By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Downtown Munich is best-known for chic shops and flashy fast cars, but right now its streets are bedecked with posters advertising next-generation drones.

"Europe's security under construction" boasts the slogan on an eye-catching set of sleek black-and-white photographs, festooned across a scaffolding-clad church on one of this town's best-known pedestrian boulevards.

Such an unapologetic public display of military muscle would have been unimaginable here just a few years ago, but the world outside Germany is changing fast, and taking this country with it.

The southern region of Bavaria has become Germany's leading defense technology hub, focusing on AI, drones, and aerospace.

Advertisements such as these that say "Europe's security under construction" would have been unthinkable in Germany not long ago.

People here, like most other Europeans, say they feel increasingly exposed, squeezed between an expansionist Russia and an economically aggressive China to the east, and an increasingly unpredictable, former best pal, the United States, to the west.

According to a recent Eurobarometer poll, more than two-thirds of Europeans (68%) feel their country is under threat.

This autumn, Germany's Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance warned for the first time since the Cold War that war is no longer "unlikely". While emphasizing that this is a safe country, it also recommends that Germans keep food supplies of three to ten days at home. Just in case.

Germany is the number one single donor of military and other aid to Ukraine, now that the US has halted any new direct aid. Opinion polls suggest voters here want to feel better protected at home too.

Germany is now the single biggest giver of aid to Ukraine.

The question for this country, along with others in Europe, is whether traditional alliances with the US, in Nato and the EU, can suffice, or whether they should be diversifying into ad-hoc coalitions alongside other like-minded nations such as Australia, South Korea, and Japan?

 

Precarious relations

By 2029, the German defense budget will be higher than the UK and French equivalents combined, Nato's Secretary General Mark Rutte pointed out to me.

He described the €150bn they say they will spend on defense as "a staggering amount".

It's something the United States notices and appreciates, he said. Donald Trump is far from the first US president to insist that Europe do more for its own security, though his tone has been noticeably more threatening than that of his predecessors.

The precarious state of transatlantic relations was the main focus of the Munich Security Conference (MSC) this weekend. It's the world's biggest annual defense meeting, bringing leaders, security experts and defense industries together.

Mark Rutte (pictured speaking to Katya Adler), described the E150bn Germany will spend on defense as "a staggering amount."

While it's easy to dismiss speech-heavy get-togethers like this as wind-baggy talking shops, in the turbulent times we live in, they can make a difference - especially the informal private huddles between global decision makers, far away from the glare of the cameras.

The most eagerly, and for some the most anxiously, anticipated speech at this year's conference was that of the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who represented the Trump administration here.

European leaders and top diplomats were seriously on the edge of their seats. But why was a simple 30-minute address given so much importance?

It's because Europe-US relations have never been so frayed as they are now, over the last 80 years since World War Two. And this isn't a bust-up between buddies that will easily blow over.

 

Denmark still furious

In just over 12 months since Trump returned to the White House, he has at times insulted and undermined European leaders, slapped big tariffs on their exports, and, most shockingly of all to his allies in NATO, threatened Danish sovereignty over its territory, Greenland, refusing for a while to rule out taking the island by force.

Speaking at the MSC on Saturday, Denmark's still clearly furious prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said Trump's designs on Greenland remained "the same" despite ongoing trilateral talks between representatives of Greenland, the US, and Denmark.

Trump has ruled out taking Greenland by military force for now, and he's backed away (for the moment, at least) from slapping economic sanctions on allies, including the UK, France, and Germany, that were getting in the way of the US acquiring the Arctic island. But transatlantic trust was severely damaged.

European powers see in Trump a truly transactional president who thinks nothing of leveraging security or economic relations with his closest allies to get what he wants. Just before being re-elected president, for example, he told Europeans that the US would not protect nations that didn't pay their way on defense.

It is true, though, that Europe has been coasting on America's security blanket for decades. Critics in the US argue that European nations have been able to run generous welfare states for decades while Washington picked up the tab for security spending.

The speech by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (left) was the most eagerly anticipated at the conference

Germany's defense minister, Boris Pistorius, told me on Saturday: "We got used to the strong support from the US; we got used to our comfort zone in which we used to live. This time is over, definitely over," he said. "Washington was right."

But the crisis over Greenland and other actions by the Trump administration - such as when it temporarily paused intelligence-sharing with Ukrainian forces last March, leaving them blind on the battlefield, to pressure Kyiv into engaging in peace talks with Moscow - have left deep scars and a troubling sense of transatlantic wariness.

 

A loyal speech

I found it telling that so many European politicians and politicians in the audience jumped on the warmth of his words, rising to their feet to applaud the US Secretary of State. They were clearly relieved he hadn't threatened or berated Europe as the US Vice President JD Vance famously did at last year's MSC.

But for those listening closely, Rubio's speech was loyal to themes close to the heart of the Trump administration and hard for many European leaders to swallow: anti-climate action, skeptical of globalization, multilateralism, migration, and pro-building of a new era of Christian Western civilization.

Rubio was clear: the US wasn't interested in allies clinging to the old status quo. It wanted to forge a new path, ideally alongside Europe, but only if it shared the same values.

This US offer of close partnership was conditional and absent of a sense of compromise.

"A bit like a (psychologically) abusive partner," said one European diplomat, speaking candidly on condition of anonymity. "He reminded Europe how wonderful the (transatlantic) relationship used to be, but he then switched to coercion: If you want things to be good between us in the future, you have to do as I say!"

Another diplomat pointed out that, while talking of shared values, it was telling, he said, that of all the European countries that Rubio could have gone to after making his speech in Germany, he chose to visit Slovakia and Hungary before heading back to the US.

They are viewed by Brussels as two of the EU's most problematic members, both with Eurosceptic nationalist prime ministers who oppose sending military aid to Ukraine and who are tough on migration.

 

A fragile new relationship

Rubio's softer tone also divided European leaders who had recently spoken as one, in defense of Denmark, at the height of the Greenland crisis last month.

The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, underlined a now fragile relationship with the US, despite Rubio's gentler rhetoric. "Some lines have been crossed that cannot be uncrossed anymore," she said. "Europeans have suffered shock therapy."

But will some countries in Europe grasp what warmth there was in Rubio's speech as an excuse not to rush to boost defence spending as promised? The coffers of most European governments are overstretched already, and their voters tend to prioritise cost-of-living concerns over defense budgets.

"Some lines have been crossed that cannot be uncrossed anymore," according to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen.

Hence, the trepidation in Munich before Rubio took the stage.

In the end, his words were laced with a sense of historic kinship. "We want Europe to be strong," he said. "The two great wars of the last century serve for us as a constant reminder that ultimately our destiny is, and will always be, intertwined with yours."

 

Starmer's nuanced approach

In stark contrast to Marco Rubio's insistence on greater national sovereignty, Sir Keir Starmer spoke in favour of greater integration between the UK and Europe on defense, to cut re-armament costs, though he emphasized this did not mean the UK turning its back on the United States.

Sophia Gaston, national security expert at King's College London, told me that in Munich, Starmer was able to better articulate the nuance of Britain's strategic outlook.

"Other allies in Europe may be more willing to speak of divergence from Washington", she says, "but for Britain it remains a strategic imperative to triangulate within the Transatlantic relationship. There will also be times when Britain will have to make hard choices, and Starmer appeared more confident in confronting that reality.

"The key is to have a really strong grasp of the national interest and our instruments of power and influence. This requires a much more competitive approach that has not always felt natural to Britain, which has typically pursued much of its diplomacy in elegant, consensus-focused and invisible ways."

Keir Starmer spoke in favor of greater integration between the UK and Europe on defense.

 

 

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