The Transatlantic Split Myth: How U.S.-Europe Militarization Thrives Behind the Rhetoric
Synchronized defense budgets, shared doctrines, and welfare cuts expose the fiction of a 'rift'—while citizens foot the bill for perpetual war readiness.
Prelude: a polite quarrel in Washington
Back in late 2022, I encountered an Atlantic Council panel discussion watching then-SPD chair Lars Klingbeil, now vice chancellor and finance minister, field questions that were less questions than carefully upholstered invitations to agree. The moderator delivered a bouquet of assumptions—Germany “plays a leading role,” must “create a new peace order,” and so forth—then asked the gentlest of questions:
That’s a big role for Germany to play. Do you think it’s ready to play that role?
Klingbeil replied with confessional humility:
I hope so, and we must be ready… we have to do our homework.
The scene was all ceremony, no suspense. A visiting German politician reported to a friendly board of US and US-funded experts. The experts urged him to speed up defense spending, and everyone nodded gravely over coffee. If this is what a “transatlantic split” looks like, then I don’t recognize the meaning of split anymore.
Scroll through European op-eds and think-tank briefs, and you’ll find a familiar refrain: the United States and Europe are “drifting apart.” Look closer. Defense budgets on both sides of the Atlantic are rising in lock-step, security doctrines share the same PowerPoint slides, and the EU, a supposed pacifist haven, today accounts for a bigger slice of world military spending than Russia and China combined. The rift is rhetorical. The convergence is material, and it is financed by the slow bleed of social programs at home.
What’s more: The evidence isn’t buried; it’s right there in policy briefs, conference videos, and occasionally inadvertent slips from the very people now implementing Germany’s next great re-armament. Today's post concerns the theatrical disconnect between rhetoric (a split) and practice (feverish military and fiscal synchronization).
I. The crisis that isn’t
Every few months, headlines warn of an Atlantic crackdown. Commentators cue the end-of-alliance requiem. Yet beneath these words, the policy coordination and implementation hum along in remarkable harmony:
Defense budgets converge upward. 2024 world military spending rose by a record 9.4 percent; Germany alone jumped 28 percent and now sits fourth in the global ranking, behind only the US, China, and Russia. NATO as a bloc accounts for 55 percent of all military expenditure on the planet. SIPRI
NATO defense spending target. US President Trump has been calling for NATO members to increase their defense budgets to five percent of their economic output. German Foreign Minister Wadephul (before becoming Foreign Minister, he famously said that ‘Russia will always remain our eternal enemy’) has voiced his support for this proposal, indicating it encompasses more than traditional defense expenditures. Tagesschau
Shared understanding of doctrines. The Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy and Berlin’s new National Security Strategy share the same two-front worry list as A. Wess Mitchell from the Marathon Initiative wrote in 2022, referring to Russia and China as “wolfs”:
…the United States should act decisively now, but in ways that are not just dealing with “the now. ˮ The United States will have one big chance to create a demonstration effect in Europe that will help avoid a war in Asia. By dealing with the wolf closest to the sled, it will be in a better position later to deal with the larger wolf watching from the hilltop.
Industrial policy locks in. The US and Germany aim to funnel public money toward dual-use tech that feeds both competitiveness and war-fighting capacity or just plainly repurpose civilian industry for military use.
Where is the rift? Mostly on talk shows, where it serves two political functions: (1) shielding elites from domestic anger over social retrenchment; (2) selling higher military outlays as reluctant self-help rather than enthusiastic re-armament.
Remember the Atlantic Council panel discussion from 2022 I showed you at the beginning: Strip away the diplomatic politeness, and the message is plain: Germany will arm fast and heavy, not because Washington and Berlin are fighting, but because they’ve never been more in sync.
On a side note: According to a post on the Two Majors Telegram channel (archived 17 Apr 2025), Lars Klingbeil, now Germany’s vice chancellor and Finance Minister, spent 2002-03 on a Georgetown exchange and even interned with U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, then a member of the House Intelligence Committee. I haven’t yet found independent documentation for that specific internship. Still, Klingbeil’s own CV confirms an earlier 2001 placement at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung’s New York office and a string of Washington visits, including a closed-door round table at the American Council on Germany in 2022. On the CDU side, Friedrich Merz’s links are entirely on the record: he chaired BlackRock Germany (2016-20) and was hired by the Wall Street giant in 2016 (Handelsblatt).
II. Taskmasters with open microphones
Sergei Glazyev, now Eurasian Economic Commission minister, observed in The Last World War that “analytical centers” have perfected new technologies of cognitive and hybrid warfare to achieve their aims without resorting to armed force. One such centre is Stratfor, dubbed “the shadow CIA”. Its founder, George Friedman (2014), happily spells out the century-long U.S. objective:
The United States has spent the past century pursuing a single objective: avoiding the rise of any single hegemon that might exploit Western European technology and capital and Russian resources and manpower.
Friedman’s candor is the norm in the world of corporate-finance supported think tanks, or as Glazyev would call them, “taskmasters”. The clause is refreshingly candid, refreshingly devoid of humanitarian garnish. The examples of these long-term strategies and goals laid out in the open in some form or another are myriad. One does not have to rummage through clandestine cables to find these blueprints:
Peter Rough (2022), writing for Atlantik-Brücke, chaired by Sigmar Gabriel, a former Vice Chancellor, interestingly succeeding Friedrich Merz in 2019, in an article that is titled “Germany needs to protect Europe”, asserts:
The rise of China is occupying more American attention by the day, making it urgently necessary for Germany to relieve the United States in Europe.
Additionally, he remarked:
As the most influential, prosperous, and powerful country in Europe, it is up to Germany to take the baton.
A baton, of course, is not a choice; it is something you either seize or drop. Berlin chose to seize it.
Pentagon undersecretary Elbridge Colby, from the Marathon Initiative and current Under Secretary of Defense, tweeted this year that Berlin should “ramp up to 5 percent of GDP” for defence, pledging DOD help to “enable this necessary and critical effort” by working closely with its allies.
And possibly, quite revealing and most striking, also from Colby’s paper called Strategic Sequencing (2024):
We should be clear that this is not about “abandoningˮ Europe. Even once the United States has prioritized Asia, it will be a European power and continue to have compelling strategic reasons to keep certain kinds of high-end military hardware in that theater, both to augment European capabilities and to have a point dʼappui from which to project power to other places, including Asia. The whole point is to manage time wisely by using the proxy wars that are underway in Ukraine and Israel to increase our own capacity to wage war, so that a larger and more consequential war may yet be avoided due to our enhanced strength.
That sustained basing, plus nuclear-umbrella commitments and NATO decision clout, qualifies Washington, in his vocabulary, as a power in Europe. Additionally, the U.S. keeps some forces there less to defend the continent per se than to have a strategic springboard. Calling the U.S. a “European power” is, for him, shorthand for: the U.S. will remain one of the decisive outside actors shaping Europe’s (in)security order.
In other words, when policy architects speak publicly, belief in a trans-Atlantic divorce starts to look naïve. The quarrel is theater; the marriage is thriving.
III. Rhetoric as budgetary Pavlov
Social programs do not die in committee rooms; they die in the realm of justification. Through the threat of looming abandonment by Uncle Sam, German voters will accept that their €49 rail ticket cannot be renewed because the Bundeswehr needs new F-35s. Transatlantic burden-sharing finally appears on your pay stub as an extra defense levy or the quiet disappearance of school lunch subsidies. The cycle is elegant and ruthless.
World War I, World War II, the Cold War: same game, different jerseys. Once Berlin dropped its flirtation with Moscow in September 2022, the Biden Administration rushed to lock Germany into a dual mission: backstop NATO’s eastern flank and free up U.S. bandwidth for the Indo-Pacific. The management of a mission that the current Trump Administration is continuing.
IV. Why Berlin? A brief genealogy of delegation
The United States cannot patrol both the Baltic littorals and the Taiwan Strait with a dominant force. Somebody in Europe must hold the line while the carrier groups steam east. Enter Germany: geographically central, fiscally flush, and psychologically eager for redemption (in contrast to other European nations, which are anything but fiscally able to stem increased military spending).
The idea is not new. From the 1990s onward, US policy papers spoke of a Germany that should “grow up” inside NATO. Just read this aptly titled RAND paper, “Germany’s Geopolitical Maturation,” from 1993. Or look at this 1995 NATO paper that includes a section called “The Russian Enigma,” followed by “The German Question,” whose contents you can guess. What is new is Berlin’s willingness to adopt the adult costume inside the confines of NATO without protest. The Zeitenwende speech (February 2022) and Klingbeil’s follow-up address (October 2022) tore up decades of military reticence in several minutes of Bundestag applause. This militaristic enthusiasm has now been topped by the current Chancellor Merz’s first Bundestag speech, where he says:
We want to be able to defend ourselves so that we don't have to defend ourselves. Strength deters aggression, while weakness invites it. The goal, therefore, is for Germany and Europe to be so strong that we never have to use our weapons. The federal government will provide the Bundeswehr with all the financial resources it needs to become conventionally the strongest army in Europe.
Why the acquiescence? Three overlapping motives:
Elite continuity with the Cold War West: SPD and CDU figures still climb through Atlanticist pipelines—Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung grants, Atlantik-Brücke fellowships (Merz was once its chairman), U.S. study stints such as Klingbeil’s years at Georgetown. The pattern persists in the new government: Merz has installed transatlantic wunderkind Jacob Schrot—founder of the Initiative junger Transatlantiker—as both chief-of-staff and head of a new National Security Council, pulling foreign- and security-policy control into the Chancellery and away from the Foreign Office.
Industrial-military profit pools. Rheinmetall’s share price tripled after Zeitenwende and after the newly announced investments into military expenditures; start-ups flock to Bundeswehr innovation hubs. Domestic capital likes leadership roles that come with procurement splurges.
Historical phantom pain. A strain of German conservatism (and not only conservatism), for example, when former foreign minister Baerbock talked to the Atlantic Council and told a story about how her grandfather fought against the Red Army on the Eastern Front in the winter of 1945. This, she says, is her inspiration for fighting for Europe and for Ukraine. In contrast, or not in contrast at all, the AfD parliamentary group's defense policy spokesperson Lucassen, a NATO and Israel fan, called for massive rearmament and conscription on behalf of the AfD. He also appreciates the achievements of Hitler's Wehrmacht through the feats of his father who also fought on the Eastern Front, even tweeting: “To this day, the key dates and names of this battle are familiar to our Bundeswehr soldiers, even though the political leadership tries to suppress it.”) has never fully processed the defeat of 1945, experienced less as liberation than as humiliation. Re-armament cloaked in liberal internationalist garb offers a path to restored pride without explicit revanchism.
For Washington, this is ideal. Instead of cajoling 27 EU capitals, you whisper in Berlin and let the ripple propagate along supply chains from Vilnius to Valencia.
V. From re-armament to historical revisionism — Merz and the missing Red Army
No grand mobilization is complete without a new foundation myth. Enter Friedrich Merz, ex-BlackRock luminary, now Chancellor. Preparing for the 80th anniversary of V-Day, he declared:
I want to express my gratitude to the Western Allies who liberated Germany from National Socialism.
The Soviet Union—27 million dead—was air-brushed out. Merz offered no acknowledgement of the Red Army’s role. He had merely recycled Trump’s own recent omission. The logic is transparent: if today’s foe is Moscow, yesterday’s ally must be erased from memory.
This is not innocent forgetfulness. An RT Online analysis frames the manoeuvre as calculated:
Berlin drängt wieder nach Osten… Germany sees in costly war preparations the historic chance to shed every post-1945 restriction and reclaim influence in Central and Eastern Europe.
That ambition triggers the same anxieties that haunted the Continent in 1914 and 1939. The report continues:
Poles, Czechs, and other states know they risk becoming fodder for Germany… They will build their own forces—not only against Russia but also against Germany.
Germany’s Long Memory: Why Berlin Obeys with a Smile
To grasp why modern German leaders like Klingbeil, and now Chancellor Friedrich Merz cheerfully shoulder the U.S. baton, we need a detour through socio-historical path dependence. Which I’m admittedly no expert in, so I will just sketch out what is striking to me:
Fragmented beginnings
From the Holy Roman Empire through the 18th century, German lands were a mosaic of Estates and free cities. Loyalty flowed vertically to local lords, not horizontally to a national parliament. Bureaucratic legalism thrived inside princely courts; popular representation did not.
Prussian fusion of uniform and clerk
The 18th-century cameralist state counted trees, peasants, and calories, while the army offered the quickest social lift. By 1900 the uniform carried a moral halo that Zuckmayer later skewered in the novel Der Hauptmann von Köpenick.
Revolutions postponed
Failed uprisings—1525, 1848, 1918—taught liberals to fear chaos more than despotism. The middle class struck bargains with kings and Junkers; political modernity arrived half-built, a phenomenon historians call partial modernization. For expert insights on this topic, I highly recommend this article.
The Sonderweg hangover
Even today German socio-historical cultural patterns seem to lean toward rules, titles, and thick instruction manuals. When Washington hands Berlin a to-do list—“hit 5 percent, forward-deploy to Lithuania”—it resonates with an ingrained habit: homework from above is how order is preserved.
Fittingly historian and newly chosen Minister of Culture Wolfram Weimer brags in Das konservative Manifest that old Prussian virtues, Fleiß, Treue, Gehorsam, Disziplin (diligence, loyalty, obedience, discipline), deserve a comeback. The cultural soil (understood as artifacts and social practices ever but slowly changing) is fertile; Washington merely supplies the fertilizer.
VI. The China alibi
Washington’s oft-repeated pivot to Asia is the last note in the orchestral score and it comes with a price tag for Europe. Eldridge Colby, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense, spells it out in the Munich Security Conference’s Zeitenwende — Wendezeiten report (2020):
From the U.S. perspective, the era of ‘the end of history’ is over. America is internalising that fact and is increasingly determined to concentrate on great-power competition. This will mean focusing on ensuring that China does not dominate Asia—a demanding objective that will shape everything America does, regardless of the party in power. In this light, America needs a Germany that shares this concern and is willing to contribute to that effort, particularly in Europe … Europe and America surely do not want a Machtpolitik Germany, but they would be better off with a more candidly realpolitik one. Now the critical thing is for Germany to implement those spending commitments—quickly—so it can field real, combat-credible forces able to defeat, and thus deter, Russian aggression against NATO.
Colby’s logic is stark: Germany must bulk up against Russia so the United States can spare forces for China. The implicit bargain,“stay under our nuclear umbrella, but prove yourself on the Donbas steppe”, pries open the German treasury, while dovetailing neatly with Berlin’s own fear of jeopardizing exports to China: de-risk, yes; decouple, not yet.
VII. What Russia sees — and why that matters
From Moscow’s perch, a U.S.-blessed German build-up looks eerily like 1941 in slow motion. Dmitry Medvedev brands Merz a “Nazi” for threatening long-range missiles; Russian state TV replays archival footage of the Immortal Regiment marching past the Kremlin, muttering “never again.”
Veteran Moscow-based journalist John Helmer lays out the Kremlin’s view with unvarnished bluntness at Dialogue Works :
The serious, serious Russian concern isn’t the British Army. It isn’t the French—though the French have nuclear weapons that some even propose basing in Germany. It’s Germany that constitutes the most serious rising security threat from a Russian point of view, and this isn’t being mentioned in any of the PR. Merz has just appointed Johann Wadephul—one of his long-time aides, a former Bundeswehr officer, and a very hard-line hater of Russia—as foreign minister. From Moscow’s perspective, the biggest medium-term danger is that a future Trump administration will finance and supply Germany’s €50 billion re-armament programme, which Wadephul has openly said is geared to fighting Russia.
The takeaway message he hears in Moscow: “We suffered once at German hands; we won’t allow it again.”
These fears materializing in today’s European militarization inform Kremlin decision-making. Each additional Eurofighter stationed in the Baltics narrows the diplomatic off-ramp and raises nuclear (or conventional war) brinkmanship stakes. Washington gets a two-front containment; ordinary Europeans inherit a hair-trigger frontier.
VIII. Why the rift narrative is useful (and therefore durable)
Budget alchemy
Claim: “The U.S. is tired of protecting Europe.”
Effect: German voters accept austerity to “take responsibility.”
Industrial hand-off
Claim: “Europe must match U.S. aid to Ukraine.”
Effect: EU diverts cohesion funds to ammo factories; Pentagon reallocates to the South China Sea.
Diplomatic smoke
Claim: “Franco-German friction shows EU independence.”
Effect: Washington still authors the playbook while Paris and Berlin squabble over props.
The real divide: citizens vs. the permanent war coalition
The alleged trans-Atlantic split conceals the true fracture line, between a managerial-finance class bent on preserving U.S. primacy at all costs and the populations who will finance that project with higher rents, lower pensions, and riskier security environments.
When Chancellor Merz thanks only the Western Allies, he’s securitizing memory to justify tomorrow’s arms contracts. When Pentagon officials tweet that Berlin must reach 5 percent of GDP on defense, they’re not scolding free-riders; they’re outsourcing Washington’s European chores so the U.S. Navy can ring-fence the South China Sea. When think-tankers reassure us that “Europe must lead,” they’re really telling municipal treasurers to close libraries before they cancel drone orders.
Closing Notes: Follow the Money
A genuine rift would manifest in diverging budgets, incompatible doctrines, and hostile trade blocs. We have the opposite: synchronized spending, interoperable doctrines, and industrial policies so alike. None of this is inevitable. Elites coordinate because it works for them; the public can coordinate because the internet still allows lateral exchange. So here’s the ask:
Send this article to a friend who still believes the alliance is on the brink of divorce.
Support independent outlets that scrutinize military-industrial story-lines; cite the data, follow the money.
Dispute memory wars. Insist that the Red Army’s dead matter; historical erasure is pre-war propaganda, and we’ve seen where that leads.
The real divide is not Washington versus Brussels; it is citizens versus the permanent war managers. Naming that reality is the first step toward ending this theater.
If this analysis resonated or infuriated you, leave a comment, forward it, translate it. The conversation about war and welfare belongs to all of us, not just to the taskmasters in conference rooms.
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Stay curious,
Nel
Excellent analysis. I found the observations on Merz's advisers and speeches informative. I agree the marriage holds at the strategic, political elite level and it is premised on Europe serving USA global power. I wonder though if the sociocultural differences will not drive a deeper split over time. It will drive splits in society, and Trump's crassness gives people the excuse to break the American spell. The routine contempt of US elites across the spectrum towards Europe - which reminds me of the attitudes of the British Raj - may also provoke breakaway elites. Especially if there is a cascade of disasters from US elites bad deciaion making and failed war on China. Thanks for the food for thought.
Indeed. I had thought that only the MIC alliance would be bad for Europe, while the rift would be real otherwise. In retrospect, the implications are larger and deeper. Can I paraphrase your ideas as: Trump may not like the current crop of European leaders. However, the deep-staters in all these countries are still in control, and much more so in Europe than in the US. Adding the multi-national companies and the super-rich. Their business interests are also more aligned than the discord between Trump and his European counterparts.
I usually argue that national defense is the number one, if not the only job, for a national government. But in the case of the US and many European nations, national defense is but an excuse for uncontrolled and unaudited money flow into private pockets. I wonder if the US and the European nations should nationalize the MIC (if that dream can be realized at all). Military spending and waste will remain mostly unchanged, but now they are nominally under the umbrella of the executive branch of the government and subject to the usual internal accounting and inspection. At least, the government cannot use business interests or shareholder payback as excuses. Taking MIC into national government removes one layer of middlemen and a bunch of shareholders.