opening day of the Munich Security Conference<\/a> last week, Germany\u2019s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, warned of the threat Russia posed to Europe and attempted to draw the US back into firm mutual security commitments, even as he acknowledged ties were in need of repair.<\/p>\n\u201cIn the era of great power rivalry, even the United States will not be powerful enough to go it alone,\u201d he said. \u201cDear friends, being a part of Nato is not only Europe\u2019s competitive advantage. It is also the United States\u2019 competitive advantage. So let\u2019s repair and revive transatlantic trust together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johann Wadephul speaks at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday. Photograph: dts News Agency Germany\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n
At the same time, Merz disclosed he had held initial talks with Macron over the possibility of joining France\u2019s nuclear umbrella. However, the prospect of Europe pro-actively seeking its own nuclear defence capabilities beyond US protection laid bare differences within Germany\u2019s ruling coalition.<\/p>\n
Wadephul, a member of Merz\u2019s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), voiced caution about the prospect of Europe mounting its own more robust nuclear defence, saying: \u201cThere are enough atomic weapons in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
He told German public television late on Sunday that \u201cno one in Washington is questioning\u201d whether the US would use its own nuclear arsenal to defend Europe if necessary, and he warned against creating that impression with a debate questioning the US protective shield.<\/p>\n
Germany\u2019s vice-chancellor, Lars Klingbeil, said Berlin would continue to rely on Nato\u2019s nuclear deterrence system and had no plans to acquire its own atomic weapons \u2013 an option it renounced under existing treaties.<\/p>\n
He welcomed the talks with France about joining its nuclear umbrella. \u201cWe\u2019ll see what the outcome is,\u201d Klingbeil, a Social Democrat, told the German news agency dpa.<\/p>\n
However, the senior Christian Democrat Armin Laschet said the proposal risked sending a message to Washington that Germany was voluntarily renouncing the US protective shield. And he noted that France would insist on full control over how its nuclear arsenal was used.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe [Macron] will not give the German chancellor a say in this nuclear armament issue,\u201d Laschet said on public television.<\/p>\n
Thomas R\u00f6wekamp, the CDU chair of the Bundestag defence committee, said Germany must take on more responsibility for European security but not in an ill-advised drive to replace US nuclear guarantees. He called in the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper for a \u201cEuropean complement within Nato\u201d to the US atomic arsenal.<\/p>\n
France had been making a key contribution to European deterrence for years, R\u00f6wekamp said, and the current exchange showed \u201chow closely we are continuing to develop this contribution together\u201d.<\/p>\n
In an article published in the Guardian<\/a> and the German newspaper Die Welt at the weekend, Britain and Germany\u2019s highest-ranking military leaders made an unprecedented joint appeal to the public to accept the \u201cmoral\u201d case for rearmament and prepare for the threat of war with Russia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"France needs to boost its defence spending to make European self-sufficiency a reality, Germany\u2019s foreign minister has said.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":471965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-471964","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/471965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}