The chairman of the Munich Security Conference, Christoph Heusgen, said that Germany cannot rest all the time on America as a shelter, and must thus further strengthen itself. As we read in an interview that Heusgen did with ZDF:

ZDF: You have experience with the first Trump administration: What can we expect if Trump wins again?

Heusgen: I think we will experience a Trump that will be even worse than the one we experienced between 2017 and 2021. By that I mean that he will then try to implement his erratic, emotional politics. And we have to be prepared that he will try to somehow reach a deal with Putin.

That he will say: “You Germans have to defend yourselves now!” And it will be very difficult. We now have very nice coherence within the G7 . It won’t be like that again, but we’ll have to deal with a Trump who doesn’t know how he got up today. And what his moods are like.

ZDF: Are we prepared for this?

Heusgen: I think that as Germans we know mentally that something is threatening. What we haven’t done yet is draw the conclusions from it. This means that, on the one hand, we in Germany do our job in defense. But also that we do more in Europe to achieve closer, stronger cooperation on security and defense issues.

We cannot guarantee our defense when faced with a massive attack. We need America and in this respect we are still at the mercy of America. It has worked great in the past. But we have no guarantee that it will continue to be so. And that’s why we have to change times. We have to do our homework and we can’t just sit on the sofa.