West German chancellor Willy Brandt liked to say the best way to predict the future was to shape it. That wisdom is half a century old, yet it carries a new urgency as European leaders face off with Trump allies at this weekend’s Munich Security Conference from Friday.
For 61 years the weekend gathering combined daytime defence crystal ball-gazing with strong evening cocktails. Munich’s only – golden – rule was simple: “Engage and interact with each other, don’t lecture or ignore one another.”
That rule was torn up last year when US vice-president JD Vance, just weeks in office, denounced Europe’s “enemy within” and warned that European democracy was in danger from state crackdowns on free speech and anti-migration parties.
Outraged European attendees pushed back against a bemused Vance, who will not attend this year’s gathering. Instead European leaders will have to air their denunciations of Ice and Greenland to US secretary of state Marco Rubio.
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For US allies gathering in Munich, the question of the hour is what – if anything – such US allyship entails in 2026.
A prominent absentee will be Canadian leader Mark Carney, staying at home after the mass shooting in British Columbia. Last month in Davos he warned that a “rupture” in the rules-based international order, long underpinned by American hegemony, had ended “pleasant fiction” of global co-operation.
Carney’s call for a new values-based realism, and greater co-operation among middle powers, has found widespread acclaim among European leaders.
Conference organisers have built on Carney’s address, warning delegates this week to react prudently – and quickly – to the Trump “wrecking ball” whistling past their heads.
“More than 80 years after construction began, the postwar international order is now under destruction,” the conference organisers noted. Sticking with decades-old habits – “sterile communiqués, predictable conferences and cautious diplomacy” – is a “recipe for failure in an era where opponents have become more ruthless and much more innovative”.
“In an era of wrecking-ball politics,” the conference organisers warned, “those who simply stand by are at constant risk of entombment.”
Its gloomy warnings are a response, too, to the new US National Security Strategy.
It views Europe as “strategically and culturally vital to the United States”, while promising pushback against European migration policies it says are expediting the continent’s “civilisation erasure”. As a result, the strategy says, the US should cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.
Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies describes the standoff – including a Trump administration vow to engage with far-right parties – as a “moment of cavernous divergence between Europe’s view of itself and Trump’s vision for Europe”.
That view is shared by many European citizens, judging by a six-country YouGov poll. Only one in five Germans still has a positive view of the US, down from 52 per cent two years ago. Elsewhere, positive perceptions of the US remain in the lower range, from 25 per cent (Italy) to 30 per cent (UK).
A month after the Greenland standoff, it is little surprise that just 11 per cent of Danes have a positive view of the US.
In Germany, France, Spain and Denmark the percentage of respondents viewing the US as either an unfriendly or hostile nation ranges from 30 to 65 per cent. Interestingly, though, only the Germans surveyed are alone in thinking largely that this shift is permanent.
A year after the Vance shock in Munich, the survey throws up an interesting contradiction: the French and Germans surveyed are at odds with their leaders on the best approach to Washington.
Just 27 per cent of French surveyed by YouGov think the Trump stance on Europe is permanent. Yet French president Emmanuel Macron is pushing for a radical response, demanding a buy-European “economic revolution” to counter a Trump administration whose “contempt” for the EU is expediting “minute-by-minute instability”.
“What we shouldn’t do is bow down or try to reach a settlement,” he told European newspapers earlier this week.
Across the Rhine in Germany, chancellor Friedrich Merz, a chastened Atlanticist, still favours a two-track approach to the US: plan for the worst, hope for the best.
Munich delegates expect to learn more on Friday afternoon about how he plans to do this. Recent Merz speeches have been Carney-lite, demanding greater European unity and competitiveness, without showing Washington the cold shoulder.
Mindful of the delicate talks to end the war in Ukraine, Merz will meet Marco Rubio. But he also has a date with Trump troll-in-chief Gavin Newsom, governor of California.
His two-track approach, though, appears out of step with German public opinion. The YouGov survey suggests 41 per cent of those surveyed think the US shift on Europe under Trump is permanent, with 45 per cent demanding greater European efforts to defend its independence and values – even at the expense of the partnership with the US.
Already, Germans are thinking the unthinkable: real independence from the US.
In his bestselling book Das Erwachsene Land (The Grown-up Country), German journalist Holger Stark imagines a Germany without America as “a historic chance”.
“This farewell is difficult, it makes one melancholic and perhaps it is not a farewell forever but the start of something new. But it is a farewell,” he says.
He frames Germany’s multibillion borrowing for arms and infrastructure as a “one-off chance for Germany to become a grown-up country that can take care of itself .. it could be a second fall-of-the-wall moment”.
In Munich, such elegiac arguments will collide with hard realities and differing European perspectives on how to respond to Trump 2.0.
The Merz administration has tripled Germany’s domestic arms expenditure to 5 per cent of gross domestic product. But its blank-cheque approach to security and defence has shifted the bottlenecks elsewhere: German defence and security policy is hampered now by too much money rather than too little.
Berlin is struggling to spend the money fast enough – while actual delivery is hampered by capacity limits on what German arms companies such as Rhinemetall can manufacture.
Another revealing episode involves FCAS, the troubled next-generation war plane under development by a French-German-Spanish consortium.
After years of rows and standstill, the German side wants out. They cite unreasonable French demands and interference, and suggest parallel plane-building as a face-saving solution.
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Yet Macron insisted this week – with a Pythonesque defiance – that FCAS was not dead yet.
For all the inner-European dissent and transatlantic distance, EU and US attendees in Munich will still meet Ukraine leaders and discuss growing fears of a larger regional war following any end to the war with Russia.
Watching such European-US interactions closely will be the delegation from Beijing. A year ago Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi warned Munich attendees of an unnamed country “withdrawing from international treaties and organisations, and I think in Europe you can feel chills almost every day”.
After a full year of Trump chills, Chinese delegates will hope Europeans in Munich are now more open to Wang Yi’s 2025 undertaking to “safeguard the UN-centred international system, observe the basic norms governing international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter”.
Such overtures are not new. Half a century ago Willy Brandt, father of German “Ostpolitik” – West Germany’s policy of detente with its eastern counterpart – urged European countries to free themselves from “the outdated idea that there can only be security policy by meeting additional demands of an American president”.
“We should free ourselves from this strange behaviour, shaped by an inferiority complex,” he urged. “After all, it’s not as if our first priority is to note whether someone’s forehead creases in certain Washington offices.”
