US ‘not powerful enough to go it alone’, Merz tells Munich conference | Friedrich Merz

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned Donald Trump at the opening of the Munich Security Conference, saying that the United States, acting alone, has reached the limits of its power and may have already lost its role as a global leader.

Merz also announced that he had held initial talks with French president Emmanuel Macron about the possibility of France joining the nuclear umbrella, underlining his call for Europe to develop a stronger, independent security strategy.

In a speech Friday to set a firm but conciliatory tone about the future of the transatlantic partnership, Merz argued that the old order is over and that even the United States has reached the limits of going it alone in this new era of superpowers.

Referring to those who warn that the international rules-based order is about to collapse, Merz said, “I’m afraid we need to express this more clearly. Although this order is flawed at best, it no longer exists in this form.”

Translating his message into English, Merz said: “In the age of great power competition, even the United States will not be strong enough to carry out this job alone. Dear friends, being a part of NATO is not only Europe’s competitive advantage. It is also the United States’ competitive advantage.”

“So let’s repair and revive transatlantic trust together,” he added.

The German chancellor’s speech opened the annual meeting of senior global security figures, including many European leaders and US secretary of state Marco Rubio.

At last year’s conference, held just weeks into Trump’s second term, US vice president JD Vance stunned European leaders by lecturing them about the state of democracy and freedom of expression on the continent; This was a moment that set the tone for the past year.

This was followed by a series of statements and moves by the Trump administration targeting its allies; This includes Trump’s threat last month to impose new tariffs on several European countries in a bid to secure US control of Greenland, a semi-autonomous region of NATO ally Denmark.

While directly criticizing the current American administration, Merz received the loudest applause from an audience full of hostility towards US unilateralism, saying: “The Maga movement’s culture war is not ours. Freedom of speech ends here when that speech goes against human dignity and fundamental law. We believe in free trade, not tariffs and protectionism. We stand for climate agreements and the World Health Organization.”

“In the age of great powers, our freedom is no longer a given. It is threatened,” he said, adding that “firmness and willpower will be needed to assert this freedom”. Challenging Trump’s one-sided style, Merz added: “Autocracies can have followers, democracies can have partners and allies.”

At the same time, he said Europe must cast off its excessive dependence on the US, emphasizing: “We won’t do that by writing off Nato.”

He also called on the US President to recognize that it was still possible to economically and militarily exhaust Russia to the point that it would be willing to come to the negotiating table on Ukraine.

With Germany being one of the European countries doing the most to increase its own defense spending, Merz clearly felt that he was in a strong position to insist that the United States must do more to listen to Europe’s concerns about its own security and the legitimacy of a sustainable European pillar of NATO.

Describing the Munich conference as a seismograph for the state of US-European relations, he said the Ukraine war “had forced Europe to return from a vacation from world history. Together we have entered an era that is once again marked by power and big-power politics.”

Merz said that these great powers “make their own rules, are fast, harsh and often unpredictable, and these powers exploit natural resources, technologies and supply chains by using them as bargaining tools.”

Merz was speaking as the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approached, a year after Vance spoke in the same hall in which he criticized the Europeans for not having enough control over their own defense arrangements and for ignoring the demands of their constituents.

Merz responded by saying it was vital for the continent to change its mindset and take full advantage of the “enormous” military, political, economic and technological potential of a “sovereign Europe”. Germany was striving for “consociational leadership” in Europe but maintained no “hegemonic fantasy.”

Merz said he started talks with Macron about Europe’s nuclear deterrent. This should be tightly integrated into NATO’s nuclear arsenal, he said, and would not result in some parts of Europe being more defended than others. The chancellor stated that Germany had not given up on NATO but wanted to create a “strong, self-sustaining pillar” within the alliance.

In his speech, Macron insisted that Europe should be at the table to negotiate a new arms control agreement with Russia covering ballistic missiles, deep strike capability, defense technology and nuclear weapons.

The French president said previous arms control agreements, such as the now-defunct INF Treaty, were negotiated solely by the United States, and this could not be repeated if Europe was to be taken seriously as a geopolitical power.

He said the first talks on the new European security architecture have already been held with the UK and Germany, but now it is time to expand consultations across Europe.

Macron warned that a Ukraine peace deal would require extra pressure, but even if an agreement was reached, Europe faced the problem of “how to coexist with an unreconstructed aggressive Russia on our borders” with a “bloated military and a defense industry high on sugar”.

Calling for a transparent independent European channel of communication with Russia, he said the post second world war security architecture had been “totally designed and framed during the cold war times” and needed a new articulation.

Addressing Vance’s criticism of Europe last year, Macron said: “Europe is denigrated as an oppressive continent where expression is not free and alternative facts cannot claim the same citizenship rights as the truth itself, that outdated and cumbersome concept.”