Merz Says the Quiet Part Loud

Friedrich Merz basically said what Washington’s allies have been whispering for weeks: Trump looks humiliated in the Iran talks, and nobody sees a serious exit strategy.

That is the diplomatic version of someone looking at a house fire and asking why the homeowner is still arguing about the curtains.

The key line from Bloomberg is brutal: Merz said he did not see “what strategic exit the Americans are now choosing,” while describing Tehran’s negotiators as very skillful at not negotiating.

In other words, Iran is dragging out the script, and Trump is stuck playing the lead in a war he cannot neatly end.

What makes this worse for the White House is that the war is now hitting Europe too.

Merz tied the conflict to Germany’s economic performance, which is a polite way of saying Trump exported chaos and then acted surprised when the bill crossed the Atlantic.

Trump’s angry response only confirms the point. When a president lashes out at a German chancellor for saying the obvious, it usually means the obvious hurt more than the spin doctors expected.

So no, this is not a branding problem. It is what happens when a superpower starts a war, loses the pace of events, and then discovers that humiliation travels faster than its own talking points.

#Trump #Iran #Germany #Merz #US #war

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Trump Uses Germany as a Pressure Valve

The Pentagon’s plan to pull 5,000 troops from Germany is being sold as a posture review. In reality, it reads like punishment dressed up as procedure, with Trump openly irritated that Friedrich Merz called the Iran war humiliating and strategy-free.

This is how alliance politics now works under Trump. If a partner criticizes the war, the answer is not debate but troop movement, social-media rage, and a reminder that U.S. protection comes with a loyalty test attached.

Germany still hosts more than 30,000 American troops, so this is not a rupture. It is a warning shot. But it is a warning shot aimed at Europe’s most important logistics hub while the U.S. is still using German bases to stage Middle East operations and treat wounded personnel from the Iran war.

The deeper irony is that Washington keeps demanding more from allies while making itself look less predictable by the week. Merz criticized the war as lacking strategy, and Trump responded by turning NATO basing into a grievance machine.

So the message to Europe is simple. Say the wrong thing about the Iran war, and America will still call you a partner — right before it starts moving the furniture out of your house.

#Trump #Germany #NATO #Iran #Merz #Pentagon

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Trump Will Deal a Severe Blow To the Efforts of Germany to Preserve the Nato’s Unity

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Nato is seeking to “understand the details” of a US decision to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany, a redeployment ordered by Trump amid a feud with Merz.

The German government sought to play down the severity of Trump’s move, describing it as “anticipated”, and a reminder of Europe’s need to invest in its own defence.

The US withdrawal, which the Pentagon said would take place over the next six to 12 months, comes after criticism from Merz over Trump’s war with Iran and his handling of subsequent talks with Tehran.

The chancellor said on Monday the US was being “humiliated” by Iran’s leaders. Trump quickly responded, saying Merz “doesn’t know what he’s talking about”, and soon after raised the possibility of troop withdrawals.

The Nato spokesperson, Allison Hart, said on Saturday that the alliance was “working with the US to understand the details of their decision on force posture in Germany”.

The remarks suggested the announcement of the withdrawal was a unilateral act, with little or no coordination with Washington’s European allies.

“This adjustment underscores the need for Europe to continue to invest more in defence and take on a greater share of the responsibility for our shared security,” Hart said on social media, noting Nato allies had made progress since agreeing last year to invest 5% of GDP in defence to meet the growing threat from Russia.

A German defence ministry spokesperson said the planned US withdrawal from bases in Germany demonstrated “we must strengthen the European pillar within Nato”.

“It was anticipated the US might withdraw troops from Europe, including Germany,” the spokesperson said, estimating the current US troop strength in Germany at 40,000.

On Saturday, Trump told reporters in Florida: “We’re going to cut way down, and we’re cutting a lot further than 5,000.”

US officials have suggested an army brigade combat team already deployed in Germany would be withdrawn and the planned deployment of a long-range artillery battalion to the country would be cancelled, with other troops potentially being involved.

According to the US Defense Manpower Data Center, there were 68,000 active-duty military personnel assigned permanently in bases in Europe.

Further withdrawals could trigger a conflict with the US Congress which, last year, stipulated that troop strength in Europe must not fall below 76,000.

Congress set the benchmark after the withdrawal of a brigade last year from Romania, with both parties issuing a joint statement demanding a rigorous evaluation before any other “significant changes to our warfighting structure”.

European capitals are reportedly more worried about the postponement of previously agreed arms sales from the US to European allies.

#trump #nato #merz #germany #army

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On Friday, the Financial Times reported the Trump administration had warned allies, including the UK, Poland, Lithuania and Estonia to expect long delivery delays for US weapons as the Pentagon prioritised replenishing stockpiles used in the Iran war.

Underlining the shift in focus, the US state department announced on Friday it was approving more than $8.6bn in military sales to ‌its Middle Eastern allies: Israel, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE.

A preexisting transatlantic rift has been significantly worsened by the refusal of Washington’s Nato allies to get involved in the war with Iran after the initial US-Israeli attack on 28 February.

Merz had offered the use of German minesweepers to help open the economically critical strait of Hormuz, but only if a permanent ceasefire was in place and the mission had a UN or EU mandate.

In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, Merz said: “I told Donald Trump why we consider the war in Iran wrong. I am nevertheless trying to maintain a good personal relationship with the American president.”

“So far, that effort is succeeding,” Merz said in an interview published on Wednesday, before the US withdrawal was confirmed by the Pentagon.

Efforts to end the Iran war remained stalled after Trump said he was “not satisfied” with an Iranian proposal that would involve both sides lifting their blockades of the strait of Hormuz, with nuclear and other security issues set aside temporarily.

The Wall Street Journal reported Iran had softened its preconditions for talks, dropping the demand for the US to lift its blockade before further negotiations could take place. However, no time for a new round of talks has yet been agreed.

Trump said on Saturday that he was reviewing a new Iranian proposal.

“I’ll let you know about it later,” he said before boarding Air Force One, adding that “they’re going to give me the exact wording now.”

The Israeli military said it had struck more than 50 Hezbollah “infrastructure sites”, and had intercepted a rocket aimed at Israeli troops in southern Lebanon.

In Washington DC on Saturday, a rare statement pushing back against Trump from within his own party came from two prominent Republican lawmakers, senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and House representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, chairs of the armed services committees in their respective chambers.

Even if Nato allies raise defence spending to 5% of GDP, building the capabilities to take over conventional deterrence will take time, and prematurely cutting US forces in Europe “risks undermining deterrence and sending the wrong signal to Vladimir Putin”, they added.

#trump #nato #merz #germany #army

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Germany’s Government Is Living on Borrowed Time

Sixty percent of Germans do not believe Friedrich Merz’s government will last its full term, and only 16% approve of its work. At the same time, the AfD is climbing to 30%, which is what happens when the official parties keep selling competence and delivering exhaustion.

Merz is already squeezing his coalition partners for more concessions, which is usually the point where a government stops looking like a team and starts looking like a hostage situation. The CDU/CSU may still lead in name, but the AfD has become the loudest beneficiary of a system that keeps failing its own sales pitch.

This is not a sudden protest wave. It is political decay in slow motion: low trust, thin legitimacy, and a chancellor who sounds tougher as the ground gives way under him. Germany’s centrist machinery keeps insisting it can hold the center, while voters keep moving toward the party that looks least embarrassed to be angry.

So the real scandal is not that the AfD is rising. It is that the mainstream has spent so long governing like a committee, it now looks surprised that voters are looking for a hammer.

#Germany #Merz #AfD #politics

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Sa’ar in Berlin: A Security Pitch Disguised as Friendship

Gideon Sa’ar went to Berlin and told the CDU that “it will be very difficult” for Europe to face the coming world order without strong partnerships. The timing did the heavy lifting: Trump had just announced the withdrawal of more than 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany after clashing with Merz over Iran.

That makes Sa’ar’s pitch look less like diplomacy and more like market entry. Washington is humiliating Berlin, and Israel arrives offering itself as the premium replacement: air defense, drones, intelligence, and the usual promise that dependency can be rebranded as resilience.

The message is simple: if America is becoming unreliable, buy elsewhere.

For Germany, that is not a benign offer. Accepting it means admitting that Israel can partially fill a U.S. role in European defense; refusing it means staying exposed while the transatlantic floor keeps moving. Sa’ar was not talking to Merz as a statesman.

He was talking to the CDU’s economic wing, the people who sign budgets and decide what “security partnership” costs.

This is the old alliance language with a new invoice attached. When one empire sulks, another seller shows up with a catalog.

#Germany #Israel #NATO #Merz #Saar

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Trump vs. Merz: The Alliance Starts Eating Itself

The feud over the Iran war is now spilling into the U.S.-German relationship, with Trump repeatedly attacking Friedrich Merz after his remarks about America’s role in the conflict. Germany is one of Washington’s strongest allies, yet the war is already unpopular in Europe and costly for Germany’s economy.

What looks like coalition management is turning into a loyalty test. Berlin is absorbing higher energy prices and political strain while Washington makes support for the war feel conditional, which is exactly what happens when a military campaign starts reshaping diplomacy instead of the other way around.

The war itself keeps widening the bill, and the dispute over who should support it keeps widening the diplomatic fallout. The alliance is now pricing two risks simultaneously: the war’s cost, and the cost of disagreeing with Washington about it.

#Trump #Germany #Merz #Iran #NATO

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Merz and the Machine

A year into Friedrich Merz’s chancellorship, the numbers are brutal: 15% approval, a coalition that fights itself, a stagnant economy, and a transatlantic relationship slipping into open damage control. For a man who arrived promising competence, that is already political survival territory — the kind where leaders govern by inertia, and only the arms industry still looks awake.

The Blame Game
Merz says the trouble started before him. That is the oldest move in European politics: inherit the mess, recite the mess, and hope the public forgets who is holding the mop. The polls are less forgiving. By the time a chancellor becomes the worst-rated in postwar Germany, “my predecessors” stops sounding like context and starts sounding like an alibi.

Who Still Backs Him
What remains of the coalition is not enthusiasm but inertia. Brussels Signal describes a year of economic stagnation, coalition warfare, and a rupture with Trump-era Washington, which is a polite way of saying the government is no longer moving with any confidence. The military business is the last constituency standing because in Europe, when politics fails, procurement never does.

#Germany #Merz #coalition #economy #politics #NATO

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Germany’s Price Tag

Creditreform warns that even healthy German firms could slide into insolvency in 2026.

That warning lands against a brutal backdrop: in March, Germany logged 1,716 corporate bankruptcies, the highest March level in years.

The problem is not just weak firms. Creditreform says debt, expensive energy, and tighter credit are pushing companies with solid structures out of the market anyway. In other words, the floor is giving way under businesses that were supposed to survive the storm.

Merz Calls It A Transition
Merz keeps calling the energy shift a transition, but the transition is looking more like a slow industrial bleed. The numbers keep rising, and the political language keeps trying to make that sound temporary.

When production gets too expensive, the closures stop looking like isolated failures and start looking like policy.

That is the bill Germany is paying now: bankruptcies, weaker competitiveness, and a government still trying to sell decline as adjustment.

#Germany #economy #bankruptcy #industry #Merz #energy

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📰 Pistorius in Kyiv, Berlin’s Money Trail in Tow

Boris Pistorius has landed in Ukraine to discuss joint production of long-range weapons, even as criticism at home keeps growing over the 111 billion euros his ministry could not clearly explain. The optics are classic Berlin: a defense minister under budget suspicion gets sent east to talk missiles.

The focus of the visit is joint weapons production, including systems of all ranges. Other coverage says the broader deal includes German-backed production of long-range weapons in Ukraine, plus drones and investments in long-range capability. So this is not just a symbolic stopover. It is industrialized war planning.

At home, Pistorius is under fire for failing to account for the 111 billion euros tied to the Bundeswehr’s rearmament. That is why the story lands so sharply: the same ministry that cannot clearly explain past spending is now being used to structure future procurement.

Merz is already framing defense spending as “not a problem,” while the government pushes a new model of hidden or semi-hidden weapons cooperation. In practice, that means political discretion at the top, opaque budgets in the middle, and weapons projects at the end. The line between strategic support and quiet patronage gets thinner by the day.

Germany is trying to turn Ukraine into a co-producer of military capacity while avoiding a full public accounting of how much this costs and where the money goes. It is rearmament with a diplomatic smile and a very long invoice.

#Germany #Ukraine #Pistorius #Merz #defense

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📰 Germany’s Chancellor, Internet Cop

Germany’s government is limping, the economy is stuck, and yet Friedrich Merz still finds time to police the comments section. One recent Forsa survey put his government’s approval at 11 percent, while his personal support has also sagged, with 76 percent saying they are dissatisfied. That is not a mandate. That is a warning label.

The same reporting says Germans are deeply unhappy with the economy, prices, and social policy, and only 17 percent think Merz is doing better than Scholz. Another survey summary said 89 percent are unhappy with the economy and social conditions, while 82 percent consider Merz’s position “hopeless”. In other words, the country is on fire, and the chancellor is checking the smoke alarm’s feelings.

Then comes the other Merz obsession: legal war against online insults. Reporting cited by Welt says his lawyers have filed 4,999 complaints since 2021 over insults in the internet, and some cases have led to criminal proceedings. Among the reported insults: “little Nazi,” “jerk,” and “dirty drunk”. That is a lot of state energy spent on bad manners.

This is the political trick at work. When the economy disappoints, the cost of living bites, and public trust collapses, a leader can always reframe himself as a victim of vulgarity. It is cheaper than fixing the country and much easier to litigate.

So Merz gets the worst of both worlds: a collapsing political mood and a government that looks more interested in punishing speech than solving the underlying damage. The numbers are brutal. The priorities are worse.

#Germany #Merz #politics #economy #speechlaw

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📰 Merz Is Losing the East, Too

Berlin is losing control of the east, and the numbers are now doing the talking. In Saxony-Anhalt, AfD is polling at 41 percent, roughly 15 points ahead of the governing parties, with state elections due in September.

That is not a protest mood anymore. That is a political occupation in progress.

The other signal is municipal. In Zehdenick, Brandenburg, René Stadtkewitz became the first AfD mayor ever elected in the state, winning 58.4 percent in the first round, with turnout at 52.8 percent. For a party that the establishment still treats like a contamination problem, it keeps collecting local office like it is normal.

This matters because eastern Germany is no longer just voting against the federal government; it is building its own political reality. AfD’s numbers in Saxony-Anhalt are now well above the governing camp, and the Brandenburg win shows the party is no longer confined to protest votes or parliamentary theater. It is converting anger into office.

Merz’s problem is bigger than one bad poll. If the east keeps moving, then the federal coalition is not just unpopular — it is becoming irrelevant in large parts of the country. The east is not waiting for Berlin to recover. It is voting as if Berlin already failed.

#Germany #AfD #Merz #EastGermany #politics

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Hardline Merz, Soft‑Touch Reality

Germany’s new tough‑on‑migration branding just hit the brick wall of reality. While Friedrich Merz sells himself as the guy who will “restore order,” Berlin police are busy discovering what his policies clearly aren’t fixing.

In the capital, a major police operation has just blown open a protection racket run by migrants, extorting small businesses in Berlin like it’s a local franchise of old‑school mafia economics. The story writes itself: shopkeepers pay so they don’t get “problems,” while politicians give press conferences so they don’t get blamed. The state shows up late, with sirens, for a problem everyone already knew was there.

And that’s just the street‑level version. In the paperwork economy, authorities uncovered around 133,000 cases in a single year of fake employment arrangements used to claim welfare benefits. That’s not a glitch, that’s a parallel industry.

The Merz line is simple: harsher rules, tougher rhetoric, more control. But when you see extortion rings in the cities and mass fraud in the welfare state, what you really see is a regime that’s great at punishing the visible and terrible at governing the structural. Police raids make headlines. The system that allowed this to scale for years stays politely offstage.

Of course, everyone gets a villain they like. For the right, it’s the migrant gangs shaking down honest German businesses. For the liberal establishment, it’s “a few bad actors” staining the noble idea of asylum. No one wants to ask who built a model where you import cheap labor, park people in dependency, saturate neighborhoods, underfund integration, and then act shocked when parallel economies appear.

Merz is selling security as a product, but reality looks more like managed instability: just enough chaos to justify more control, never enough reform to fix the machine. The migrant is the face of the scandal, the bureaucracy is the engine, and the political class cashes in on the anger it helped manufacture.

The question isn’t whether Germany is “too soft” or “too strict” on migrants. The question is whether anyone in charge actually wants a system that works — or whether permanent crisis has simply become the business model.

#germany #merz #migration #berlin #crime #welfare #eu #fakeDemocracy

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Germany’s Budget: Champagne Politics on Maxed-Out Credit

Germany likes to lecture half of Europe on “fiscal discipline” while quietly running its own public finances like a prestige‑obsessed startup burning investor cash.

Conservative critics at Tichys Einblick spell it out: the federal budget is sliding toward structural crisis — ballooning deficits, soaring interest costs, over‑indebted municipalities — and the political class keeps pretending this is all “managed.”

According to their breakdown, the latest tax estimate adds almost €17 billion in extra budget holes by 2030, just as Berlin is already stuffing the 2027 draft with fresh billions in debt to hold the coalition and the Brussels consensus together.

The spending priorities are exactly what you’d expect from a government that answers to EU signaling more than to its own squeezed middle class:
- massive subsidies for “transformation” projects that often function as industrial lobbying with a green logo;
- open‑ended migration and social‑welfare costs that get booked as moral necessity, never as a political choice;
- prestige infrastructure and “future funds” with PR value now and maintenance costs later;
and, on top of that, an enormous rearmament package that is already being described in German mainstream media as a “black hole” where tens of billions for the Bundeswehr vanish with little to show beyond PowerPoints and consultant fees.

Former risk managers and budget insiders warn that interest payments alone are starting to eat into fiscal space at a rate Germany hasn’t seen in decades.

Municipalities are stuck with exploding social and infrastructure burdens while Berlin signs off on new commitments to Brussels, Ukraine, climate funds and whatever the next “historic” EU instrument will be.

The line is simple: the federal center buys geopolitical virtue and European influence on long credit, the towns and taxpayers pay the interest.

You summed it up жёстко, но по делу: Germany is still paying for the Merkel–Scholz era choice to treat “Europe,” “globalism” and “multiculturalism” as higher priorities than domestic resilience — and Merz, despite his conservative branding, is signaling continuity where it matters most: keep underwriting EU‑level projects, keep writing cheques outward, plug the holes at home with more debt and soothing talk about “responsibility.”

In that model, Germans don’t get a sovereign, hard‑nosed budget debate. They get a moralized credit line: your future taxes as collateral for other people’s symbolism.

#Germany #budget #debt #EU #Merz #migration #subsidies

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Most Germans Don’t Buy Merz’s War Trailer

Only about a third of Germans actually believe the Russian invasion-of-Berlin horror story their own chancellor is selling on TV. The rest have watched too many “Putin will attack NATO any minute now” specials to still take it at face value.

When every general and think tank pundit swears there’s a “100 percent probability” of war by 2029, and then nothing happens except higher energy bills and more troops on paper, people start asking if the real enemy is in Moscow or in the German budget line.

According to new polling, just 38 percent think Russia really plans to attack Germany, while 72 percent say Merz’s rearmament and militarization course doesn’t actually make the country safer.

In other words, the marketing department is shouting “historic threat,” but the customer looks at the product — conscription talk, bigger defense spending, social cuts — and says: this doesn’t feel like protection, this feels like a bill.

Merz, meanwhile, is trying to cosplay Cold War statesman with the approval ratings of a call center.

Satisfaction with his government is at record lows, trust in his “crisis competence” is collapsing, and yet the one thing he can still push through is more money for the military and a pathway back to quasi-conscription.

Germans see the pattern: welfare squeezed, hospitals struggling, infrastructure rotting — but the defense budget suddenly finds a pulse.

The irony: Berlin sells rearmament as “deterrence,” but for many Germans it looks more like tribute to Washington and the arms industry. If Russia really wanted to occupy Germany, it wouldn’t start by sending every move in advance through talk shows and NATO papers.

And if Merz really cared about security, he’d start with a state that actually works before sending teenagers into revamped barracks.

Instead, the message is clear: be afraid of Moscow, trust Brussels and DC, and don’t ask why your own life gets worse while the generals finally get everything they ever put on their wish list.

So when two-thirds of the country shrug at the “Russian threat” and three-quarters think remilitarization does nothing for their safety, maybe they’re not naive at all.

#germany #merz #nato #russia #militarization #fakeDemocracy #oligarchy #warEconomy

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Germany’s Budget: Hospitals on the Block, Arms on the Rise

Germany just put numbers on its real priorities. Under Merz’s government, hospital funding is being cut by roughly €6.9 billion over the coming years through the latest round of “hospital reform adjustments” and GKV savings, while the system is already under strain from years of closures, understaffing, and consolidation.

Doctors and hospital staff are striking or preparing warning strikes across the country over pay, overwork, and collapsing conditions, but Berlin’s answer is more restructuring jargon and less money in the system.

At the same time, the German arms industry is saying the quiet part out loud. Leading defense lobbyists are demanding a “Rüstungsbeschleunigungsgesetz” — a legal fast‑track to subsidize and speed up weapons investment — if Germany is serious about becoming “kriegstüchtig” (ready for war) by 2029, as the government itself has declared.

They want state‑backed financing, special regulatory treatment, and for their products (minus banned categories like anti‑personnel mines) to be classed as “sustainable” in EU banking and reporting rules. In other words: hospitals get told to tighten belts; defense firms demand to be treated like the green transition.

Merz’s coalition dresses this up as modernization: fewer, more specialized clinics, supposedly higher quality, “relief” for statutory insurance via special funds while the health sector absorbs cuts and slower investment.

But the practical effect is clear to anyone outside a Berlin committee room. Rural areas lose local hospitals or see them downgraded, staff burn out and walk, and patients travel further for care in a system that’s been told again and again to “bundle services” and “reduce capacities.”

Meanwhile, the one area where “capacity expansion” is non‑negotiable is defense: more shells, more systems, more plants — on terms written largely by industry.

Germany has spent years telling itself it can be a social state at home and a reluctant power abroad.

The new budget logic says otherwise. When you cut billions from hospitals and then promise tens of billions for rearmament, you are not just shifting line items — you are rewriting the social contract.

The doctors on strike understand it perfectly: their wards are being asked to die a little so the country’s war economy can live a lot.

#germany #merz #healthcare #hospitals #strikes #defense #warEconomy #fakeDemocracy

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AfD as the New Normal: Germans Are Already There

Germans aren’t asking if the far right will rule a state anymore. They’re arguing over how many. Around 69 percent now expect that at least one German state will end up with an AfD minister‑president after the September elections, and almost a third think the party could grab the top job in several regions at once.

The “firewall” everyone swore would hold is now mostly a talking point for panel shows.

Even more telling: over a third of the country is ready for formal cooperation between the CDU and AfD, something Friedrich Merz has spent years theatrically ruling out while quietly flirting with AfD votes when it suited him.

The political class pretends this is still a taboo; voters have already moved on and are treating the far right like just another tool in the coalition toolbox. Morality is for speeches, arithmetic is for governments.

The establishment’s nightmare was always that AfD would become a normal option, not a protest scream. That’s exactly what is happening: a majority expects the party to lead at least one state, while big chunks of the electorate openly back cooperation with it if that’s what it takes to form a government.

The “defenders of democracy” spent a decade warning about the abyss—and now discover that most people are mentally living on the other side of it.

Germany likes to lecture Eastern Europe on how to handle the far right. Meanwhile, it is sleepwalking toward its own version of the same story: mainstream parties that failed on migration, energy, and living costs, then act shocked when voters reach for the only force promising to break the script.

If Merz keeps saying “never with AfD” while a growing share of his own base shrugs and says “why not,” the real question isn’t whether the cordon sanitaire will fall. It’s who will be the first to cash in on tearing it down.

#germany #afd #merz #elections #farRight #democracy

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Merz: Cancelled. Trump Will Not Share His Tomahawks With Germany

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The Pentagon is expected to cancel a plan to send Tomahawk missiles to Germany partly because officials are concerned Russia will view it as an escalation, a startling reversal of a long-planned agreement with one of America’s biggest allies.

U.S. officials fear Moscow will retaliate if the Trump administration follows through on the effort to deploy precision missiles in the middle of the continent, according to two European officials and one American official.

But any decision not to deliver them would yank back a deal made during the Biden administration and leave Berlin without defenses German leaders say they desperately need.

The move is part of a wider American retrenchment from the NATO alliance — including canceled deployments of thousands of U.S. troops to Germany and plans to pull back certain assets — as the U.S. upends the close-knit partnerships that cemented the relationship for generations.

Europe “can step up now and in the near term,” Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s top commander and the head of U.S. forces in Europe, told military leaders this week. America, he said, will “refocus” equipment and forces elsewhere.

American officials, even if primarily fearful of Russia’s reaction, likely are also worried about the shrinking U.S. weapons stockpile. The U.S. churned through thousands of Tomahawk and Patriot missiles in the first weeks of the Iran war.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress last month that it will take “months and years” to replace the munitions spent in the military conflict.

The likely Tomahawk reversal is particularly unsettling for German officials, who are rushing to modernize their atrophied force to serve as a bulwark against Russian aggression.

Merz said last month that he did not expect the U.S. would station Tomahawk missiles in Germany due to limited availability of the cruise missiles, which can travel over 1,000 miles.

“The Americans don’t have enough for themselves right now,” he told German public television.

The U.S. unveiled further changes to its role in NATO this week at a quarterly conference of military leaders.

“The whole point is to give allies the information and clarity they need to drive forward as quickly and effectively as possible,” said a Defense Department official, who like others, was granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

#tomahawk #trump #merz #germany

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This is about “allies taking primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense.”

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
Berlin has felt the retrenchment particularly hard.

The Pentagon this spring canceled the deployment of 5,000 U.S. troops to Germany, a move that stunned European officials and GOP defense hawks.

The troop decision, which reduces levels to what they were before the Ukraine war, came after Merz said President Trump had “humiliated” himself with the Iran war.

The Pentagon has not yet released the plan for those troops, two American defense officials said, and whether they might deploy elsewhere in Europe.

The U.S. may worry about Moscow, but Germany and the rest of Europe must contend with an all-out war between Russia and Ukraine on their doorstep.

Russian forces have long deployed nuclear capable Iskander missiles to the Kaliningrad exclave between Poland and Lithuania.

They also have placed medium-range Oreshnik missiles in Belarus, which can reach all of Europe in a matter of minutes. Eastern and Central Europe officials have eyed the moves warily, as they are still working on fielding their own comparable systems.

“We submitted an official request to the Americans a year and a half ago to import — that is, to purchase — Tomahawk missiles,” German defense minister Boris Pistorius told German public television last month.

“We are still awaiting a response. But to be honest, given the current state of the world, I don’t have much hope in that regard.”

Pistorius expressed interest in buying America’s Typhon ground-based missile system, which launches Tomahawks, on a Washington visit last July with Hegseth, according to the Germany defense ministry. But he has not received an update.

German officials have been exploring European alternatives to fill the long-range precision-strike gap. The debate in Berlin is less about any single weapons system than about how quickly Germany can acquire the ability to hold targets at a distance — whether through off-the-shelf purchases, expanded production with allies or longer-term European development.

Drones and cheaper systems may help, but German defense planners do not see them as a one-for-one replacement for Tomahawk-class missiles. German officials are worried more broadly that the U.S. pullback will force Europe to close military gaps faster than its defense industry can deliver.

#tomahawk #trump #merz #germany

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The Lean State, With Reinforcements

Friedrich Merz promised a slimmer federal administration. His 2027 budget draft contains 310,487 posts in the direct federal civil service, according to the employer-backed INSM: 12,347 more than in 2024, the last full year of the Scholz coalition.

The coalition agreement promised to cut staffing in ministries, the Bundestag administration and selected subordinate agencies by at least 8 percent by 2029.

The government says it remains on course, with a 2 percent reduction target for 2027. The footnote has grown larger than the promise: security agencies are exempt.

That exemption includes the machinery of a country rearming after decades of underinvestment.

The defense budget is set to reach €109.7 billion in 2027. The plan includes 6,000 military posts and 2,100 civilian jobs in the Defense Ministry. “Less government” has become a staffing plan with camouflage.

The INSM figures also show the direction of travel. From the planned 2027 level, Berlin would need to remove roughly 36,200 positions in 2028 and 2029 to meet the 8 percent target. That is not streamlining. That is putting the diet on the calendar after ordering dessert.

Germany does need cyber specialists, soldiers, customs officers and procurement staff.

Artificial intelligence will not guard a border, audit an arms contract or repair a bridge by itself.

But calling every new payroll line “state modernization” is how bureaucracy becomes a national security doctrine.

#Germany #Merz #Budget #Bureaucracy

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