Merz Bets Germany's Future on Autonomy as US Pulls 5,000 Troops

Friedrich Merz has decided what kind of Germany he wants, and this week he spent down a great deal to get there. The direction is autonomy — a Germany that leans less on the United States, because the chancellor no longer trusts where Washington is leading. The price of saying so came first: after Merz called the US war on Iran "ill-considered" and likened it to the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon announced it would pull about 5,000 troops out of Germany over the coming year. Berlin is treating the loss as the cost of independence rather than a wound to be nursed.

The clearest move came in the air. On June 6, on the margins of an EU summit in Montenegro, Merz told Emmanuel Macron that Germany and France were giving up on the manned fighter at the heart of their €100bn Future Combat Air System — the would-be European super-jet that was the proudest emblem of building a defence industry without the Americans. Only its software backbone survives. The thing collapsed because Airbus and France's Dassault could never agree who would build what, which is its own lesson about how hard Merz's vision will be: Europe's big states want sovereignty in defence but will not share it. On Ukraine he was more constructive, using a Bundestag speech to float an EU "associate membership" that would give Kyiv a seat at summits and a commissioner in Brussels — a way to anchor Ukraine to Europe while full membership stays years off, and a piece of the wider European move to own the war.

The trouble with betting on strength abroad is that Germany's weaknesses are domestic, and they surfaced in the same days. A suspected extremist arson attack on a substation in Reutlingen knocked out power to some 40,000 homes and critical sites — the kind of cheap sabotage European security officials increasingly read as deliberate pressure on a society, not random vandalism. And the figures behind that unease are now official: the federal police logged a record 85,837 politically motivated crimes in 2025, with the interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, singling out right-wing extremism, which accounted for roughly half, as the gravest threat, even as violent crime on the far left jumped sharply too.

That is the contradiction Merz has to manage. He is asking Germany to lead Europe's defence and underwrite Ukraine's future at the exact moment its own grid is being sabotaged and its politics are turning more violent. The autonomy he wants is real and arguably overdue; the capacity to deliver it is what the FCAS wreck calls into question.

The signal to watch is whether the fighter's collapse proves to be a one-off or a pattern. If Berlin and Paris drift into building rival national jets, Merz's Europe will look less like a coming power than a collection of states that agree on the threat and on nothing else — and a Germany that has cut its American safety net before its European one is built will have taken on the leadership of a continent it cannot yet equip.