Shifting alliances: The implications of incoming German Chancellor Merz's nuclear deterrent proposal on European security

The announcement by incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that Europe should seek an independent nuclear deterrent capacity could set off a disturbing chain reaction of nuclear proliferation around the world.

Merz was reacting to US President Donald Trump’s administration’s threat to withdraw US protection from Europe. Trump’s threat had “lifted the lid off … proliferation worldwide”, said Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Brookings Center on the United States and Europe.

She was speaking in a Brookings seminar on the theme “Trump’s return and the fate of Ukraine” to mark the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

Stelzenmüller blamed the risk of worldwide nuclear proliferation on Trump’s threats to withdraw from the defence of Europe and on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons throughout Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Merz’s Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) party won Sunday’s parliamentary elections and he is expected to form a grand coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) which led the outgoing government but did poorly in the elections.

Europe has been rattled by hostile remarks by US Vice-President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference on 14 February and by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in Germany and Brussels, and threats that Europe could no longer count on US military support if attacked. The shock has been amplified by Trump blaming Ukraine for the war with Russia and opening direct negotiations with Putin without consulting Ukraine or Europe.

“We must brace ourselves for the fact that Donald Trump will no longer unconditionally honour Nato’s mutual defence commitment,” Merz told the German broadcaster ZDF on Friday.

Europe must “now make every effort to at least be able to defend the European continent on its own”, he continued.

He said Germany would need to talk to Europe’s two nuclear powers, France and the UK, about extending their deterrence umbrella to cover Germany.

‘Escalation risk’

Stelzenmüller, who is German, said the French and British nuclear deterrent would not be enough to replace the US deterrent so the French and the British deterrent would have to be expanded “and Germany would have to somehow join in that”.

“I cannot overemphasise what kind of a sea change that is in the politics of my country,” she said.

“That used to be an absolute and complete taboo, and we are in fact signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“But I think that what we are seeing here, coming out of this White House, is taking the lid off of many things, including of proliferation worldwide. And I do not need to describe to anyone, the escalation risk inherent in that.

“We have similar debates in Asia, namely in Japan and in South Korea,” she said, adding that an Eastern European had also recently told her that at Nato, “we’re going to have to get nuclear weapons too. That’s not a good thing….

“Not only do I think that that is ill-advised, but it is of course a response to the fact that Russia has successfully employed the threat of nuclear weapons use in its invasion of Ukraine, and that that has served as a significant deterrent against escalation by both the Biden White House and the [Olaf] Scholz Chancellery.”

She added that discussing a European nuclear deterrent was in many ways a distraction from the much more urgent issue — the need for Europe to remedy its conventional deterrent deficiencies by dramatically increasing its defence industrial production and defence spending.

She said the need for Europe to develop a “deterrent of whatever kind” independent of the US would probably be addressed urgently at the upcoming Nato summit in The Hague and at several EU summits starting in early March.

Stelzenmüller said though it was true that Europe had not risen to the challenge over the last 10 years of making itself more independent in security, it had been “profoundly shocked” by the remarks of Trump’s officials and was now working round the clock to beef up support for Ukraine.

She said it seemed that Merz would be able to form a coalition government with just one coalition partner, the SPD, and that he “wouldn’t have any compunction in supporting Ukraine. I think he intends to be a strong player in Europe.”

She expressed concern about the rise of the extreme-right AfD party, which doubled its seats in Parliament.

Merz would try to reach out to Europe and Nato, but would be constrained by an opposition led by the AfD. “Ultimately, I think he may end up being a transitional figure in what is going to be an even, an ever more fragmenting German political landscape”.

EU faces new reality

Fiona Hill, a senior fellow on foreign policy at the Brookings Center on the United States and Europe, also attended the Munich Security Conference and said she never thought she would hear Europeans and Britons “talk about the United States as an adversary, and that was exactly what started to happen after the vice-president’s speech, because suddenly it was as if a switch had been flipped.

“I was also standing next to a prominent member of the German Green Party, whose family were refugees from the Soviet Union; he said he was sick to his stomach, he never expected that the beacon, the land of freedom and opportunity that everybody had looked towards, from the Cold War onwards, was suddenly basically lecturing Europeans about free speech, and also openly siding with  an extreme right-wing party.”

She said Europeans knew that they partly had themselves to blame for this predicament, for wasting not only the last several years after the invasion of Ukraine, but the last decade-plus since the 2014 Nato Wales summit where US President Barack Obama had exhorted them to do more about their defence and to spend at least the Nato target of 2% of GDP on defence.

Now the realisation had set in that they were at least 10 years behind in being serious about their defence.

“So that was also that moment where it became obvious that basically farming out your security to the US was no longer an option.”

Hill added that many had hoped the decisive shift in the war in Ukraine would come from changes in Russia. However, Putin had remained rock solid for 25 years and the decisive shift in the external environment had come from the US.

“In Moscow, the feeling is the United States has converged with Russia and with Russian views. And that’s what shifted the entire dynamic.

“And so the US has changed. And Europe has realised that if it wants to be serious about its own security and also about long-term settlement for Ukraine, which is essential to European security, then they need to change as well.

“The writing is very much on the wall for everybody that Ukraine’s future is also the future of European security.” DM