Downtown Munich is best-known for chic shops and flashy fast cars but right now its streets are bedecked with posters advertising next generation drones.
“Europe’s security under construction” boasts the slogan on an eye-catching set of sleek black-and-white photographs, festooned across a scaffolding-clad church on one of this town’s best known pedestrian boulevards.
Such an unapologetic public display of military muscle would have been unimaginable here just a few years ago, but the world outside Germany is changing fast, and taking this country with it.
The southern region of Bavaria has become Germany’s leading defence technology hub, focusing on AI, drones and aerospace.
People here, like most other Europeans, say they feel increasingly exposed – squeezed between an expansionist Russia and an economically aggressive China to the east, and an increasingly unpredictable, former best pal, the United States, to the west.
According to a recent Eurobarometer poll, more than two-thirds of Europeans (68%) feel their country is under threat.
This autumn, Germany’s Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance warned for the first time since the Cold War that war is no longer “unlikely”. While emphasising that this is a safe country, it also recommends that Germans keep food supplies to last three to ten days at home. Just in case.
Germany is the number one single donor of military and other aid to Ukraine, now that the US has halted any new direct aid. Opinion polls suggest voters here want to feel better protected at home too.
The question for this country, along with others in Europe is whether traditional alliances with the US, in Nato and the EU can suffice, or whether they should be diversifying into ad-hoc coalitions alongside other like-minded nations such as Australia, South Korea and Japan?
The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, underlined a now fragile relationship with the US, despite Rubio’s gentler rhetoric. “Some lines have been crossed that cannot be uncrossed anymore,” she said. “Europeans have suffered shock therapy.”
But will some countries in Europe grasp what warmness there was in Rubio’s speech as an excuse not to rush to boost defence spending as promised? The coffers of most European governments are over stretched already and their voters tend to prioritise cost-of-living concerns over defence budgets.
Rachel Ellehuus, Director-General of defence think-tank RUSI told me she sees a rift opening up across the continent.
On the one hand, you have the Nordic and Baltic nations that are geographically close to Russia, and also Germany and the Netherlands, which are all big defence spenders, she says, whereas in southern Europe, there’s Spain, for example, that is absolutely unapologetic about refusing to increase defence budgets to the levels demanded by Donald Trump.
France and Britain are both verbally committed to boosting defence spending, says Ellehuus, but are still looking for a “political band aid” to help them explain to voters the trade-offs that will involve – higher taxes, less welfare or more borrowing.
“Europeans need to get to work yesterday and to focus,” she says. “They have 5-10 years to stand on their own two feet in terms of conventional defence capabilities.”
Last week, U.S. Undersecretary of Defence Elbridge Colby couldn’t have been more stark in his messaging at a meeting of Nato defence ministers he attended in Brussels: Europe was no longer a US priority, the Indo-Pacific was.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are reprioritising the defence of our homeland and the protection of our interests in our Hemisphere,” he said.
While he emphasised that the US remained committed to Nato’s mutual defence clause, where an attack against one member is viewed as an attack against all, Colby insisted the US would be reducing its capabilities in Europe, becoming “a more limited and focused” presence.
Europe had to become a partner, rather than a dependent, he said, calling for a new “Nato 3.0”. The old world order with the West at its core, has faded but the MSC this weekend made clear that what comes next for Europe and the US is still very much up in the air.
Marco Rubio called for a new century of western civilisation, Elbridge Colby wants a re-vamped Nato, while the UK’s prime minister appealed in Munich for the western alliance to be re-made.
