Friedrich Merz Vindicates Trump’s Approach to Europe |
“The decades of the ‘Pax Americana’ are largely over for us in Europe, and also for us in Germany. It no longer exists as we knew it and nostalgia won’t change that… The Americans are now very, very ruthlessly pursuing their own self-interests.”
Friedrich Merz, Germany’s new center-right chancellor and the leader of Europe’s largest economy, made these remarks on December 13, describing America’s reorientation away from Europe in pursuit of its own self-interest. As Merz implies, that self-interest does not include underwriting European security, at least not to the degree it has for the last several decades. Importantly, Merz does not cast Washington’s shift as a betrayal, but rather as a strategic reality to be met rather than lamented. In response, the Bundestag has voted to increase defense spending to €152 billion ($179.2 billion) by 2029, about 3 percent of current German GDP, and to increase it further to 5 percent of German GDP by 2035. This is in addition to moving to increase the number of active-duty German military personnel from 180,000 today to about 260,000 by 2035. While the other European nations that take defense spending seriously—Poland, the Nordics, the Baltics, and Italy are to be commended—the degree to which Germany’s economy dwarfs that of any other single European nation is hard to understate, and the success or failure of any future European rearmament will depend substantially on Berlin.
While trans-Atlanticists have been critical of President Donald Trump’s haranguing of European states to spend more on defense, it is hard to imagine a counterfactual where European defense budgets, particularly Germany’s, increased enough to make a difference. That Trump has, at times, been........