U.S. Leadership Further Strains Relations with Germany

As Germany and the United States celebrate the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, relations between both countries find themselves at a low point.

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There was snow on the ground on the day the Dachau concentration camp was liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945, but the day of its eightieth anniversary brought a sunny afternoon. At a commemorative ceremony at the Dachau Memorial Site, German representatives expressed their gratitude to the United States for uprooting the Nazi totalitarian dictatorship from Germany, while American representatives praised the modern ties between both countries. 

And yet, there were some signs that U.S.-German relations are not what they used to be. One came from Karl Freller, a member of the Christian Social Union (CSU) of Bavaria, the ruling party in the southern German state. Freller, who is also the director of the Bavarian Memorial Foundation, emphasized in his speech that weapons were needed to liberate the Dachau concentration camp, in what was likely a reference to the Trump Administration’s reluctance to keep arming Ukraine.

U.S.-German relations have been in crisis at least since February 2025, when U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance visited Germany for the Munich Security Conference. Two days after paying a visit to the former Dachau concentration camp with his family, Vance addressed the foreign leaders assembled at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in central Munich. The Vice President accused Europe of retreating “from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America” and admonished German political leaders for isolating groups like the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) from government offices. 

Then-German chancellor Olaf Scholz replied by noting that the AfD has been guilty of relativizing the Nazi cruelties Vance had seen evidence of in Dachau. One such example is that high-ranking members of the AfD have said that “Hitler and the Nazis are just bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history” and advocated for a 180-degree change in the way Germany deals with its Nazi past. In the February 2025 general elections, the AfD finished in second place for the first time in the party’s history, garnering nearly 21 percent of the vote.

The impact of Vance’s speech only intensified when foreign leaders realized in the coming days that the Trump Administration planned to sideline its European partners in its efforts to put an end to the Ukraine War. The shock was felt across Europe, particularly in the German mainstream media and political class, which has close ties to the United States. The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for instance, spoke about Vance’s address as “a cold shower for Europe.”

In March 2025, the combined fallout from Vance’s speech and the subsequent clash between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House provided Friedrich Merz, leader of Germany’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and incoming chancellor, with an opportunity to garner parliamentary support for a constitutional change to free German military expenditures from the country’s rigid limits on debt accumulation. Merz, who was elected chancellor of Germany on May 6, defended the move, saying that the United State’s ambiguous signals regarding security guarantees for Europe required Germany to invest more in its defense.

Rachel Tausendfreund, a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, says that U.S.-Germany relations now find themselves in “a new quality of low.” Although in the past there have been significant rifts in the bilateral relations, such as Germany’s opposition to the Iraq war in 2003 and the 2013 revelation that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on then-chancellor Angela Merkel, Tausendfreund says, “these disagreements did not fundamentally change the perception of the German political and policymaking class that the United States was a reliable partner with at least largely aligned goals, and, more importantly, a reliable security provider.” 

During Germany’s February 2025 general election campaign Elon Musk participated virtually in a campaign rally with the AfD’s candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel. In early May, after Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution moved to classify the AfD as a “confirmed rightwing extremist” group, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio decried the decision, accusing the German government of “tyranny.” 

The U.S. government’s interference in German internal affairs has caused consternation on this side of the Atlantic. Tausendfreund notes that Germans believe they “may need to start thinking of the Trump Administration not only as ‘not a friend,’ but potentially as a threat. The wildly outrageous imperialist ambitions of Trump, for example in threatening to annex Greenland, strengthen these concerns.”

Ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential elections, 83 percent of Germans supported Kamala Harris and only 10 percent backed Donald Trump. Four months into Trump’s presidency, Germany’s opinions about the Republican leader have not significantly improved: 74 percent of Germans believe Trump’s policies should be met with severity from the German government, whereas 14 percent favor meeting his demands. What’s more, 39 percent of the German population sees Trump as favoring Russia over Ukraine in the ongoing negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. This perception drives Germany and the United States apart at a time when nearly two-thirds of the German population are worried Russia could attack other European countries.

Soon after he took office in early May, Merz scheduled a telephone call with Trump in an attempt to mend the tensions with the United States. According to Merz in an interview with Die Zeit, Trump explained during the conversation that his family comes from Kallstadt, a village in the southwestern German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Merz reportedly told Trump that he had been deployed as a soldier in a nearby area during his military service, and that he would invite Trump there. On Ukraine, Merz told Die Zeit he did not have the impression from their conversation that Trump was aligned with Vladimir Putin’s interests.

Regarding the new chancellor’s future relationship with Trump, Tausendfreund says that Merz has the advantage of being “a conservative businessman who has been very critical of ‘wokeness’ and migration. So there is significant agreement on some issues. But there are larger challenges, such as Trump’s conviction that Germany deals unfairly economically with the United States, and Trump’s disdain for the European Union. Plus, Trump will probably expect Merz to fawn and flatter, and I’m not sure Merz will manage this.”

In 1992, on the forty-seventh anniversary of the liberation of Munich from the Nazis by U.S. troops, the Munich city council dedicated an inscription to the soldiers who freed the Bavarian capital. The inscription is still there, for tourists and locals alike to see, and it will remain even if U.S.-German relations take another turn for the worse. It reads: “To the members of the US armed forces who liberated Munich from national tyranny on 30 April 1945.”