Can the Alternative for Germany save NATO?

“We are at an existential milestone for our freedom and security,” declared German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who demanded European involvement in the Ukraine peace talks initiated this week by Presidents Trump and Putin.

Better said, it is an existential moment for Baerbock’s Green Party, the most aggressive war hawks on the European political spectrum. Despite the Greens’ enthusiasm for the Ukraine War, only 9% of its members told German pollsters that they would fight to defend their country. 

Europe’s war hawks don’t want to pay and don’t want to fight. Their sense of entitlement derives from their status as clients of the Washington foreign and security policy establishment, which paid billions of dollars a year through USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and prominent private foundations to keep complaisant Europeans on the payroll. 

“Brutally hard Americans shock Europe,” reads the headline in today’s “Berlin Playbook” newsletter by the German Springer Verlag-owned Politico, the recipient of $8 million a year in US government subsidies, according to a White House spokesperson.

The shock goes far beyond peace negotiations in Ukraine, which left the Europeans “relegated to the children’s table,” Die Welt editor Jacques Schuster complained February 13. 

That plug was pulled by President Donald Trump, who has warned for years that the United States could not and would not pay for Europe’s defense indefinitely. Trump on February 13 proposed a new global security pact with Russia and China that would allow the United States to cut its military budget in half.

“At some point, when things settle down, I’m going to meet with China and I’m going to meet with Russia, in particular those two, and I’m going to say there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on the military … and I’m going to say we can spend this on other things,” Trump said.

Europe will have to see to its own defense. The only major political party with a clear defense strategy is Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the scrappy populist contender that filled the vacuum on the conservative spectrum after Angela Merkel moved her Christian Democrats toward the left.

Merkel suspended compulsory military service for all males 18 years or older in 2011 and later allied her party with the Social Democrats and adopted green anti-nuclear energy policies.

In a December 22, 2024, analysis, we noted that the AfD is the only German party proposing a comprehensive revival of military conscription. The AfD’s party platform states:

Military service is honorable service. It should not be understood first of all as an impingement on the fundamental rights of a citizen, but rather as the civic duty to act on behalf of peace and security, and to guarantee the existence of our country and its stable democracy. The national army should be anchored in society, and the elimination of conscription has done significant damage to this relationship in only a few years.

At the AfD’s party convention January 12 in the town of Riesa in the state of Saxony, its co-chair Tino Chrupalla proposed to remove conscription from the party’s electoral campaign program. More than 70% of the 600 delegates voted to keep conscription at the forefront of the campaign, outvoting the AfD’s second-highest official.

AfD Bundestag member Jan-Wenzel Schmidt, a leader of the party in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, told Asia Times, “The AfD advocates the full reinstatement of conscription. National service for Germany offers young people the opportunity for personal development while making a valuable contribution to their homeland. Most importantly, it is essential for rebuilding Germany’s defense capabilities.” 

He added, “It is critical for Germany to become more independent from its alliance partners. The Bundeswehr [German armed forces] must be capable, if necessary, of defending Germany autonomously.

“This requires the acquisition of modern defense equipment and the expansion of our own defense production of which German industry is eminently capable,” he continued. “The AfD is firmly committed to NATO membership, provided that the alliance sticks to its role as a defensive alliance and does not act as a global aggressor.”

No one will fight and die for “Europe,” the amorphous supranational bureaucracy sitting in Brussels. But patriots will fight for their country, the wellspring of their identity and the vehicle for its transmission to future generations. 

The AfD’s commitment to a large citizen army has deep strategic implications. Under Angela Merkel and her successor, Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Bundeswehr atrophied to the point that it cannot field a single combat-ready division.

Germany’s defense posture consists of doing nothing while cowering under the American nuclear umbrella. That is an inherently unstable and dangerous state of affairs. The absence of conventional forces channels every crisis towards the nuclear escalation ladder. 

Helmut Schmidt clearly recognized this danger that (West) Germany would become a nuclear battleground (and cemetery, as German soldiers darkly put it in the 1970s) when he served as defense minister (1969-1972) under Chancellor Willy Brandt and acted on when he became chancellor himself in 1974 (serving in that position until 1982).

Nicknamed Schmidt-the-Lip (“Schmidt-Schnauze”) by his compatriots, he defined tactical (or theatre) nuclear weapons as “nuclear weapons that go off in Germany.”

He set out to restore credible strategic equilibrium in Europe, in particular, after the Soviet deployment of the MIRVed SS-20 mobile IRBM in 1976.

Under Schmidt’s leadership, the Bundeswehr grew to its maximum personnel strength of 495, 875 by the end of 1982. The army fielded 38 brigades, deployed over 7,000 tanks and was judged (even by American observers) the world’s best standing fighting force. NATO’s 1979 decision, prompted by Schmidt, to deploy 108 Pershing II IRBM launchers in Europe led to equalization of the in-theatre nuclear balance.

And yet, in 1983, the world came perilously close to nuclear war during the NATO “Able Archer” exercises. NATO’s attempt to make the exercises hyper-realistic by involving UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl convinced the Russians that the exercise screened a NATO first strike against the Warsaw Pact.

In response, the Soviets readied their forces, including their nuclear forces, and potential disaster was only avoided when NATO headquarters realized the Soviet countermobilization was real and called the whole exercise off.

After the near-disaster, Germany continued to build up and modernize its conventional forces, a process that only came to a halt after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. 

Talk of a peace dividend was reasonable and a degree of downsizing of the unified Germany would have made sense.

What made no sense, and now condemns Germany to impotence in the current security situation in Europe, was a series of mindless government decisions driven by narrow budget considerations of the Social Democrat-Green ruling coalitions under Gerhard Schroeder (1998 – 2005) and the Christian Democratic-Social Democratic and Christian Democratic-Liberal coalitions headed by Angela Markel.

Those successive governments let the Bundeswehr fall into utter disrepair, its personnel reduced to just 180,000 (and falling) at present.

Trump wants a new security architecture less dependent on nuclear arsenals. The key to achieving this goal is a robust German conventional force. That isn’t merely a matter of budget allocation, but of a national commitment to defense. The AfD’s proposal to revive the citizen army that Germany had in the closing years of the Cold War dovetails with Trump’s strategic vision.