Can Europe confront Vladimir Putin’s Russia on its own?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. WITHIN HOURS of his party winning national elections, Friedrich Merz, Germany’s presumptive next leader, offered a bombshell on national television. Donald Trump “does not care much about the fate of Europe," he told Germans, and the priority was to “step by step…achieve independence from the USA".
This was not some distant objective. He was unsure, he said, whether NATO would still exist “in its current form" in June, when leaders are due to meet in the Netherlands, “or whether we will have to establish an independent European defence capability much more quickly". If anyone thought Mr Merz was being alarmist they were swiftly disabused.
On February 24th America sided with Russia and North Korea in voting against a UN resolution proposed by its European allies that blamed Russia for invading Ukraine. It then pushed through its own resolution in the Security Council with the support of Russia and China that called for a “swift end" to the war, but without repeating previous calls of support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Mr Merz is not the only staunch transatlanticist flirting with radical ideas over the future of NATO in the face of Donald Trump’s assault on the alliance that kept the peace in Europe for nearly eight decades.
“The security architecture that Europe has relied on for generations is gone and is not coming back," writes Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary-general of NATO, in an essay for The Economist. “Europe must come to terms with the fact that we are not only existentially vulnerable, but also seemingly alone." In truth, it could take a decade before Europe is able to defend itself without America’s help. To understand Europe’s challenge, start with the
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