Germany braces for Trump’s potential return

• Defense policy

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has long been a lightning rod for Trump and his cadre of foreign policy advisers, who have criticized Berlin for low levels of defense spending.

“NATO’s problem is particularly Germany has to spend more on security, has to spend more on defense,” his vice presidential candidate JD Vance said on Sunday, voicing an opinion widely held by Republicans who would likely serve in foreign policy roles in a second Trump administration.

While many in Germany are optimistic that Trump wouldn’t pull the US out of the NATO alliance entirely, there are still fears about what he could do within the alliance. “NATO could be a really burning question, but not necessarily in terms of the US leaving. I think the more likely scenario could be that he stays in NATO, but attempts to play countries against each other within the alliance,” Link said.

• Pulling troops out of Germany

Berlin also fears that the former president would make a fresh attempt to pull thousands of US troops out of Germany. The Trump administration announced it would withdraw 12,000 troops from Germany in its last months because, Trump said, “they’re not paying their bills” — a decision Biden reversed. 

“What his folks are telling me” is that there would be a “stocktaking of military personnel and equipment in Germany and on European soil,” said Peter Beyer, a German lawmaker who served as the Foreign Office transatlantic coordinator during the Trump years. “They would withdraw everything that they need, and if there’s some residuals for us, okay, if not that’s also okay for them.”

• Tariffs

Trump has a “grudge against Germany,” Laura von Daniels, of the Germany Institute for International and Security Affairs, told Semafor. “He keeps talking about Germany, German businesses, car corporations and tariffs all the time. That’s not exactly signaling that he’s ready for compromise.”

“The first shock that we will really feel will be about trade policy, and about some of the multilateral arrangements like climate policy,” the Social Democratic Party’s Schmid said, referring to Trump’s promises to pull the US out of the Paris climate accord for the second time and implement blanket tariffs.

A 20% tariff, which Trump has repeatedly floated, could cut Germany’s GDP by as much as 1.5%, the German economics institute IW estimated, a serious blow to an economy that is set to shrink in 2024 for the second year in a row.

German officials insist they have done more to prepare this time around, citing in particular their outreach efforts to Republicans: German politicians had an unusually large presence at the Republican National Convention, and officials have been meeting with Republican senators, governors, and foreign policy experts to highlight Germany’s role as a key trading partner and stress that the country has now reached NATO’s spending target.

“All the Europeans, including the Germans, have recently scrambled” to meet with potential Trump officials, Leonard Schütte, a senior researcher at the Munich Security Conference, said. But “personal connections only get you so far.”

Experts in Berlin and some European officials think the government has largely failed to present the kind of ambitious policies that could help insulate the country from the tectonic shifts in American foreign policy that a Trump presidency could entail.

At the top of the list is defense spending: The government has only budgeted for Germany to hit NATO’s 2% spending target until 2026, and big questions remain about how the country will continue to finance its defense buildup with a struggling economy and tight fiscal rules.

Johann Wadephul, a conservative lawmaker, said he had been peppered with questions about the hole in the defense budget during meetings with US lawmakers in Washington, DC. “They know it, and Trump will know it as well, or his advisors will know it,” Wadephul said.

If Trump is elected, Berlin may not have much more time to get ready. During his first term, Trump’s most radical proposals came towards the last months of his presidency and were not fully completed before he left office, Jürgen Hardt, foreign policy spokesperson for the center-right Christian Democratic Union, told Semafor. This time, Germany would face “serious challenges” right off the bat, as the former president is better prepared to hit the ground running from day one, the lawmaker predicted.

But Germany’s three-party coalition is teetering on the brink of collapse, meaning there is little political leadership to boost defense spending or take a leading role within the EU. “The fiscal and political room for maneuver for actually preparing foreign policy initiatives in Germany is extremely limited,” said Schütte.

The Germans “are in denial, they don’t want to talk about it,” a European official told Semafor. “Even if Trump is elected, Berlin will do everything they can to keep the USA engaged in Europe.”