The End of Deference to the American President
Monday Memo, 4/26/AD2025
The world has stopped playing along with America’s reality TV style governance. No one is laughing with the Americans. Even The Drudge Report news aggregator highlighted a countdown banner for the end of the 47th presidency.
Perhaps the trickiest transatlantic relationship is between the administration of Donald John Trump and his ancestral country, Germany. The president has made much of being German, or rather German-American, and often mentions his pride in his origins. The Germans themselves are bemused by the kinship. To most of the German public, Mr. Trump represents an American caricature of the very traits—narcissism, militarism, and racial chauvinism—that they spent 80 years trying to excise from their own character.
When people think of the villains of the 20th century, around the world they will point to the Germans. In the Great War, it was the Kaiser; in the Second World War, it was Hitler. This history made Germans sensitive to criticism, resistant to asserting leadership, and hesitant to criticize the State of Israel due to the Holocaust committed by the Nazi government that ruled Germany and Austria.
The Americans clear have no strategy [in Iran]…an entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, particularly by the so-called Revolutionary Guards.—German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, April 27, 2026
As a result, the Germans embrace the principle of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the "struggle to overcome the past." Comparisons of the American president and his movement with Hitler and Nazism are especially touchy for Germans and their government. Every violation of norms by Mr. Trump provoked strong feelings but muted reactions in Berlin. Germany depended on NATO for defense , as the alliance structure allowed it to sheath its military power within a multilateral system. This curtailed the temptation to become a great military power and the risks that would follow .
However, that is changing.
Between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the American threats against Greenland, Germany has been forced to reckon with the need to match its firepower to its economic power. With the rise of the anti-establishment, anti-immigrant and anti-Vergangenheitsbewältigung Alternative for Germany(AfD) party, the German federal government feels a need to demonstrate that it is done being passive. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union party, must counter the rebelliously assertive AfD by presenting a Germany that is strong, within the bounds of memory policy.
This assertiveness now includes an unprecedented attack on the American administration. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz, created the opening. The United States has been so damaged by POTUS’s Iranian adventure that Germany feels empowered to publicly criticize the US, accuse it of having no strategy, and declare that Iran is winning the war and humiliating the United States in the process. In the past no German leader would have take such a stance against Trump. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is to shrinking America’s stature.
By using the word “humiliated,” Merz is not just critiquing a policy failure in the Middle East; he is performing a public decoupling. He is signaling that Germany will no longer play the role of the quiet, repentant junior partner to a superpower it views as strategically adrift and rhetorically volatile. The “struggle to overcome the past” has entered a new phase. Germany is no longer just defending its history from its own ghosts; it is now defending its legacy of democratic rebirth. The era of muted reactions is over. Berlin has decided that the only way to avoid being humiliated along with Washington is to speak the truth, regardless of the offense it gives.
Germany, for the first time since the Second World War, has a military budget almost the size of France’s and Britain’s combined; it is now the world’s fourth-largest. Only the United States, China, and Russia spend more on their forces. The next thing Merz will likely do is seek to make Europe comfortable with German leadership, and he can do that by articulating a European strategy for mutual thriving in the midst of the Iran war impacting fuel. Such a development would be in defiance of the lack of a strategy by the USA. By openly speaking of American failure, Mr. Merz has changed the permission structure for Europe.
The old world is ready to challenge the new again.
