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”.