NATO via Flickr
Germany is Back
Jeff Rathke
President of AGI
Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.
Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.
Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an M.P.P. degree from Princeton University and B.A. and B.S. degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.
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Chancellor Merz, Defense Investment, and the NATO Summit
Since Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine more than eleven years ago, German leaders have struggled to find a fitting response to the deterioration of the European security environment. Then-chancellor Angela Merkel committed Germany in 2014 to meet the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense but did too little to reverse the neglect and under-funding of the Bundeswehr that had marked German policy since the end of the Cold War. Within a little more than a year of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, Merkel had restored an element of business-as-usual to German relations with Russia by agreeing to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Moscow. In her final year as chancellor, Germany spent 1.46 percent of GDP on defense, according to NATO data.
Olaf Scholz during his chancellorship was confronted with a full-scale Russian war on Ukraine in 2022, and in response he froze cooperation with Russia, pledged to reach the 2 percent defense spending level and recapitalize the Bundeswehr, and provided military assistance to Ukraine that eventually made Berlin the second-largest source of support to Kyiv, after the United States. Material progress in strengthening Germany’s armed forces was slow, however, and Scholz’s coalition was unwilling to raise the base budget, relying instead on procurement spending from an off-budget special fund of €100 billion that was quickly committed to wish-list items rather than expanding the force or promoting innovation. The “sea-change” (Zeitenwende) in security policy that Scholz promised remained incomplete when he left office on May 6, 2025.
In recent days a new era in German foreign policy has taken shape, one that could complete the reorientation of the country’s defense. Through a combination of policy clarity and resource commitments, Germany is on a path to make Berlin the key actor in European security, with long-lasting consequences.
Just before the start of the June 24-25 NATO Summit in the Hague, Chancellor Friedrich Merz delivered a government declaration in the Bundestag outlining his coalition’s priorities for European security. As described by my AGI colleagues in greater detail here, Merz emphasized a “new determination” in the country’s security policy and asserted that “Germany is back on the European and international stage.”
The risk of empty words in German government declarations cannot be overlooked, but in this case, they were backed up by resources. On the morning of June 24, Merz’s cabinet approved the budget for 2025 as well as the spending framework (Eckwerte) through 2029. In the current year, defense spending will reach €86 billion through a combination of budgetary allocations and funds from the special fund—this is double Germany’s outlays in 2019. The planning for future years reflects the constitutional change earlier this year that exempts defense and some security spending from the debt brake, and it envisions an increase from 2.4 percent of GDP in 2025 to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2029—a full six years ahead of the new target (2035) that NATO leaders agreed at their summit meeting this week. By the end of the decade, Germany will commit more than €150 billion per year to defense, an increase of 3.5 times in ten years.
The risk of empty words in German government declarations cannot be overlooked, but in this case, they were backed up by resources.
Is this actually an accomplishment of U.S. President Donald Trump? Partially. There is no question that the potential uncertainty around President Trump’s commitment to America’s NATO obligations and his periodic threats to reduce the U.S. contribution to transatlantic security have focused German leaders’ minds. The threat from Russia, however, is the principal driver of this growing commitment to defense capabilities in Germany and elsewhere. During President Trump’s first term, defense spending among European NATO members and Canada increased from 1.48 percent of GDP to 1.72 percent—a far cry from the commitment made this week. The new commitment is also a matter of Chancellor Merz’s definition of national and European interests and his desire to position Germany better to pursue them. German Chancellor Merz went out of his way to stress to the Bundestag that rising German defense investment was not about the United States. “We are not doing this, as is sometimes claimed, in order to do a favor for the United States and its president. We are doing this out of our own perception and conviction—because most of all Russia actively and aggressively threatens the security and freedom of the entire Euro-Atlantic space, because we have to fear that Russia will carry the war beyond Ukraine.” At the conclusion of the NATO Summit, he was even more direct in remarks to the press: “we want to, and we must, make these investments in the interest of our own security. We are making them in our own interest.”
An explosion in defense spending does not guarantee that Germany will effectively address the challenges it and its allies face. The Bundeswehr’s capability development and procurement processes have not been sufficiently reformed to guarantee that new resources will be allocated efficiently. The German defense industry must respond to these new signals with the necessary investments in expanding capacity. And the Bundeswehr must develop a model for growing the strength of German forces by about 30 percent in order to meet newly agreed NATO capability targets—this would mean recruiting an additional 60,000 servicemembers, according to Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. The German government will attempt to meet this need in the first instance by making service more attractive to volunteers rather than by reintroducing some form of conscription. Pistorius will introduce a draft law for cabinet approval in the coming weeks, and he has suggested that it could include a service obligation if volunteers in the future are not sufficient to meet the Bundeswehr’s needs. The possibility of obligatory service divides Pistorius’s Social Democratic colleagues, with the SPD Bundestag leader Matthias Miersch, for example, ruling out any obligatory service during the 2025-2029 legislative period.
This highlights perhaps the greatest risk to Chancellor Merz’s ambitious agenda: the narrowness of the thirteen-seat majority his CDU/CSU-SPD coalition holds in the Bundestag. An SPD party congress June 27-29 will address, among other things, discontent among some members of the party’s left wing about rising defense spending and the potential return of conscription. The chancellor and SPD co-Chairman Lars Klingbeil have put Germany on a path toward security leadership in Europe, and their success will depend significantly on the SPD’s support for a policy that will make Germany the leading conventional military power in Europe.
