On February 27, 2022, three days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Olaf Scholz, who was then the Chancellor of Germany, gave a speech to an emergency session of the German parliament at which he described the attack as a Zeitenwende – an historic turning point. This watershed moment, he declared, meant “that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before. The issue at the heart of this [change] is whether power is allowed to prevail over the law: whether we permit Putin to turn back the clock to the nineteenth century and the age of great powers, or whether we have it in us to keep warmongers like Putin in check. That requires strength of our own.” He announced a major restructuring of the country’s cautious defense policy, including billions for modernization of the military and a promise that defense spending would exceed 2 percent of Germany’s GDP, a level of spending that Scholz’s party (the Social Democrats) traditionally had opposed. 

Three years later, Germany has a new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who leads the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He succeeded in amending Germany’s constitution to lift the so-called “debt brake,” which means that the country will spend significantly more on defense as well as hundreds of billions on related infrastructure over the next ten years. But will it be enough to allow Germany to deter Russian aggression against Europe — particularly if the United States under Trump withdraws from its post-1945 role as the guarantor of European security? Can Germany develop a defense industry that can deliver under wartime conditions? Can Germany take on the leadership role in Europe that it long has been reluctant to assume — and will other countries accept Germany in this role?

Jan Techau is a director with the Eurasia Group’s Europe team, covering Germany and European security. He is also a senior fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis. From 2020 to 2023, he served in the German government as head of speechwriting for three ministers in the German Ministry of Defense. In this podcast interview, he discusses the European reaction to Trump’s reelection, the likelihood of Germany’s being able to make the physical and psychological adjustments it would need in order to become the principal provider of conventional deterrence in Europe, the rise of anti-Americanism in Germany on both the left and right, and whether Europeans are capable of keeping peace on the continent without the help of the Americans. He also explains his 2016 diagnosis of what he called “sophisticated state failure,” which long before the Abundance movement was dreamed of predicted that highly developed countries would find it increasingly difficult to get anything done, and that this paralysis would provide an opening for populist uprisings all over the world. “The only lasting way out of sophisticated state failure,” he concluded, “is for responsible politicians to worry less about getting re-elected and start risking their political careers for things that need to be done.”