To understand the shortcomings of German foreign policy, you would be advised to visit a village in North Dakota. It was there, at a barbecue with a farming family in the summer of 2000, that the journalist Jörg Lau learned why Americans might not appreciate being sent to fight for Europe. Or at least, as Lau writes a quarter of a century later, he should have learned. But like almost all his compatriots and politicians—indeed, like pretty much every European—he didn’t.
His host, a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy from the prairies called John Wald, said his son was about to be sent to Kosovo as a soldier for the United Nations peacekeeping force there. It was his second stint, and John was concerned.
To understand the shortcomings of German foreign policy, you would be advised to visit a village in North Dakota. It was there, at a barbecue with a farming family in the summer of 2000, that the journalist Jörg Lau learned why Americans might not appreciate being sent to fight for Europe. Or at least, as Lau writes a quarter of a century later, he should have learned. But like almost all his compatriots and politicians—indeed, like pretty much every European—he didn’t.
His host, a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy from the prairies called John Wald, said his son was about to be sent to Kosovo as a soldier for the United Nations peacekeeping force there. It was his second stint, and John was concerned.
“Why do we have to send our sons to Kosovo?” he asked, beer in hand, ever so gently. “Just so that I understand.”
Lau recalls that he gave him a “long and complex explanation of European politics and the differences between the various Balkan states. John looked skeptical and confused but replied politely, ‘Yes, it does all sound a bit complicated.’”
The author reflects now: “When I today see the mix of fury, disappointment, and arrogance that America’s retreat from its role as defender of the world order in Europe has unleashed, I think back at this warm summer’s evening. I hadn’t been able to give a plausible explanation to John about why his son had to go to the other side of the world to secure the peace. I hadn’t even managed to convince myself.”
This was a German talking to an American, whose settler family hailed originally from Germany, in a Midwestern state whose capital is called Bismarck.
This is one of several personal-political reflections from Lau, a journalist at the weekly Die Zeit and one of Germany’s foremost foreign affairs specialists, distilled in a new book entitled Der Westen sind jetzt wir, or The West, That’s Us Now.
He divides his critique into four thematic regions: the United States, Russia, the Middle East, and China. In each area, he contends, German policymaking has been found wanting—for decades. It is a salutary read, but not without hope. Indeed, he concludes with a series of prescriptions of how a more courageous and self-confident Germany, leading a more autonomous Europe, can begin to cope with the dystopian world order of U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
But does the government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, marking its first anniversary in early May, have what it takes to achieve this? When Merz took office, Europe was still reeling from the Trump administration’s early attacks on liberal democracy. He signaled a more robust response from Berlin toward Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, declaring that Germany “is back.”
Then came the June 2025 U.S. attacks on Iran, followed by the operation in Venezuela, interspersed with threats to Canada and Greenland, peppered with casual volleys of insults about European leaders. And most recently, the mayhem of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran that began on Feb. 28.
Germany’s response? It depends whether you prefer to see the glass as half full or half empty. The debit scorecard focuses on Merz’s rhetorical inconsistencies. Before leaving on a trip to Washington, he said in February that he wouldn’t “lecture” the White House on international law. Furthermore, he dismissed the notion of values, which has underpinned eight decades of foreign policy, echoing the Trumpian mantra of “deals” and “interests.”
He praised the United States for doing the West’s “dirty work” in taking out the former spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and degrading Iran’s nuclear potential. While sitting by Trump’s side in the Oval Office, one in a long line of excruciating sofa-based press conferences to which visiting leaders have been subjected in Washington, he smiled meekly when the president excoriated the Spanish and British prime ministers, Pedro Sanchez and Keir Starmer, for not aiding the war effort.
But it was only when he arrived back in Germany—and possibly only then realized the potentially catastrophic consequences for Germany’s and Europe’s economies, alongside the benefit that skyrocketing oil prices were providing Putin—that he did an abrupt U-turn. Each subsequent statement seemed designed to distance himself further from Trump. And in remarks that seemed destined to antagonize the White House, Merz suggested that the US was being outplayed. ‘An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards,’ he declared. ‘So I hope that this ends as quickly as possible.’
On China, Merz portrays himself as a hawk, then travels there with business delegations in tow, talking benignly about partnership in a bid to do whatever it takes to boost the economy. In this regard, he is no different from his European equivalents, and it remains to be seen how Trump navigates the security versus trade dilemma when he eventually makes his delayed visit to Beijing.
Then there have been the straightforward clangors. Merz was in a minority of leaders of major economies who took the time to travel to Belém, Brazil, to attend the opening of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in November, only to undo much of that goodwill by disparaging the host city on his return home. “Last week, I asked some journalists who were with me in Brazil: ‘Who among you would like to stay here?’ No one raised their hand. Everyone was delighted to be back in Germany and to have left that place.”
While utterances such as these show a lack of sure-footedness, his longer-term strategy deserves more praise. The German foreign policy that he inherited had reached what Lau describes as at rock bottom.
In barely a year, he has overhauled the country’s entire approach to military spending. Not only did he push through a constitutional change allowing for heavy borrowing on defense, but he has also not shied away from a difficult public debate on the need to turn Germany’s armed forces into Europe’s most powerful—and quickly.
Much of the time, he has been candid about long-term U.S. disengagement from Europe and (possibly short-term) unpredictability and hostility. He has mooted the possibility of European Union defense guarantees (something that the French have been pushing for years) and even talked of the possibility of extending the French nuclear umbrella among a populace ritualistically hostile to all things nuclear. And he has been at least as forthright other leaders on the need for sustained support for Ukraine. He has gotten many of the big calls right.
All of this is vigorously debated in Berlin. Well, perhaps, not all of it. When it comes to meaningful debate about Israel, Germany remains paralyzed. Lau, like many reasonable commentators, calls for a nuanced discussion, separating the requirement to combat antisemitism at home and protect Israel as a state, with the need to move away from slavish support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his expansionist dreams and his extremist ministers. Many politicians say the same, but only within the safety of private discourse.
Germany knows that it must grow into, and get used to, the role as a leader in hard power. It won’t come easily. Lau concludes his book by recalling a recent conversation, also over a beer, with a Finnish colleague. How would that country feel about U.S. withdrawal from NATO?
Finland, the colleague replied, already assumed that the United States wouldn’t be there for the Finns and that, together with the Nordic and Baltic states and Poland, they had enough to hold back the Russians. The Germans are heading in that direction, but—militarily and psychologically—they still have some way to go.
