The recent NATO Summit in the Hague saw many successes. President Trump convinced the alliance to raise its overall defense spending to five percent by 2035, an amount higher than that at the height of the Cold War.
One of the most noteworthy political performances came from Germany’s right-of-center chancellor, Friederich Merz. After a rocky start failing to win the first round of his parliamentary confirmation vote, Merz has hit the ground running and built significant momentum both at home and internationally. He is on the short list of leaders who successfully navigated a White House visit back in June, and that good luck seemed to hold through the Hague Summit.
Merz has transitioned away from his campaign promises of keeping the budget sound, regardless of the implications for the defense budget. Now he is willing to change the Constitution to raise German defense spending from 10 billion Euros to 60 billion Euros. In today’s terms, 5 percent is 250 billion dollars, an amount to make even the most jaded of Pentagon planners take notice.
More interesting is the statement by Merz and his Defense Minister, Boris Pistorius, that Germany intended to have the strongest conventional army in Europe by 2031. This means increasing troop strength as well as purchasing and activating aircraft, tanks, and drones, including buying from the U.S.
Why does it matter so much what the German leader does or does not do? Germany is the largest population center and the biggest economy in Europe. It is the dominant member of the European Union, and is potentially the single voice for Europe that Donald Trump wants to be able to call to get things done. In addition to all of these things, Germany has, within the memories of some still living, a history of militarist expansion, culminating in the horrors of the second World War. Both internally and amongst its neighbors, German rearmament is a subject of intense debate, and the German people had come to see rearmament as a threat to their democracy.
Germany stayed politically pacifist during the Cold War, even while providing a large army to NATO for defense against the Soviet Union. Since 1991, Germany’s military has almost disappeared, even as its economy expanded. Germans came to see defense spending as unnecessary and expensive, an impediment to growth. This situation lasted through the chancellorship of Angela Merkel and only began to end with Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
That invasion prompted the then-chancellor Olaf Scholz to pledge 100 billion Euros for rearmament in a “turning point” for German policy. Small beans compared to the U.S. Defense budget and as a percentage of the German economy, but a start for a country that had been trained not to trust itself as a military power for almost eight decades.
However, changing a mentality, especially one that is tied to economics, is not easy. Little of this money was spent by the time of the economic crisis, which ended the Scholz government in November 2024 and forced the elections that brought Merz to power in February 2025.
President Trump has pulled back from some of his harsher anti-NATO rhetoric amidst rising evidence both that Russia’s Vladimir Putin has no wish for peace, and that the People’s Republic of China has a vested interest in Russia not losing its war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, the U.S. wants Europe to take the lead on defending itself. This was a major friction point between Trump and the Merkel administration, but has become a point of significant agreement between Trump and Merz.
Taking on a greater part of the defense burden is not cheap, but it must be done. Those who would lead and gain the benefits of leading must, in the end, show their leadership, rather than talk about it. Merz seems to get this and to understand that, rather than being a threat to democracy, sometimes strong armed forces are necessary both to secure and defend it.
Dr. John Callahan is a professor at the Institute of World Politics and New England College.
Image: Michael Lucan, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.