So here we are: Germany is a Western power just like any other. And its ruling class, freed from the historical scruples that stopped it asserting its dominance over Europe (except through fiscal austerity and trade surpluses), once again feels called to pursue a genuinely national ambition: to build ‘the strongest conventional army in Europe’. Friedrich Merz declared this a priority in his first speech to the Bundestag as chancellor in May 2025.

This Bundeswehr, soon ‘ready for war’, as defence minister Boris Pistorius is so fond of saying, will serve a triple objective, at once economic, military and strategic: reviving a faltering industrial base; protecting Europe’s northern and eastern reaches against Russia; and, with Washington’s blessing, securing German leadership of NATO in Europe.

‘We are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either,’ Merz has said. The proof: Germany’s $114bn of defence spending in 2025 means it has the world’s fourth largest military budget, behind only the US ($954bn), China ($336bn) and Russia ($190bn). Drawing on financial resources unmatched in Europe, Berlin will have spent more on armaments by the end of the decade than London and Paris combined.

This combination of economic and conventional military supremacy is destabilising the European security architecture created at the end of the cold war and exposing an imbalance that neither the façade of European integration nor the fiction of the ‘Franco-German couple’ can conceal any longer. True, bound by its international commitments, Germany is still dependent for strategic deterrence on US nuclear capabilities and, if the partnership initiated by Emmanuel Macron bears fruit, those of France. But the era when the Federal Republic was confined to the role of a ‘civilian power’ with no military autonomy is coming to an end.

‘In the era of great powers,’ Merz has written, ‘Germany must chart its own course’. This spring, historian Liana Fix (…)

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(1) ‘Merz: “Wir sind nicht mehr im Frieden” ’ (Merz: ‘We are no longer at peace’), Die Zeit, 29 September 2025.

(4) Martin Jäger, public hearing before the Bundestag’s Parliamentary Oversight Panel (PKGr), 13 October 2025.

(5) Johann Wadephul, interviewed on ARD’s Bericht aus Berlin, 15 March 2026.

(6) Jan-Werner Müller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity, Yale University Press, 2000.

(7) Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Basic Books, New York, 1997.

(8) Wall Street Journal, New York, 11 August 2026.