What Trump’s security doctrine really means for Germany
Dear Reader,
Two developments from across the Pond have triggered outrage inside the German political establishment — and sharpened fears that Washington is no longer merely drifting away from Europe, but actively working against it.
The first was the publication of the Trump administration’s new national security strategy. The document goes far beyond the familiar complaints about European free-riding and defence spending. Instead, it openly signals an intention to interfere in the internal politics of allied states.
According to the strategy, future US policy will aim to “cultivate resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” What that resistance might look like is spelled out only a few paragraphs earlier, where the paper expresses optimism about “the growing influence of patriotic European parties.”
The second provocation followed days later. A delegation of around 20 AfD politicians travelled to New York at the invitation of the city’s Young Republican Club. At a gala dinner, the group awarded the AfD’s foreign affairs spokesman, Markus Frohnmaier, a prize for his “courageous work in Germany’s particularly repressive and hostile political climate.”
It is the security strategy, however, that has caused the deeper shock in Berlin. The document paints a bleak picture of Europe’s future, warning of “civilizational erasure” driven by EU overreach and immigration policies that are transforming the continent’s ethnic composition.
European governing elites, it claims, are prepared to “trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition” in order to cling to power.
Frohnmaier echoed that language in New York. Accepting his award, he warned of a “new totalitarianism that doesn’t wear a Soviet uniform, but clothes itself in the language of diversity and hate-speech laws.”
Germany’s leaders, he added, were preoccupied with ordering dawn raids against citizens who insult ministers online, while neglecting the country’s crumbling infrastructure.
“They have turned my homeland — this great land of thinkers and poets, engineers and warriors, of honourable men and women — into a land of prosecutors and censors,” Frohnmaier declared.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz initially responded cautiously to the US document. “Some of it is understandable, some of it is comprehensible, some of it is unacceptable to us from a European perspective,” he said, adding a plea to Washington: “If you can’t get on with Europe, then at least make Germany your partner.”
But his tone darkened over the weekend. Speaking in Munich, Merz struck a more fatalistic note. “Pax Americana is over,” he said. “It no longer exists in the way we knew it.”
Merz also suggested that a US withdrawal from NATO may now be only a matter of time. Twice during his speech he spoke of preserving the alliance “for as long as possible.” He even hinted that Washington had come close to leaving earlier this year, relenting only after Germany raised its defence-spending commitments above three per cent of GDP.
What has the reaction been?
Figures in Merz’s own CDU — less constrained by the demands of office — have been blunt. Norbert Röttgen described the shift in US policy as a “second Zeitenwende.” For the first time since the end of the Second World War, he said, the United States is no longer standing alongside Europe.
Instead, Röttgen warned, Washington is preparing to “cooperate with the internal enemies of liberal democracy in Europe — in Germany, that means the AfD.”
The Süddeutsche Zeitung went further, arguing that Trump is deliberately seeking to weaken Germany. “Seen from this perspective, it makes sense for them to support forces on this side of the Atlantic that destabilise the political system,” the paper wrote, describing the Frohnmaier award as part of a broader strategy to sow division.
Others have said that Europe is flying into its usual moral panic. Mathias Döpfner, the head of Axel Springer media group, insisted that critics were misreading Washington’s intentions. “Our difficult American friends want exactly what they say they want: a strong Europe as a reliable and effective partner,” he argued. “But we don’t hear that — or we don’t want to hear it. We only hear the criticism.”
What comes next?
In the Munich speech in which he declared the end of Pax Americana, Merz outlined a four-point response. Germany, he said, must support Ukraine for as long as necessary, hold the EU together, keep NATO intact for as long as possible — and make “massive investments in our defence capabilities.”
He also stressed that Trump should not be dismissed as an aberration. The next occupant of the White House, Merz warned, could be “even more difficult.”
Nor has US pressure to work with “patriotic parties” had any visible effect in Berlin. As he routinely does, Merz ruled out cooperation with the AfD — a line that drew loud applause from CSU delegates.
With Berlin increasingly treating the US security strategy as a kind of divorce paper, Germany appears to be bracing itself for a future in which it must fill what it sees as a growing security vacuum in Europe. Over the coming decades, that points towards Germany assuming the role of the continent’s leading military power.
Jörg’s take
Reading the US national security strategy through the lens of the German media, one could easily conclude that the Trump administration is more interested in courting Russia and China than in sustaining its alliance with Europe.
The document itself offers little to support that interpretation. It explicitly states that “Europe remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States,” and stresses that transatlantic trade is “one of the pillars of the global economy and of American prosperity.”
Russia barely features at all, except in relation to the security of western Europe.
Instead, the paper is preoccupied with what it sees as Europe’s long-term self-harm. European elites, it argues, have manoeuvred themselves into political, economic and demographic crises that risk leaving the continent too weak to serve as a serious partner for the US in the coming decades.
The figures cited are stark. Europe’s share of global GDP has fallen from around 25 per cent in 1990 to roughly 14 per cent today, while the US has broadly maintained its 26 per cent share. These are home truths that Europe doesn’t like to hear.
When the document turns its focus to Germany, its critique also lands a punch.
“The Ukraine war has had the perverse effect of increasing Europe’s — especially Germany’s — external dependencies,” it notes. “Today, German chemical companies are building some of the world’s largest processing plants in China, using Russian gas that they cannot obtain at home.”
That passage appears to allude to chemicals giant BASF, which has shut down large parts of its Ludwigshafen operations due to soaring post-2022 energy costs, while investing around €10 billion in new capacity in China.
The most troubling element of the new US strategy is the stated ambition to “cultivate resistance” to Europe’s decline by backing parties such as the AfD.
If this amounts to little more than invitations to conservative conferences, it may be provocative but hardly unprecedented. Any move towards campaign financing, or something similar, would cross legal and political red lines — and would provide genuine grounds for concluding that the transatlantic friendship, as it has existed for decades, is over.
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News In Brief
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Sincerely,
Jörg Luyken