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Within hours of emerging as the near-certain next chancellor of Germany after Sunday's election, Friedrich Merz offered a grim prognosis of the transatlantic relationship.
Europe needs to "achieve independence from the United States, step by step," Merz told public broadcaster ARD. The Trump administration does not care about Europe "one way or the other," he said, and called the advocacy of Vice President JD Vance and tech billionaire Elon Musk on behalf of Germany's far right "no less outrageous" than Kremlin-backed election interference.
It was a remarkable assessment, in large part because of who delivered it. Merz, 69, is a veteran politician representing Germany's conservative Christian Democrats. He is not known as a firebrand but a pro-business politician who worked for an organization whose aim is to further U.S.-German relations.
What would have been a more radical position a few years ago or from a different source instead came across as a basic recognition of an impending tectonic shift in European foreign policy. The continent has seen Washington as its most important ally and security guarantor since World War II.
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia three years ago, the first large-scale European land war since 1945, had shown Europe that it needed to rethink its defenses. The uncertainty over U.S. leadership under the Trump administration has brought the matter of dependence to a crisis.
Europe should still hope for a good relationship with the United States and continue to support the NATO military alliance, Merz said at a news conference Monday. However, he added, "if those who really make not just America first but almost America alone their motto … prevail, then it will be difficult."
Though Europe as a whole spends more than $290 billion on defense, its fragmented system and the reality of reliance on the United States creates vast inefficiencies. One estimate released last week found that Europe would need hundreds of thousands of new troops and at least $260 billion more in funding to deter Russia without the United States.
As Europe's largest economy, with a critical central location and large population, Germany would be expected to play a central role.
But independence is particularly daunting for Germany, where military spending remains influenced by the aftermath of World War II and decades of occupation and division after. Some 50,000 U.S. service members were stationed in the country last year, second only to Japan. Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr, are widely considered weak and bound by a postwar consensus that they cannot act unilaterally.
Germany said it met NATO's 2 percent of economic output target for defense spending last year, but many voices within the alliance - not just President Donald Trump - have called for Europe's largest economy to contribute far more.
Berlin should commit to defense spending at 5 percent of gross domestic product as soon as possible, Jakub Janda, director of the Prague-based European Values Center for Security Policy think tank, wrote on X on Monday. "If Germany does this, most European nations will follow and the United States will not leave Europe."
German business is dependent on trade with the United States, making the country vulnerable to tariff threats from Washington. In key areas, including tech and defense, Germany relies on the United States for specific orders that it cannot easily source from within Europe. The German economy, once the strongest in Europe, has been sputtering in recent years, contracting for the past two.
Merz's statements reflect a major shift for someone who grew up in Cold War-era West Germany, said Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. "He suddenly has to navigate a landscape that looks entirely different," she said.
Elon Musk, a billionaire White House appointee, repeatedly posted to X, the social media platform he owns, in support of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ahead of Sunday's vote, while Vance had met with AfD's leader, Alice Weidel, during a Munich security conference at which he also suggested that the party should not be barred from government.
Merz reacted with strong displeasure to the words of U.S. officials before the vote, stating that Musk's action in particular "cannot go unchallenged." In his comments Monday, he also pointed to what he described as an "unacceptable" U.S. attempt to make a deal with "Russia about Ukraine over the heads of the Europeans."
The new language coming from Germany's election winner suggested a break with the foreign policy of Angela Merkel, who led the country from 2005 and 2021. Merkel was a Christian Democrat, like Merz, and known for her tight relationship with U.S. President Barack Obama, but she attempted to maintain working relationships not only with Washington but also Moscow and Beijing.
Merz's immediate predecessor, Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), had offered a vision of Germany's shifting international circumstances three years ago, describing it as a Zeitenwende or "turning point" in history. With the left-wing SPD expected to join the right-wing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in a grand coalition, they may at least be on the same page here.
"Germany is facing a new reality," Sudha David-Wilp of the German Marshall Fund said. "It needs to step up and make decisions in order for it, and Europe, to maintain its role in the world."
In addition to boosting defense spending, Germany deployed Bundeswehr troops to Lithuania in recent years, a move designed to protect the European Union's eastern flank. But that could be just a first step.
A joint study released last week by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank, estimated that Germany would need to increase its annual defense spending by more than $145 billion to ensure that Europe could defend itself against Russia without the United States, as well as provide NATO with an additional 100,000 troops.
Speaking Monday, Merz suggested that his first priority in coalition talks with the Social Democrats would be foreign policy and security. He has suggested that he is open to loosening Germany's constitutional "debt brake" that had imposed strict budget rules on borrowing.
"It is Merz's uber-Atlanticist and fiscally conservative CDU background that lends force to his calls for independence from the U.S.A., and will give him the credibility to bury the debt brake," said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a European think tank.
While both parties appear willing to borrow to finance ambitious policies, they might not agree on what those policies should be. And in the AfD, they will have a powerful opposition force in the Bundestag. This political fragmentation, in part promoted by the Trump administration, could end up proving Germany's critics in Washington right.
"If Germany isn't able to significantly shift the way it sees its own role in NATO and Europe, it will end up being seen as weak and ineffective, which will only serve as fuel for Trump's worst beliefs about Europe," said Rachel Rizzo, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.
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