The Gun Europe Is Loading
Germany is building the continent's strongest army. The question of who commands it in 2035 is not being asked.
Germany’s new military strategy is titled “Responsibility for Europe.” The planning horizon runs to 2035. By then, Germany will field the strongest conventional army on the continent. France and Britain have nuclear deterrents and smaller conventional forces. Germany is building the other kind of army.
The Alternative für Deutschland, a nationalist party with a history of sympathetic commentary toward Moscow, currently leads in German national polls.
Most analysts treat these two facts as separate chapters. They belong in the same sentence.
Europe is rearming in direct response to a lesson Trump taught: that institutional commitments mean less than the preferences of whoever controls them. NATO guarantees survived for seventy years not because of the treaties, but because successive American governments chose to honor them. One election changed the calculation. Europe registered this, drew the correct conclusion, and began building military capacity that does not depend on Washington’s mood. It has not extended the same skepticism toward its own electoral future.
A German army built over the next decade will be commanded by governments that do not yet exist, answerable to an electorate whose direction is not fixed. The AfD has opposed weapons deliveries to Ukraine, cultivated ties with Moscow, and led national polls for months. It may not win the next election. It may win the one after. Military establishments take a generation to build and considerably less time to redirect.
Europe’s strategists spend considerable energy on whether a rearmed Germany can be embedded in joint structures deeply enough to constrain independent action. That was the right question in 1955, when West Germany joined NATO. It is the right question again. The difference is that in 1955, European leaders were asking it out loud.
The continent is constructing a deterrent against Russian unpredictability. The possibility that the army doing the deterring may one day answer to different political masters is, for now, filed under assumptions that are easier not to examine.