‘It feels like a betrayal.’ Germany’s painful estrangement from the US
The unravelling of transatlantic ties has shocked a country that had an emotional attachment to the relationship
Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in Berlin and Laura Pitel in Kaiserslautern
© FT montage/Getty/UnsplashWolfgang Ischinger’s life-long bond with America began at 16, when he arrived in Watseka, a small town in Illinois’s Iroquois County.
Now 79, the German chair of the Munich Security Conference, a major annual gathering of US and European security policymakers beginning on February 13, spent his final year of high school there on a programme funded by the American Field Service, a foreign exchange association.
Ischinger was treated “like a son” by his host family and spent “days glued to the house’s black and white television” following the assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963.
“It was my first exposure to America, global politics and drama — a life-shaping experience,” he recalls.
He went on to serve as ambassador to the US, the country that laid Germany’s postwar democratic foundations and has guaranteed its security for nearly eight decades.
In doing so he joined generations of staunch German Atlanticists, among them conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who shaped Germany’s foreign policy and formed Europe’s largest ecosystem of think-tanks, foundations, cultural associations and business clubs devoted to ties with Washington.
Today that community is in disarray.
After repeated blows by the Trump administration to Nato and the EU, Ischinger wonders whether the first warning signs of American estrangement were already visible two decades ago, during the US invasion of Iraq.
“Maybe I should have started worrying when America tried to drive a wedge into Europe by talking about ‘old Europe’ and ‘new Europe’,” he says.
“These are the friends of the United States, who are going with us into Iraq.
And these are the old guys, the Germans and the French, whom we don’t like anymore because they’re not sharing our views.”
The recent unravelling of transatlantic ties has come as a profound shock in Germany, where the bond with the US runs deep.
“The transatlantic relationship has a far more emotional foundation than in the UK or in France,” says Claudia Major, senior vice-president at the German Marshall Fund, which has also sent generations of German students to the US — including 47-year-old Social Democratic Party (SPD) vice-chancellor Lars Klingbeil.
“America was the country that trusted Germany to become reasonable after the atrocities of the second world war,” she says.
“The Americans taught the Germans democracy. It feels like a betrayal.”
German Atlanticists took particular offence a year ago, when US vice-president JD Vance used the Munich Security Conference — which fell during the German federal election campaign — to lecture Europe over democratic values, before meeting far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Alice Weidel on the sidelines.
Shaken, Merz — a former head of Atlantik Brücke, a networking organisation, and ex-chair of BlackRock in Germany — later described it as an “epochal rupture”.
On the night his Christian Democrats won the elections days later, he declared it urgent for Europe to “achieve independence from the US”.
In December, he went further: “The decades of Pax Americana are largely over for us in Europe and for us in Germany,” he said.
For Germany, which sees itself as Europe’s most scrupulous guardian of the rule of law, Washington’s open disregard for the postwar world order it once championed is especially painful.
This sense of betrayal — felt to varying degrees across Europe but more acutely in Germany — is upending the continent’s decades-long security architecture and fuelling an arms race unseen since the cold war.
Long reluctant to assume a leading military role because of its Nazi past, Berlin, with its ample fiscal power, is now being pushed to the forefront of Europe’s rearmament.
“When a global power like the US actually says, ‘I don’t care about international law’, it poses a far greater challenge to the cohesion of the alliance — because this relationship depends on public support,” Ischinger says.
“If the public don’t support it, if they believe that this is a hostile power, then it’s worth nothing.”
Major adds that the US “used to be the power keeping the house together within Nato.
Now it’s the one setting it on fire.”
Germany’s postwar foreign policy was “defined by the US-German relationship”, says Karsten Voigt, who was commissioner for German-American co-operation in parliament under SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
As the most powerful occupying force after the war, “the US had a sort of veto” on foreign policy, and successive West German governments developed “stronger connections” with the US than with France or other neighbours, he says.
But that was not without frictions, with pockets of virulent anti-Americanism emerging on the left during the Vietnam war and resurfacing during the 1980s, when US nuclear missiles were stationed in West Germany, and during the Iraq invasion.
The irony is that anti-American sentiment had shrunk in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, says Norbert Röttgen, a senior CDU MP and foreign policy expert.
The Greens who “entered parliament as a pacifist movement deeply critical of America”, shifted as they became Kyiv’s staunchest supporters, for example.
Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, German attitudes towards America have flipped from broadly positive to overwhelmingly negative.
A December survey by the Pew Research Center and Körber Foundation found that just 27 per cent of Germans judged relations with the US as “good”, down from three-quarters the previous year.
Last month, a Forsa poll conducted after Trump threatened to seize Greenland found that 71 per cent of Germans now viewed the US as an adversary rather than a partner.
A majority of AfD sympathisers agreed.
For Röttgen, Washington’s recent hostility towards its European allies — including efforts to “sell European security” to Russia through a 28-point ceasefire proposal — amounts to a second Zeitenwende, or historical turning point, after Russia’s 2022 invasion.
Even in Germany’s most American city, Kaiserslautern in Rheinland-Palatinate, doubts are creeping up.
Home to some 50,000 US service members, civilians and their families posted to the sprawling Ramstein air base — the largest outside the US — the city has long revolved around transatlanticism.
Local authorities work hard to make Americans feel welcome, offering orientation sessions and tips on avoiding German faux pas, such as mowing lawns at the wrong hour or sorting rubbish incorrectly.
Entire swaths of the region’s economy exist to serve the base.
“K-Town”, as the Americans call it, has diners serving up piles of pancakes, a salon called Hair Force and a lap dancing club — one of many — called Hotel Tennezzee.
The city also has a cemetery for American children who died while their parents were based in Germany.
“We are very, very good hosts,” says Beate Kimmel, the city’s mayor.
Yet at Kullman’s, a classic American-style diner with red vinyl seats and a chrome bar, neurosurgeon Stefan Kupsch is fizzing with anger.
Like Ischinger, he spent a formative year in the US as a teenager, studying in Montana.
“There was this idea of a big country and a free democracy,” the 57-year-old said over burgers and fries. “At that time it was like that.”
He still has close American friends, but says the country now feels unrecognisable.
“It’s completely different from what I knew in the 1980s.
It’s not a free democracy anymore.”
Kupsch — whose 88-year-old father still recalls being handed sweets by American soldiers in 1945 — is enraged by Trump’s talk of seizing Greenland and by US interference in last year’s German elections, when Vance and Tesla founder Elon Musk voiced support for the AfD.
Invited to a wedding in Arizona later this year, he says he will not go.
“Now I wouldn’t set foot on US soil.
No way.”
In a nearby Irish pub, Nils Putze, a sales representative nursing a pint of Guinness during a round of bilingual bingo, says the gratitude he grew up with — the belief that “friends across the Atlantic helped postwar Germany to become the democratic and prosperous country that it is today” — is fading fast.
But he believes that “eighty years of friendship won’t come to an end due to four years of a stupid president . . . that in 10 years from now, things will be better.
Maybe it’s a delusion.”
Others cling to optimism.
“There is no rupture!” insists Andreas Hausmann, a local hotelier, who depends on US clientele for his two hotels and two restaurants, including a popular brewery-steakhouse called the Big Emma.
But uncertainty looms over the base and the whole region.
During Trump’s first term, his administration announced plans to withdraw 12,000 troops from Germany — a move later blocked by Congress.
European officials now await the Pentagon’s so-called Global Posture Review, which will determine the future for the 80,000 American soldiers stationed in Europe, about 37,500 of them in Germany.
David Sirakov, head of the Kaiserslautern-based Atlantic Academy, a think-tank, doubts Ramstein is at risk.
The base, he argues, is important not just to project American military power in Europe but also in the Middle East and Africa.
“The talk about withdrawing troops neglects the fact that the US depends on the European facilities as much as the Europeans depend on the US,” he says.
Sirakov, who first bonded with America as a young drummer at a Californian music academy, says that even before Trump, the US held less appeal for younger Germans.
“Older generations think of ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ or ‘Tear down this wall’,” he says, referring to speeches by Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
“Younger generations think of Guantánamo Bay, the Iraq war, George W Bush.”
Merz’s plan to pour billions into building the Bundeswehr into “Europe’s largest conventional army” has broad backing across Germany’s mainstream parties, from conservatives to Greens and Social Democrats.
Yet policymakers remain torn over how far emancipation from the US should go — balancing fears that assertiveness might hasten US troop withdrawals and leave a deterrence gap, against hopes that, perhaps, the Trump administration proves to be an aberration.
Merz’s stance exemplifies this fine balancing act.
“The Nato alliance and the trust established in Nato over more than seven decades remain the best guarantee of freedom, peace and security for all parties involved on both sides of the Atlantic,” he told parliament last month.
“That’s why we Europeans want to preserve Nato, to strengthen it from Europe.
We will always extend the hand of co-operation to the United States of America.”
But he warned: “As democracies, we are partners and allies and not subordinates.”
Fresh from meeting with Republican lawmakers in Washington, CDU MP Röttgen also believes Nato can and must survive Trump.
What is happening in the US “is not an evolution, it’s a revolution, and it’s still under way”, he says.
“The transatlantic relationship remains in flux.
It also depends on us how this ends.”
Ischinger is urging relentless engagement.
“We must engage with everyone — the White House, the national security team, the state department, the senators, congressmen to explain that even if we disagree we’re still on the same team,” he says.
Europe, he adds, has no alternative given its military dependence on Washington to safeguard a ceasefire in Ukraine.
“We’re caught between a rock and a hard place.”
Major from the German Marshall Fund adds: “Many here are still inside the dream that it might get better again.
But that’s deep inside the stomach and the head is telling you: actually not.
But there may be a way to say: while it will never be like before, [this relationship] may become more predictable again.”
To be sure, history still weighs heavily on the German psyche.
In the mid-1990s, after the Bosnian war, conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl sent Ischinger to the Balkans to assess how locals would react to German army helmets as part of a postwar settlement under the UN.
The result: the government first chose to send mostly unarmed transport vehicles, Ischinger recalls.
In 2001, SPD Chancellor Schröder scraped Bundestag approval by only two votes to send soldiers to Afghanistan — the first combat troop deployment outside Europe since the second world war.
“For a very long time, we simply didn’t have an independent military thought, and we took pride in seeing the German army fully embedded into Nato,” Ischinger says.
This reticence persisted even as Olaf Scholz proclaimed a Zeitenwende following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
His government drew ridicule for initially promising to send 5,000 helmets to Kyiv for Ukrainian soldiers to use and later dragged its feet on tank deliveries for fear of escalation, looking to then US President Joe Biden for political cover at each step.
Many in Berlin also remain sceptical that Europe can manage Russia alone.
The Minsk negotiations, led by Angela Merkel and François Hollande after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, failed.
It was Bill Clinton’s decision to intervene that saved Bosnians from massacre in the mid-1990s during the Bosnian war, Ischinger says.
But Julia Friedlander, the first American chief executive of Berlin-based Atlantik-Brücke, and a former Trump administration security adviser in charge of Europe, says it is high time that Germany steps up.
A self-described “cold-hearted realist”, the 41-year-old argues that Europe’s most populous country must shed sentimentality.
“The good old unipolar days, when everyone could feel very happy under the US umbrella, those are all gone,” she says.
Friedlander describes her experience during her time in the Trump administration of growing “bitterness” in Washington towards the EU, and Germany in particular, for failing to take its defence seriously.
It was “often much more exciting to call Paris”, a power less aligned with the US but with a “security mindset”.
“Germans would always pick up the phone of course . . . but the answer was never yes.
It was always ‘we can’t — because of the coalition, because of our economic interests, because of our history’ . . . War guilt is an excuse.”
Under pressure from Trump, Merz is now trying to “flip the narrative”, Friedlander says.
Germany has overtaken the US as Ukraine’s largest provider of military aid, according to the Kiel Institute.
“He’s saying that because of our history, we have a responsibility towards Ukraine — Germany can’t hide behind America anymore.”
Voigt, the former SPD MP, feels this transformation is in full swing.
“That’s uncharted territory but Germany is ready.
We no longer feel guilty and we don’t feel completely alone.
Our role has changed a great deal already.
We look at ourselves in amazement and we wonder: is that really you?
No, that’s no longer us.
We are something new.”
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