Rearmament Without Strategy: Why Europe Risks Another Bleak Year In 2026 | ZeroHedge

Via Middle East Eye via AFP Addressing his party on 14 December, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made headlines with remarks unprecedented in postwar Europe. " Dear friends, the decades of Pax Americana are largely over for us in Europe, and for us in Germany as well. It no longer exists as we know it. And nostalgia won't change that. The Americans are now very, very ruthlessly pursuing their own interests. And this cannot have a different answer than that it is time that we also pursue our own interests. And dear friends, here we are not weak, we are not small." Pax Americana, the US-led security order that has come to define American and European partnerships since the end of the Second World War, is now being openly questioned. Indeed, Merz has crossed a line that few European leaders have even contemplated since the Cold War - triggered by the shock generated by the new US National Security Strategy (NSS), issued earlier this month. The document no longer even identifies Russia as a threat , describing it instead as a factor in the Trump administration's efforts to reach peace in Ukraine, an objective now presented as a strategic interest for Washington, alongside the stabilisation of relations with Moscow. via AFP To rub salt into the wound, the NSS states that "the perception and reality of Nato in constant expansion must stop" . In a single sentence, nearly three decades of western narrative, which has brazenly denied any link between Nato's eastward expansion and the war in Ukraine, were quietly discarded by the alliance's leading power. It is no surprise, then, that the NSS was received in Europe with consternation . But what is harder to justify is the sense of surprise. The document merely puts into writing what US President Donald Trump has been stating, with characteristic bluntness, for over a decade. European elites were even forewarned last February, when Trump dispatched Vice President JD Vance to the Munich Security Conference to deliver an unequivocal message about what lay ahead. Merz's remarks followed similar declarations from Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte, who delivered an apocalyptic speech in Berlin, as well as from France's Chief of Defence Staff General Fabien Mandon and Nato Military Committee chair Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone. In an interview with the Financial Times, Cavo Dragone went so far as to advocate pre-emptive or preventive hybrid attacks against Russia. It is difficult to avoid the impression that this chorus of fearmongering is intended to build public support for the EU's recently announced 800 billion euro ($942bn) rearmament plan , ostensibly designed to fill the vacuum left by a US administration increasingly determined to disengage, while confronting a heavily exaggerated Russian threat. Rearmament without strategy This narrative becomes even more disturbing when viewed against the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has come under accusations of ideological links to Nazism, at a time when Germany is being urged to rearm on a massive scale. Yet this...

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