1. Get audio access with any FP subscription.

   Subscribe Now

   ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Not long after the United States and Israel unleashed war on Iran, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz issued a statement. He didn’t condemn the attacks on Iran as a violation of international law, as countless German and European leaders before him might have done. (French President Emmanuel Macron, for one, remained true to that familiar pattern.) Nor did he advertise a sense of indignation, in striking contrast to his Spanish counterpart, who promptly banned U.S. forces from using Spanish bases.

Instead, Merz used the occasion to denounce the viciousness of the Iranian regime and its threats to the region and beyond, including Germany. He declared his “relief … that the mullah regime is coming to an end” and said that Germany shared the United States’ and Israel’s aim that Iran’s “dangerous nuclear and ballistic armament is stopped.” Instead of condemning the bombing campaign, he offered a striking comment on the state of the world: “The criteria of international law will have relatively little effect. … Appeals from Europe, including from Germany, the condemnation of Iranian violations of law, and even extensive sanctions have had little effect … That also has to do with the fact that we were not ready to pursue our fundamental interests with military force if necessary.”

Not long after the United States and Israel unleashed war on Iran, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz issued a statement. He didn’t condemn the attacks on Iran as a violation of international law, as countless German and European leaders before him might have done. (French President Emmanuel Macron, for one, remained true to that familiar pattern.) Nor did he advertise a sense of indignation, in striking contrast to his Spanish counterpart, who promptly banned U.S. forces from using Spanish bases.

Instead, Merz used the occasion to denounce the viciousness of the Iranian regime and its threats to the region and beyond, including Germany. He declared his “relief … that the mullah regime is coming to an end” and said that Germany shared the United States’ and Israel’s aim that Iran’s “dangerous nuclear and ballistic armament is stopped.” Instead of condemning the bombing campaign, he offered a striking comment on the state of the world: “The criteria of international law will have relatively little effect. … Appeals from Europe, including from Germany, the condemnation of Iranian violations of law, and even extensive sanctions have had little effect … That also has to do with the fact that we were not ready to pursue our fundamental interests with military force if necessary.”

That stringent note of Merzian realism marks a stark break with his country’s recent past. Chancellor Angela Merkel, Merz’s longtime political rival, spent her term touting the primacy of international law and denouncing virtually any recourse to military action. Of course, she had the luxury of doing so not least because the United States’ unquestioned military might loomed in the background, allowing Germany and its European friends to enjoy comprehensive security without devoting huge shares of their own budgets to defense. She also benefited from the cheap Russian oil and natural gas that fueled the German economy, even building a major gas pipeline to circumvent Poland and Ukraine. Her professed respect for hallowed international principles didn’t prevent her from forcing Kyiv to agree to the patently unfair Minsk agreements after Russia illegally seized Crimea and invaded Ukraine in 2014—and from allowing Moscow to violate the terms of those agreements as it saw fit.

Now, of course, we live in a radically changed world. Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we find ourselves witnessing a U.S. administration displaying flagrant contempt for European sovereignty (by threatening to seize Greenland from Denmark) and security (by aligning a peace plan for Ukraine with the Kremlin’s maximalist demands). U.S. President Donald Trump has ceased to provide direct aid to Ukraine, continues to pursue a weirdly conciliatory policy toward the Kremlin, and has repeatedly undermined U.S. obligations for NATO’s collective defense. The guarantee of U.S. security for Europe no longer feels like a guarantee. No European leader can now deny the urgency of the need for European “strategic autonomy,” which necessarily includes wide-ranging rearmament and the building of defense capacities that were left to atrophy due to dependence on Washington. But few Western European leaders are stating the case with the same clarity as Merz. At this year’s Munich Security Conference, he responded to general anxiety about the decline of the rules-based international order by saying: “I fear we must put it even more bluntly: This order, however imperfect it was even at its best, no longer exists in that form.”

This isn’t just a matter of rhetoric. Recently, Merz announced that he has been conferring with Macron about extending France’s nuclear deterrent to its European allies. This week that initiative bore fruit. Macron announced that France is launching a new policy of “forward deterrence,” entailing the temporary deployment of French nuclear weapons to the territory of other EU countries—the first move in a likely effort to create a new European nuclear umbrella that is aimed at reinforcing (or replacing) the U.S. nuclear force that has helped keep the peace on the continent for the past 70 years or so. “To be free, we have to be feared,” Macron said at a ceremony announcing the move. If that sounds like something Merz might have said, it’s no accident. This new sense of disillusionment about European impotence is a sentiment that he and Merz share. But Macron has only one year left in office. Merz is just getting started—if he plays his cards right.

As radical as it is, even the French nuclear move may end up being overshadowed by Merz’s signal achievement to date. One year ago, he managed to persuade members of the German parliament to suspend a constitutional constraint on government debt, paving the way for his plan to issue bonds that will finance a drastic expansion of the German military. He is now envisioning spending $580 billion on defense, bringing the country up to a funding level of 3.5 percent of GDP by 2030. Merz has floated 5 percent as a more appropriate target down the road. (During Trump’s first term, one German politician visiting Washington dismissed journalists’ questions about whether his country would agree to the U.S. demand that it raise defense spending to 4 percent. If Germany spent that much, he sneered, it would have to start buying aircraft carriers that he wouldn’t know where to park.)

This vast torrent of cash will be flowing into a military long desiccated by the pacifist spirit of a complacent and political elite more adept at moralizing than the realities of power politics. It wasn’t that long ago that soldiers of the emphatically voluntary Bundeswehr were drillingwith broomsticks rather than rifles. Now, the German defense industry is about to receive an influx of largesse unprecedented in modern European history. This will be happening in a country that already ranks fourth globally in defense spending. It’s hard to overstate how dramatic the effects could be. Michael Kimmage, director of the Kennan Institute in Washington, called Merz’s plans “a new social contract between the chancellor and the people of Germany.”

Other European countries are already uneasy about Germany’s military buildup and defense spending,” historian Liana Fix recently noted. The anxiety, she explained, is less about a revival of German militarism than the possibility that the surge of funding will go solely to the German arms industry and leave European competitors in the dust. Germany’s closest economic rivals, France and Britain, have little prospect of catching up due to their intractable fiscal problems. Fix recommended that Berlin try to cushion the blow by generating the funds from common European debt instruments rather than solely German ones—and, by including other European defense firms in the bidding process, spreading the wealth and boosting the cohesion of the continent’s fragmented defense industry. But there is little indication so far that Merz has anything like this in mind. “Strategic autonomy, senior French, Italian and Polish officials fear, will increasingly have a German accent,” as the New York Times recently noted.

Will Merz’s fellow Germans be willing to follow along? Polls show that a comfortable majority of Germans approve of higher defense spending. But respondents have also shown a marked reluctance to take up arms in a national emergency. In one recent poll, 59 percent said that they would “probably not” or “definitely not” be prepared to defend their country if attacked. Even before Merz became chancellor, the German government began implementing a program designed to boost recruitment to the armed forces and took steps that could lead to the reintroduction of mandatory conscription. But any attempt to actually revive the draft could meet serious resistance.

It is unclear how much longer Merz will be in a position to impose his realist spirit on the German establishment. He is not universally popular, not least thanks to his aloof manner and mercurial temperament. This year, his own Christian Democrats will face a bruising series of state elections that could shake his hold on power. He stands at the head of a baggy grand coalition with the Social Democrats that offers limited prospects for long-overdue reforms. The economy remains sluggish. Support for Alternative for Germany, the right-wing populists, continues to grow. 

Yet in his quest to reorient German and European foreign policy according to the precepts of what he has called “principled realism,” Merz can count on two powerful allies. One is Trump, who has made it so manifestly clear to Europeans that they can no longer count on U.S. military support—and may, indeed, find themselves compelled to resist Washington’s imperial overreach. The other is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who continues to show that war and coercion remain tools of statecraft—not only on the killing grounds of the Donbas, but also, increasingly, in the gray zone battlefields of Europe, where Kremlin-organized acts of sabotage and influence operations continue. One can only hope that Germany and its allies will be able to respond to these challenges without abandoning all their hard-won ideals.

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage. Read more here.