked specifics, Obama kept to issues on which the majority of the crowd appeared to agree. 
 
 Obama said he planned to slash America's nuclear weapons stockpile by up to a third and promised to seek negotiated cuts with Russia, too, saying "so long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe." 
 
 The loudest cheers came when Obama vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison, a move that many Europeans have been waiting for since Obama took office. 
 
 Supporters held up signs with the words "Yes we can" and "Welcome" and chanted Obama's name. At one point during his speech, two women holding a "No NATO War" sign shouted briefly from the crowd at Obama before they were questioned by security personnel. 
 
 It was a much smaller crowd than the estimated 200,000 people who greeted Obama five years ago, when he visited Berlin as a candidate for president. Back then, he captured the enthusiasm of Germans and won broad support across Europe. 
 
 He remains popular with much of Germany, where local news outlets followed the first family's every move in the capital and published detailed features on their Ritz-Carlton presidential suite. A recent survey indicated that 85% of Germans believe Obama is a good president. 
 
 But while his pronouncements appealed to the pacifist sentiments of many Germans, they did not go down well with critics in the United States. 
 
 The Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon of California, lamented that Obama wanted to further reduce U.S. nuclear readiness against a Russian government that has failed to adhere to existing arms-reduction agreements. 
 
 "The president must make clear to (Russian) President (Vladimir) Putin that the United States will not allow itself or its allies to be bullied by Russia or to allow that state to ignore its arms control obligations," McKeon said. 
 
 On Guantanamo, the president has declined to free the remaining prisoners at the facility and his Department of Justice has said the president has the authority to hold enemy terrorists without charge indefinitely. 
 
 There is no question that the Obama euphoria that swept the country five years ago has faded. The cover of the national newspaper Taz featured a full-page picture of Obama with the caption "Love Hurts," and the weekly magazine Der Spiegel featured a picture of Obama and Kennedy on its cover, with the title "The Lost Friend." 
 
 "His overall poll ratings in Germany are still for any American campaign manager dream-like, but at the same time, Germans have lowered their expectations," said Sudha David-Wilp, a senior program officer at the German Marshall Fund. "When he came here in 2008, he mentioned climate change, he mentioned a new way of doing business in the world, working with partners. Those things unfortunately haven't come to fruition." 
 
 Obama has been the subject of criticism in recent weeks over Washington's global surveillance program PRISM, which requests information legally from U.S.-based Internet companies on communications involving foreigners suspected of terrorist activity. Since Europeans communicate through such companies, it is possible German citizens have been spied on through the program. 
 
 Germany's history with fascism has planted a deep-rooted distrust of any sort of surveillance and the country has some of the strictest data privacy laws in the world. 
 
 "I think the spying is disgusting," said Richard Radtke, 52, a lawyer who navigated his way around police barricades on Wednesday to get to work. "If it's as nasty as it looks, then it will make a big difference in my opinion of the way Americans deal with the public interest and privacy." 
 
 Obama defended the program during a joint press conference with Chancellor Merkel earlier in the day, saying the initiative had saved lives. 
 
 "This is not a situation where we are rifling through ordinary e-mails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens," he asserted, adding that it was important to strike a balance between protecting citizens and intruding on their rights. 
 
 President Barack Obama is calling for a one-third reduction of the world's nuclear stockpiles. Speaking at Berlin's iconic Brandenburg Gate, he says he intends to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond a Cold War nuclear posture. (June 19) AP 
 
 Before meeting with reporters, Obama and Merkel spoke at length about some of the progress made in Syria-related talks at the Group of Eight meeting in Northern Ireland earlier this week, and touched on Syria, Iran and the upcoming trans-Atlantic trade treaty as well. 
 
 "Europe is our partner in almost everything we do," Obama said. "Europe remains the cornerstone of our freedom and our security." 
 
 He also vowed to do more to change the climate, which he said is "the global threat of our time." 
 
 Though polls show may Europeans worry about global warming, some countries in Europe are scaling back government-subsidized renewable-energy plans in the face of rising electricity prices and cash-strapped government budgets. 
 
 While many in Europe believe measures to cut carbon emissions are crucial, skeptics point to recent scientific analyses that show that since 1998 global mean temperatures have remained unchanged. 
 
 Berliners said they are less excited about this visit and have been disappointed that Obama has not delivered on promises he made previously. 
 
 President Obama greets children at the Schloss Bellevue in Berlin on June 19. (Photo: Jewel Samad, AFP/Getty) 
 
 "It's easy to build up expectations of charismatic people but he's not a superhero," said Berliner Jannis Huelsen, 29. 
 
 Contributing: Ena Paponja and Catherine Featherston in Berlin 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/11YNjam ||||| President Barack Obama called Wednesday for “peace with justice” as he proposed reducing U.S. nuclear arsenals by as much as one-third in a wide-ranging call for action delivered on the eastern side of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. 
 
 “Our work is not yet done. For we are not only citizens of America or Germany, we are citizens of the world,” Obama said, drawing on John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech on the west side of the the city, in which he called on Berliners to look ahead to “the day of peace with justice” and to the rest of mankind. “We may not live in fear of nuclear annihilation — but as long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe.” 
 
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 He said the United States is now looking to do more to reduce that threat. “After a comprehensive review, I have determined that we can ensure the security of America and our allies and maintain a strong and credibility strategic deterrent while reducing our deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to one-third,” he said. “I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War nuclear postures” and to work with NATO allies for “bold reductions in Europe.” 
 
 “We can forge a new international framework for peaceful nuclear power, reject the nuclear weaponization that North Korea and Iran may be seeking,” he added. 
 
 Obama has directed the Defense Department to strengthen its non-nuclear capabilities, to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attacks, and to reduce the role of nuclear launches in contingency planning. 
 
 New START calls for the United States and Russia to cut their arsenals to 1,550 nuclear warheads by 2018. Obama’s proposal, which would bring that number down to about 1,000, comes as tensions between the United States and Russia over Syria have been on stark display — most recently on Monday, as Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a cold joint statement at the G8 summit, and appeared to make little progress on the issue. 
 
 In another big speech in a major European city, in Prague during the spring of 2009, Obama set an even more ambitious long-term goal: “a world without nuclear weapons.” It’s a hope he’s reiterated since, including at last year’s Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, and one in which he’s said he still believes. 
 
 Obama spent much of his speech Wednesday leaning on Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech given 50 years ago next week, as he laid out a vision in which the United States and Germany “pursue peace and justice not only for our countries, but for all mankind.” 
 
 While remaining “vigilant” about terror threats, “we must move beyond the mindset of perpetual war,” Obama said, echoing the philosophy he laid out last month in his speech on counterterrorism in the post-post-9/11 era. In the United States, “that means redoubling our efforts to close the prison at Guantanamo,” he said to cheers. ||||| BERLIN (Reuters) - President Barack Obama defended U.S. anti-terrorism tactics on a visit to Berlin on Wednesday, telling wary Germans Washington was not spying on the emails of ordinary citizens and promising to step up efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. 
 
 On the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, Obama made his first presidential visit to the German capital, a favored destination of U.S. leaders during the Cold War. 
 
 He held talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel and gave a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in which he unveiled a proposal for new talks with Russia on slashing nuclear arms arsenals. 
 
 Obama, who attracted a crowd of 200,000 adoring fans when he last passed through in 2008 during his first campaign for the presidency, remains popular in Germany. 
 
 But revelations before the trip of a covert U.S. Internet surveillance program, code-named Prism, caused outrage in a country where memories of the eavesdropping East German Stasi secret police are still fresh. 
 
 Merkel said at a joint news conference that also touched on Afghanistan, Syria and the global economy, that the two leaders had held "long and intensive" talks on the spying issue, noting that some questions still needed to be cleared up. 
 
 Obama tried to reassure his host, who as a pastor's daughter growing up in the communist East experienced the Stasi first-hand. 
 
 "This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens or anybody else," Obama said. 
 
 "This is not a situation where we simply go into the Internet and start searching any way we want. This is a circumscribed system directed at us being able to protect our people and all of it is done under the oversight of the courts." 
 
 In a message which seemed designed for her domestic audience, Merkel told Obama that balance was essential in government monitoring of Internet communications. 
 
 "I made clear that although we do see the need for gathering information, the topic of proportionality is always an important one and the free democratic order is based on people feeling safe," said the 58-year-old chancellor. 
 
 Obama countered that the U.S. had thwarted at least 50 threats because of its monitoring program, including planned attacks in Germany. 
 
 "So lives have been saved and the encroachment on privacy has been strictly limited," he said. 
 
 A poll last week showed 82 percent of Germans approve of Obama, but the magic of 2008, when he was feted like a rock star, has faded amid concerns about his anti-terrorist tactics. 
 
 COMMON VALUES 
 
 In his speech to 4,000 invited guests at the Brandenburg Gate, Obama harked back to Kennedy by stressing what he called common values of openness and tolerance. 
 
 "We can be a little more informal among friends," he joked as he took off his jacket in the sweltering sun on the Pariser Platz square, just east of the Gate that once stood alongside the Berlin Wall dividing the communist East from the capitalist West of the city. 
 
 Earlier, at the news conference, he touched on tensions with Afghan President Hamid Karzai over U.S. plans to begin talks with the Taliban to try to seek a negotiated peace after 12 years of war, acknowledging "huge mistrust" between the Western-backed government in Kabul and its arch-foes. 
 
 "We do think that ultimately we're going to need to see Afghans talking to Afghans about how they can move forward and end the cycle of violence there so they can start actually building their country," Obama said. 
 
 On Syria, Obama said reports that the United States was ready to "go all in" to war in the country were exaggerated. He reiterated his view that President Bashar al-Assad's government had used chemical weapons, while acknowledging that Russia was skeptical on this point. 
 
 Obama declined to give specifics on new military aid Washington plans to provide to Syrian rebels. 
 
 Obama arrived in Germany after a two-day summit with Group of Eight leaders in Northern Ireland where he and other leaders clashed with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Syria. 
 
 Despite these divisions, he said he would engage with Moscow on reducing deployed nuclear weapons by up to a third from previously agreed levels. 
 
 "I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War nuclear postures," Obama said. 
 
 In 2008, Merkel refused to allow Obama, then a senator from Illinois, to speak at the Brandenburg Gate because he was not yet president. 
 
 Despite this awkward start, the Democrat has forged a pragmatic relationship with the conservative Merkel, who may be hoping for a political boost out of the visit months before a German election. 
 
 DRONES 
 
 In a nod to criticism, Obama defended his failure to close the Guantanamo Bay prison on Cuba that his predecessor George W. Bush opened after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. 
 
 He also reassured Germans that the U.S. military was not using German bases to launch unmanned drone attacks. 
 
 For Obama, who grew up in Hawaii and spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, Europe has sometimes seemed an after-thought. The signature foreign policy initiative of his first term was his "pivot" to Asia. 
 
 But analysts say plans to create a free-trade zone between the United States and European Union are a sign that he is focusing more on Europe. 
 
 "The Obama administration has found it harder than expected to work with emerging powers and has fallen back to a more traditional reliance on European allies," said Charles Kupchan, professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. 
 
 "Washington doesn't have better options. And when it comes to who to engage in Europe, Germany grows stronger and stronger." 
 
 (Additional reporting by Stephen Brown, Roberta Rampton, Annika Breidthardt, Alexandra Hudson, Michelle Martin; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Ralph Boulton)
– Five years after he addressed a huge crowd in Berlin as a presidential candidate—and 50 years after John F. Kennedy proclaimed "Ich bin ein Berliner"—President Obama gave an address at the iconic Brandenburg Gate today, calling for a major reduction in nuclear warheads. "We may not live in fear of nuclear annihilation—but as long as nuclear weapons exist, we are not truly safe," Obama declared, according to Politico. He said the US could still defend itself with one third fewer nuclear weapons, and said he intended to negotiate a cut to that level with Russia. That would mean taking the arsenals down to about 1,000 warheads each. Officials tell the Wall Street Journal that the cuts may take place under a new treaty, to follow 2010's New START pact, but the White House will also consider reciprocal reductions without a treaty. Obama also spent plenty of time in the speech endearing himself to the crowd before him (which USA Today notes was limited to 6,000 invited guests), with frequent jokes and stirring references to the city's history. "I am proud to stand here and pay tribute to the past from the East side of the Brandenburg," he said. Of course, hanging over everything was the NSA spying issue. At a joint press conference earlier, Merkel said she and Obama had held "long and intensive" talks about it, while Obama offered assurances that the US wasn't "rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens ... or anybody else."