US ‘not
powerful enough to go it alone’, Merz tells Munich conference
German
chancellor rebuts idea of American unilateralism and says ‘democracies have
partners and allies’
Patrick
Wintour in Munich
Fri 13
Feb 2026 19.15 CET
The US
acting alone has reached the limits of its power and may already have lost its
role as global leader, Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, warned Donald
Trump at the opening of the Munich Security Conference.
Merz also
disclosed he had held initial talks with the French president, Emmanuel Macron,
over the possibility of joining France’s nuclear umbrella, underlining his call
for Europe to develop a stronger self-standing security strategy.
In a
speech on Friday designed to set a firm yet conciliatory tone about the future
of the transatlantic partnership, Merz argued the old order had ended and in
this new age of superpowers even the US was reaching the limits of going it
alone.
Referring
to those that warned the international rules-based order was about to be
destroyed, Merz said: “I fear we must put it even more bluntly. This order,
however imperfect it was even at its best, no longer exists in that form.”
Switching
to English to ram home his message, Merz said: “In the era of great power
rivalry, even the United States will not be powerful enough to go it alone.
Dear friends, being a part of Nato is not only Europe’s competitive advantage.
It is also the United States’ competitive advantage.”
“So let’s
repair and revive transatlantic trust together,” he added.
The
German chancellor’s speech opened the annual gathering of top global security
figures including many European leaders and the US secretary of state, Marco
Rubio.
At last
year’s conference, held a few weeks into Trump’s second term, the US
vice-president, JD Vance, stunned European leaders by lecturing them about the
state of democracy and freedom of speech on the continent – a moment that set
the tone for the last year.
A series
of statements and moves from the Trump administration targeting allies has
followed, including Trump’s threat last month to impose new tariffs on several
European countries in a move to secure US control of Greenland, a
semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, a Nato ally.
Merz drew
most applause from an audience brimming with hostility toward US unilateralism
when he directly criticised the current American administration, saying: “The
culture war of the Maga movement is not ours. Freedom of speech ends here with
us when that speech is directed against human dignity and the basic law. We do
not believe in tariffs and protectionism, but in free trade. We stand by
climate agreements and the World Health Organization.”
“In the
age of great powers, our freedom is no longer a given. It is threatened,” he
said, adding that “firmness and will power will be needed to assert this
freedom”. Challenging Trump’s unilateral style, Merz added: “Autocracies may
have followers, democracies have partners and allies.”
At the
same time, he said Europe must cast off its excessive dependence on the US,
emphasising: “We won’t do that by writing off Nato.”
He also
urged the US president to recognise it was still possible to exhaust Russia
economically and militarily, to the point where it was willing to come to the
negotiating table over Ukraine.
With
Germany one of the European countries doing the most to boost its own defence
spending, Merz clearly felt in a strong enough position to insist the US needed
to do more to listen to European concerns about its security and the legitimacy
of a sustained European pillar of Nato.
Describing
the Munich conference as a seismograph for the state of US-European relations,
he said the Ukraine war “had forced Europe to return from a vacation from world
history. Together we have entered an era that is once again marked by power and
big-power politics.”
These big
powers, Merz said, “make their own rules. It is fast, harsh and often
unpredictable. These powers exploit natural resources, technologies and supply
chains using them as bargaining tools.”
Merz was
speaking as the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine
approaches and one year after Vance used his speech in the same hall to
criticise Europeans for not taking enough control of their own defence
arrangements and ignoring the demands of their electorates.
Merz
responded by saying it was crucial for the continent to change its mindset and
fully exploit the “enormous” military, political, economic and technological
potential of a “sovereign Europe”. Germany was striving for “partnership-based
leadership” in Europe but retained no “hegemonic fantasies”.
Merz said
he had begun talks with Macron about a European nuclear deterrent. This, he
said, must be firmly integrated into Nato’s nuclear arsenal and would not
result in some parts of Europe being more defended than others. The chancellor
stated that Germany was not abandoning Nato but wanted to establish a “strong,
self-sustaining pillar” within the alliance.
Macron in
his speech also called for greater European defence sovereignty, a theme of the
French for more than a decade, with the French president’s entourage feeling
vindicated by the growing US signs that it is reducing its commitments in
Europe. French nuclear weapons are different from those of the UK in that they
are not part of the Nato purview and not reliant on US technology.
Merz
pointed out that the EU treaties contained a mutual defence clause – article 42
– in the event of “armed aggression” against one of the EU member states. “We
must now spell out how we want to organise this in a European way – not as a
substitute for Nato, but as a self-supporting strong pillar within the
alliance,” he said.
There is,
however, tension between France and Germany about their respective roles in a
revised Nato in which the US takes a less dominant role. Germany is aiming for
the key position of chair of the military committee.
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