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Europe’s politicians are openly discussing how they could tackle the threat of nuclear attack without American help, in a dramatic sign of the deep crisis engulfing the transatlantic alliance under Donald Trump.
In what would be a huge shift in position, the runaway favorite to be Germany’s next leader said the continent must find new ways to defend itself without the U.S. military underpinning its nuclear protection through NATO.
Friedrich Merz, whom polls suggest is on course to become chancellor after Sunday’s German elections, said his country would need to look beyond the U.S. to Britain and France for nuclear safeguards. Under Trump, he said, America could no longer be relied on.
“We need to have discussions with both the British and the French — the two European nuclear powers — about whether nuclear sharing, or at least nuclear security from the U.K. and France, could also apply to us,” Merz said.
Merz’s comment heralds a major strategic shift for Germany, which has long resisted French plans for closer European military cooperation, especially on nuclear defense. Merz’s Christian Democrats have traditionally fought to protect relations with the U.S. over calls from Paris for more “strategic autonomy” in the EU.
A change of heart in Germany, fully embraced for the first time by a chancellor in Berlin, would be yet another sign of how Trump’s return to the White House a month ago has blown a hole in the relationship with America that has guaranteed European security since 1945.
On Friday, the president and his team showed no sign of backing down on their hostile rhetoric against Europe — and the leaders of Germany and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in particular — after a series of attacks in recent days.
With two days until the German federal elections, U.S. Vice President JD Vance even floated pulling American troops out of Germany in what would be a devastating blow to the continent’s security structures.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron will head to Washington next week in an attempt to talk Trump out of siding with Russia and abandoning American commitments to Europe and Ukraine.
NATO in doubt
On Friday, Merz said Germany would now need to look elsewhere for its defense alliances.
“We must prepare for the possibility that Donald Trump will no longer uphold NATO’s mutual defense commitment unconditionally,” Merz said in an interview with German broadcaster ZDF. “That is why, in my view, it is crucial that Europeans make the greatest possible efforts to ensure that we are at least capable of defending the European continent on our own.”
Germany is among the European countries that host U.S. nuclear weapons under NATO’s nuclear sharing policy, alongside Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium.
Paris offered to start talks on France finding a way to share its nuclear arsenal with Germany as long ago as 2007, but President Nicolas Sarkozy received a hard “no” from Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Subsequent French attempts at atomic diplomacy also failed to gain traction in Berlin.
Macron made a major attempt to promote the idea of a “Europeanized” French nuclear deterrence in 2020 and an Élysée official said Merz’s remarks showed that support was finally growing. “In response to the invitation France sent its partners who want to discuss the significance of the president’s speech in February 2020 and the European dimension of [French] deterrence, we’ve noticed that interest has only increased, in particular since the war in Ukraine,” the official from the presidential office said.
Given the long history of French frustration with Berlin, Merz’s comments were welcomed by politicians, officials and analysts in France, Germany and the U.K. Even some of his political opponents acknowledge privately that talking to the British and French about nuclear protection would be a sensible step.
“That a future chancellor, chief of the [Christian Democrats] should say that is a huge thing, I can’t think of any equivalent in the post-World War II era, but it’s commensurate with the shock that the [American] statements have caused,” said one French official working on military policy, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
“In many ways, what’s happening is a bit positive. For decades, under the guise of transatlanticism, we’ve been losing interest in defense and letting the U.S. decide. It’s also an opportunity for Europe to take matters into its own hands.”
‘Striking’
Jean-Louis Thiériot, a former deputy defense minister in France, now a lawmaker in the National Assembly’s defense committee, said Merz’s intervention was “striking.”
His words show “how seriously he takes the risk of decoupling from the USA, and thus the end of the American nuclear umbrella,” Thiériot said. “That’s a big change from the old days, when we weren’t taken very seriously, especially in terms of volume,” he added, referring to past criticism that France doesn’t have as many nuclear warheads as the U.S. or Russia.
“This shows both the seriousness of the situation within the alliance and the seriousness with which French and British deterrence is taken,” he added.
Elsewhere there was skepticism that the French public would support expanding the country’s nuclear obligations to cover Germany in the way Merz apparently imagined, although some observers still saw potential for talks with the U.K.
Merz’s comments encouraged politicians in Britain’s ruling Labour Party who want Starmer to go further in supporting European defense.
“At this critical troubling time for our continent’s defense and security, given Russia’s imperialistic designs, we as a nation must show leadership. That is what our friends and allies are also expecting of us,” said Tan Dhesi, the senior Labour MP who chairs the U.K. parliament’s defense committee. “Given the potential absence or significant reduction of American presence, this is our time as a nation to step up to the plate and take leadership on defense for the European continent.”
As part of Britain’s existing NATO commitments, the U.K. already provides a nuclear umbrella to European allies who are members of NATO, including Germany. The French position is different. Paris insists its so-called vital interests, which nuclear deterrence is designed to protect, have a European dimension, but has not committed to joint NATO nuclear planning in the same way as the British already have.
The British government had no immediate comment on Merz’s remarks but any notion of building a new European nuclear defense regime — that would be expected to come good if the U.S. reneges on NATO — is an extremely delicate topic for the U.K., whose nuclear missile program is highly integrated with America’s.
“Obviously the level of anxiety in Berlin right now is particularly high,” said Łukasz Kulesa, director of nuclear policy at the Royal United Services Institute defense think-tank in London. “At this point we still don’t have any definite indications that the U.S. will rethink its role in providing extended nuclear deterrence through NATO to the rest of the allies including Germany. So in a sense it’s more about preparation for a potential option.”
One of the many questions will be whether any new European-focused deterrent would still be devised through NATO structures, Kulesa said. “At this point I think it’s worth having a more detailed conversation of how such a U.K.- and French-led nuclear deterrence could be made credible.”
Merz’s statement now “needs to be followed up in the long term at political level, on both the French and German sides,” said Héloïse Fayet, a researcher at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris, who is an expert on nuclear deterrence.
“It’s been on the table for five years, and if we don’t talk about it now, when Europe is in danger, we’ll never talk about it,” she said.
Clea Caulcutt and Josh Berlinger in Paris and Esther Webber in London contributed reporting.
