For most of its postwar history, Germany has treated the American security guarantee as a fixed constant — the one geopolitical fact too solid to require contingency planning. That assumption is over. The speed with which it collapsed, and the direction German policymakers are now pointing in its absence, will define European security architecture for a generation.
Merz Says NATO May Not Exist in Five Years
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made a statement in late February 2026 that would have been unthinkable from a German head of government twelve months earlier: he was not certain NATO in its current form would exist in five or ten years. Speaking to German public broadcaster ARD, Merz said that given recent statements by US President Donald Trump, it had become clear to him that ‘Washington doesn’t care much about Europe’s fate.’ He added that his ‘absolute priority’ would be to strengthen Europe so that it could achieve ‘step by step, real independence from the USA’ in defence matters.
Trump, for his part, has not been subtle. In the weeks surrounding the February 28 US-Israeli strikes on Iran, Trump publicly questioned whether the United States would honour its Article 5 obligations to NATO allies that failed to meet the 2 percent GDP defence spending target. He singled out Germany, France, and Italy in a Truth Social post that asked, in characteristic Trump fashion, why American taxpayers should ‘defend countries that won’t defend themselves.’ He has also raised the possibility of the US withdrawing from NATO entirely, a threat that previous Republican and Democratic administrations treated as inconceivable — precisely because it would require Congress to give six months’ notice of withdrawal under the 2024 NATO Withdrawal Prevention Act.
According to Politico, Trump privately told NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in March that the alliance ‘won’t help the United States’ in its Iran operation, and that European hesitation had cost Washington diplomatically at the United Nations Security Council. Rutte, who has spent his tenure trying to keep Trump inside the alliance tent, reportedly emerged from the call shaken.
Germany’s Response: Acceleration, Not Panic
Merz’s public statements of doubt about NATO’s future co-exist with a policy posture that is accelerating German rearmament rather than pausing to mourn the alliance. Germany’s defence budget is now on track to reach 3.5 percent of GDP by 2028, well above the 2 percent NATO target that previous German governments treated as a ceiling. The Bundeswehr, which shrank to roughly 184,000 personnel during the post-Cold War peace dividend era, is targeting 255,000 to 270,000 troops by 2035.
A new Military Service Modernisation Act that entered into force on January 1, 2026, reinstated mandatory registration for all 18-year-old men and requires them to complete an online questionnaire and medical evaluation assessing suitability for military service. Women are invited but not required to participate. The law also contains a provision — widely reported in April 2026 and generating significant public controversy — that men aged 17 to 45 must seek approval from the Bundeswehr before leaving Germany for trips lasting more than three months. The German Defence Ministry has acknowledged that specific application procedures, processing times, and documentation requirements for this approval have not yet been defined.
The broader strategic shift is happening at the European level as well. Merz has argued publicly that Europe must ‘repair and revive transatlantic trust together,’ while simultaneously preparing for the scenario in which that trust cannot be repaired on terms acceptable to Washington. France under President Emmanuel Macron has pushed for a European defence architecture that does not require unanimous US participation. Poland, the Baltic states, and Scandinavia have all significantly increased defence spending in the past eighteen months.
The Iran War as a Catalyst
The 2026 Iran war has functioned as an accelerant for European defence divergence from Washington in ways that the Ukraine war did not fully achieve. In Ukraine, the US and Europe were broadly aligned in their support for Kyiv, even if Trump’s administration was more ambivalent than Biden’s. In Iran, the positions were irreconcilable from the opening strikes: Spain closed its airspace to US aircraft, France and Germany declined to participate in the coalition, and several EU members publicly condemned the strikes as violations of international law.
Germany’s position was carefully calibrated. Merz said in mid-March that the Middle East war was ‘not NATO’s concern,’ reflecting both a legal assessment — the NATO treaty’s Article 5 applies to attacks on member states, not to offensive operations by member states in third countries — and a political judgment that Germany could not afford to be seen as Washington’s partner in a war its public strongly opposed. A poll conducted by Infratest dimap in March 2026 found that 72 percent of German respondents opposed German military involvement in the Iran conflict in any form.
The result is a paradox that the German government has not fully resolved: Germany is arming itself faster than at any point since reunification, reintroducing elements of military service, and spending at levels that would have seemed unimaginable to Merkel-era defence planners — while simultaneously questioning whether the alliance that was the whole justification for postwar German rearmament will still exist in a usable form within the decade.
What This Actually Means
The era of Germany free-riding on American security guarantees is finished — not because Germany chose to end it, but because the guarantee has become too unreliable to plan around. What replaces it is still being constructed, and that construction is happening under time pressure created by a war Germany did not want and a US president who treats alliance obligations as negotiating chips rather than commitments.
Merz is not anti-American. He spent decades as a transatlanticist and a supporter of NATO. His pivot to language about European strategic independence is not ideological — it is a risk management response to a genuine shift in Washington’s behaviour. The question now is whether European states can build a credible collective defence architecture fast enough to matter before the next crisis tests the seams that are already showing.
Sources
Radio Free Europe | Pravda Germany | NATO News | Time | Al Jazeera | Politico via NATO News