Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Berlin’s rise may not be enough to counter the US effectively, but it already sends shivers down French spines. Germany’s renaissance is Europe’s latest, and perhaps greatest, strategic quandary.
Germany’s allies have long urged Europe’s largest economy to pull its diplomatic and military weight. Berlin is now doing so, yet the applause is edged with alarm. In Washington this week Johann Wadephul, Germany’s foreign minister, lobbied America to let NATO cool the latest quarrel over Greenland. However, he appeared to have precious little leverage in Washington.
At the same time Chancellor Friedrich Merz trumpeted a colossal rearmament programme that already dwarfs anything on the continent. And European governments, France above all, suddenly began to feel uneasy for getting exactly what they asked for.
Mr Wadephul’s mission was delicate. Donald Trump has once again cast covetous eyes on the Danish territory, telling reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday that “If we don’t take Greenland, Russia or China will take Greenland and I’m not going to let that happen.” Danish ministers cried foul; the row threatened to split the alliance.
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After meeting Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, Mr Wadephul claimed progress — with a generous dose of optimism. “NATO is currently starting to work on concrete plans which will be discussed with our US partners,” he was quoted as saying by European media. “We were still not able to do this today. But there’s the readiness to do this on all sides within the NATO framework. Germany will also try to contribute to this,” the minister told Bloomberg. That after meeting perhaps the greatest ally—or the least unfriendly person—in the Trump administration; success hardly ever feels this modest.
The saga marks Greenland’s premiere as the focal point of European security efforts. Mr Merz, speaking in India, backed his minister’s diplomacy. “We are indeed discussing Greenland within NATO. We share the American concerns that this part of Denmark needs to be better protected,” he said. Berlin’s plan is to wrap the crisis inside NATO procedures, sidestepping talk of American annexation and offering Copenhagen allies on its flank.
The initiative testifies to a striking role reversal. For decades German leaders shunned the limelight on hard security. Now they set the Arctic agenda, propose command structures and promise troops. Denmark, small and overstretched, cannot object. Yet the sight of German ministers arbitrating between Washington and Copenhagen unsettles chancelleries that thought such matters belonged to others.
This is exactly the kind of resolve we need to ensure our security. Germany is leading by example. — Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary-General
Behind the diplomatic bustle lies a transformation at home. Berlin has earmarked more than €500bn for defence by 2029 and vows to reach NATO’s spending goal of 3.5 per cent of GDP six years early. The flood of cash is already refitting barracks, ordering missile-defence batteries and expanding munitions lines. “This is exactly the kind of resolve we need to ensure our security. Germany is leading by example,” purred Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary-general, during a recent visit to the German capital.
Friends and worriers
Few allies doubt that Europe needs German kit. Poland captures the sentiment neatly. Radoslaw Sikorski, the country’s deputy prime minister, observed that “as long as Germany is a member of the EU and NATO, I am more afraid of a German aversion to armament than I am of the German army.” Generals want Berlin to fill yawning gaps in air and missile defence, space surveillance and logistics.
“We hope Germany will further develop strategic enablers for the alliance,” said General Markus Laubenthal, one of NATO’s senior German officers. “From a NATO perspective, and in terms of the know-how and industrial capacity, it makes sense to work with key European allies. Together we are stronger. We should be able to agree on requirements and deliver things faster because, as a user, I need them.”
There was a widely agreed balance in Europe that France would be the geopolitical power while Germany would be the economic power. — Claudia Major, German Marshall Fund
Yet admiration mixes with anxiety, nowhere more so than in France. Paris once served as Europe’s military vanguard while Berlin wrote cheques. That compact is crumbling. “France is in a fragile situation, and the fact that Germany is committing with such determination will of course create a dynamic that could leave us on the side of the road,” warned MEP François-Xavier Bellamy, a French MEP. “The domestic fragility is weakening France’s geopolitical heft.”
Claudia Major of the German Marshall Fund explains the discomfort. “There was a widely agreed balance in Europe that France would be the geopolitical power while Germany would be the economic power,” she said. “Germany didn’t want to be a political giant. Now Germany is doing both, as well as making an effort to embed its new power within Europe. This puts France in a difficult position. Their anxiety says more about France itself than about Germany.”
Old projects, new tensions
The change of tack has not gone unnoticed. “Sadly, when it comes to NATO, it is time to start thinking about the unthinkable,“ Gideon Rachman, Financial Times‘ prominent columnist on geopolitics wrote on Tuesday. He was referencing the need for a new European security structure with Germany at its heart.
That anxiety spills into industrial quarrels. The Future Combat Air System—Europe’s grand scheme for a sixth-generation fighter jet—languishes as Dassault of France and Germany’s Airbus haggle over control. Earlier, Paris winced when Berlin ordered 35 American F-35s without consulting its neighbour. Mr Merz has slowed further American purchases, hoping to mollify French ire, yet suspicion lingers. French officials fret that German factories, fat with orders, will outstrip their own and capture export markets.
Germany replies that its spree is a European public good. The European Sky Shield Initiative, proposed by an earlier German government, aims to plug missile-defence gaps from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Small countries eagerly signed up; France, which builds its own kit, did not. Each round of integration thus binds Germany closer to the east and north while leaving France pondering its place.
Paris remembers history, too. The Bundeswehr’s renaissance awakens ghosts invoked by no other ally. That makes Germany’s domestic politics a continental concern. “There is a growing worry about what could happen to this extremely strong German fighting power if the AfD were to take over political leadership,” Jana Puglierin of the European Council on Foreign Relations told Bloomberg. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland tops polls in parts of the east; generals in Warsaw and Brussels watch nervously.
Ambition and reassurance
Berlin insists that every euro, tank and diplomatic sortie is embedded in alliances. Mr Wadephul couches Greenland plans in NATO jargon; Mr Merz sells rearmament as a boon for collective defence. They know Europe welcomes German strength only if paired with German restraint. That explains the relentless choreography—consultations in Washington, briefings in Copenhagen, visits to the UN—designed to prove that Berlin seeks no Sonderweg.
There is a growing worry about what could happen to this extremely strong German fighting power if the AfD were to take over political leadership. — Jana Puglierin, European Council on Foreign Relations
Even so, the paradox at the heart of European security is growing clearer. Germany is damned when it under-invests, damned when it over-delivers. For the neighbours the choice is between a rich pacifist that shirks burdens or a muscular partner that reshapes the strategic balance. Greenland’s ice serves merely as this week’s backdrop.
The continent thus tests a fragile proposition: that German leadership can be both indispensable and non-threatening. Mr Merz’s government bets that transparent spending, multinational command and a steady trickle of hardware to Ukraine will ease fears. Some evidence supports the wager. The Nordics, Baltics and Poles applaud German drones overhead and supplies rolling east. The Americans, for all Mr Trump’s bluster, value a European ally able to share heavy lifting.
The French unease
But reassurance will require patience. French unease sits deep, tied to fiscal constraints that limit its own build-up and doubts about German dependability. Industrial disputes will flare whenever contracts stray across borders. And nobody knows how a recession, a Trump tantrum or a wobble in Berlin’s coalition might play with voters already flirting with populism.
For the moment, though, Germany presses on. Mr Wadephul travels to New York to brief António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, on Arctic diplomacy. Defence planners in Berlin scour budgets for faster ways to hit the 3.5 per cent mark. And French officials, torn between relief and concern, watch their neighbour stride onto the stage they once bestrode alone.
Europe asked for a Germany that leads. It now has one, brokering over Greenland and buying missiles by the crate. Whether the continent can live comfortably with this new dispensation will define its strategic future. Too little German power leaves Europe exposed; too much unsettles brittle hierarchies.
