Can Germany Reorient Itself and Europe?
Germany is being battered from within by a faltering economy and from without by a vengeful Trump administration.
The Bavarian comedian Karl Valentin once quipped, “the future was also better in the past.” It’s starting to become a widespread sentiment in Germany, which is being battered from within by a faltering economy and from without by a vengeful Trump administration. Can Germany reorient itself and Europe?
In a speech to the German parliament, in February 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz famously called for a Zeitenwende, or the start of a new era. But it never really began. Instead, Germans declined to cinch up their collective Lederhosen and confront the mounting threat from Russia.
Now, as Friedrich Merz, the leading candidate to replace the widely unpopular Scholz, appears set to assume office after federal elections take place this Sunday, a second chance may emerge for a fundamental shift in German foreign policy. Merz is a member of the mainstream Christian Democratic Party whose sister party is the slightly more conservative Christian Social Union in Bavaria. Merz’s party was headed after 1945 by the patriarchal chancellor Konrad Adenauer who insisted that the fledgling Federal Republic had to abandon Germany’s traditional role of jockeying between East and West for political advantage. Rather, it should anchor itself in an alliance with America. Westbindung, or ties to the West, was the mantra. Eventually, Adenauer’s vision seemed to be vindicated when East Germany collapsed in 1989 and was integrated, or at least incorporated, into a democratic West Germany anchored in NATO and the European Union.
What Germans did not expect, however, was that Washington would go bonkers, embarking upon what amounts to a role reversal—abandoning Western Europe to embark upon a fling with Moscow. As I learned while attending a variety of political and think-tank events thanks to the Hanns Seidel Foundation over the past few days in Munich, Germany feels jilted by the Trump administration. The remarkable thing is that, apart from the retrograde Alternative Party for Germany (AfD), the sense of aggrievement transcends political parties. In meeting legislators at the Bavarian parliament, for example, a sense of betrayal was voiced by everyone from members of the Christian Socialists to the Social Democrats.
The sense that Germany was being served divorce papers by America started with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s dismissal of the importance of NATO during his recent trip to Europe. It was followed by the speech of Vice President J.D. Vance who visited the Dachau concentration camp on one day, then denounced German democracy on the next before meeting with the radical right AfD co-leader Alice Weidel (one of its leaders, Bjorn Hoecke of Thuringia recently suggested that Germany requires more Lebensraum, or living space, a favorite term of the Nazis who saw it as essential to expand toward the east).
All this was mere prologue, of course, for Trump’s own tirade about Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and claims about the great promise that peace in our time with Russia holds for America. It is a measure of Trump’s ability to bend reality for his followers that he can convert Zelenskyy, the Winston Churchill of our time, into a nefarious figure worthy of obloquy. According to Trump, “I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished, and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way,” Chose? There was no choice. Russian president Vladimir Putin, not Zelenskyy, went to war. In his avidity to court the Russian dictator, Trump is converting the aggressor into the victim.
The sense of consternation that a variety of Germans expressed to me over Trump’s upending of the alliance with Europe has been mirrored in the German media. Two essays in particular are noteworthy. The first is by Malte Lehming in the Berlin Tagesspiegel. Lehming scrutinizes Trump’s blitzkrieg of executive orders and pronouncements in the past few weeks to arrive at the conclusion that he is turning America “into the opponent of Europe.” He underscores that this phenomenon cannot be ascribed solely to Trump’s foreign policy moves but also to dispense with liberal democracy and create an authoritarian America in his own image.
The second is by Berthold Kohler of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Kohler correctly notes that the repeated asseverations by Trump that NATO members needed to up their financial contributions were not meant in earnest. Instead, it was a pretext for eventual withdrawal from the alliance. According to Kohler, a schism is developing: “The West was never a fully homogenous community of value but it was united by similar conceptions of a desirable order in its countries as well as between them. Trump does not share it. Under his leadership and with the applause of his followers, America is transforming itself with frightening rapidity into a semi-authoritarian system.” Kohler suggests that Germany should reinstitute the draft for the Bundeswehr and that Europe needs a credible nuclear deterrent. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that, in all of these calculations, Poland, which serves as a buffer state for Western Europe, will play a vital role.
For Germany, it is more than a little distressing to see America embrace the kind of unscrupulous realpolitik that it practiced for several centuries before jettisoning after World War II. It didn’t end well for Germany and it’s unlikely to for America either. As one former European ambassador to America sardonically wrote me about Trump’s megalomania, “The only upside: our generation is now witnessing the most beautiful suicide in world history.”
About the author: Jacob Heilbrunn
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.
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