Why Germany's Military Buildup Is Raising Alarms Across Europe
For three decades after reunification, Germany spent well below NATO's 2% GDP defense benchmark — hovering around 1.2% as recently as 2021, making it one of the alliance's most consistent underperformers. That era is ending fast. The debate in European capitals has moved beyond whether Germany should build up its military. The question now shaping discussions from Warsaw to Paris is whether the manner of that buildup will reinforce European security or fracture it.
When Chancellor Friedrich Merz traveled to Washington for a high-stakes meeting with Donald Trump, he signaled unambiguously that Germany was done apologizing for decades of military underinvestment. The trip carried symbolic weight. That a German chancellor felt compelled to seek an audience with an American president who has repeatedly questioned NATO's value speaks to the new anxiety gripping Berlin. Few serious observers dispute that the strategic environment has changed. What allies dispute — in Brussels, Warsaw, and Paris — is not the goal of Germany rearmament Europe but the architecture through which it is being pursued.
The Hegemon Warning: What Liana Fix's Essay Revealed
Merz did not travel to Washington without thinking carefully about the historical dimensions of his country's new course. He invited Liana Fix, a Washington-based German researcher little known outside expert circles, to a private dinner — an unusual gesture that revealed how seriously his government is weighing the risks ahead. Fix had published a striking essay in Foreign Affairs warning that Germany risks becoming what she called "Europe's next hegemon," a power whose newly acquired military weight could alarm its neighbors and reopen the continental fractures that decades of German restraint helped seal.
Read next France Is Dragging the Eurozone Toward a Debt CrisisAfter three decades of deliberate military minimalism, that warning might seem overwrought. Berlin spent the post-reunification era cultivating an identity as a "civil power" — a state that addressed international disputes through diplomacy, trade, and multilateral institutions rather than armed force. The Bundeswehr was chronically underfunded and politically neglected. The notion of Germany as a European military hegemon seemed like a concern belonging to a previous century.
Fix's argument is that rapid, nationally driven rearmament can compress that distance with unsettling speed. A Germany spending at the upper range of NATO targets on sovereign military capabilities — outside shared EU frameworks — becomes a force without modern precedent inside the European Union. Merz found her analysis compelling enough to seek her out personally. That reveals something about the tension at the center of German strategic thinking.
The Case for German Rearmament in a Changing Security Environment
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 demolished the foundational assumptions behind Berlin's post-Cold War posture. Germany's armed forces, by its own government's admissions, lacked adequate ammunition stockpiles, sufficient functional combat aircraft, and units capable of sustained high-intensity engagement. Thirty years of treating defense spending as a political afterthought produced exactly the hollowed-out military one would expect.
The strategic rationale for Germany rearmament Europe is, on its own terms, compelling. NATO's 2% of GDP benchmark reflects a sustained analytical effort to define what credible collective defense requires from each alliance member. Germany, as Europe's largest economy, falling consistently below that threshold distorted the entire burden-sharing equation. Poland now exceeds 4% of GDP on defense; Baltic states have consistently outspent Germany relative to their economic weight, absorbing disproportionate risk. A credible Bundeswehr reduces European dependence on U.S. security guarantees that have grown demonstrably less reliable. On that logic, Germany's shift deserves support. The reservations lie not with the destination but with the route.
The Problem With How Germany Is Rearming
Berlin's allies have been explicit about their core concern: the surge in German military spending is happening without adequate coordination with European partners — shunning the cooperative structures that would embed new German power in shared frameworks. That specific complaint sits at the heart of the structural debate now animating European capitals. Analysts at the European Policy Centre and comparable Brussels-based institutions have been amplifying it with increasing urgency.
The structural distinction is fundamental to the Germany rearmament Europe debate. Sovereign national rearmament means Germany builds capabilities and acquires systems through national decisions made largely outside EU frameworks. Jointly governed European defense procurement means pooling requirements, co-developing platforms, and building interoperable systems that strengthen the alliance as a whole. The former produces a powerful Germany. The latter produces a powerful Europe.
Germany's current trajectory leans toward the former. Major procurement decisions — fighter platforms, artillery systems, armored vehicles — have been announced without the consultation that European partnership frameworks require. France, the EU's most consistent champion of integrated defense, finds itself watching Berlin spend its way to military primacy while resisting the institutional architecture that would embed that primacy in collective governance. A Europe that appears stronger on paper but remains fragmented in practice gains less than it spends.
What a Cooperative European Defense Model Would Look Like
PESCO — the EU's Permanent Structured Cooperation framework — and the European Defence Fund exist specifically to address the problem of duplicated, uncoordinated national military investment. Both instruments create mechanisms for pooling capability requirements and jointly funding research and development. Both remain significantly underused, consistently bypassed when national governments face domestic pressure to demonstrate sovereign investment in their own defense industries.
A cooperative model requires Germany to make a different kind of political choice. With Europe's largest economy and genuine political will to spend, Berlin is uniquely positioned to make EU defense frameworks function with real substance — by routing a meaningful share of its expanded budget through joint programs rather than exclusively national procurement. That converts German military ambition into European military capacity. NATO's collaborative structures have already demonstrated this is achievable: shared AWACS aircraft, the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, and common logistics standards prove that sovereign militaries can build genuine collective capability when institutional design and political will align. The EU needs equivalent architecture built for the era now arriving.
Can Europe Trust a Rearmed Germany? The Path Forward
Three decades of deliberate German military restraint bought Europe a certain psychological comfort — a reassurance, never fully tested, that the continent's largest economy had genuinely committed itself to operating through multilateral frameworks rather than unilateral power projection. A rapidly rearming Germany that shuns cooperative spending challenges that reassurance in a concrete, measurable way.
The answer is not to slow Germany rearmament Europe. The strategic case is sound, and the moment for that debate has passed. The answer is to structurally embed it. A Germany whose expanding military capabilities are bound to collective EU governance, built for interoperability with French, Polish, and Baltic forces, and procured through shared frameworks, is categorically different from a Germany that simply writes larger national checks. One strengthens European security as a system; the other risks reproducing the very anxieties that Liana Fix named in Foreign Affairs.
Merz's decision to engage seriously with that analysis, seeking out Fix before his Washington visit, suggests awareness of the historical risk at play. Awareness is not policy. Europe's security requires a stronger Germany — and a Germany that understands its credibility as a partner depends not on the size of its military budget alone, but on the structures through which its growing power is exercised. The path forward runs through Brussels as much as it does through Berlin.
Source: Opinion | The Guardian
