DURING DONALD TRUMP’S presidential campaign, it seemed impossible to predict what kind of foreign policy he might pursue once in office. On the one side, there were the portents of radical change: Trump lauded Vladimir Putin and criticized allies from Angela Merkel to Enrique Peña Nieto. He called NATO obsolete and railed against free trade. There was reason to think that a President Trump would steer an isolationist course, undertake radical changes to American alliances and attempt to dismantle the liberal world order.

There were also signs of continuity, however. After some of his most radical statements, Trump would claim that he had been misunderstood. It was NATO’s strategic focus, not the alliance itself, that was obsolete, his team would assure reporters. He was not opposed to free trade but simply in favor of fair trade, he would explain. On the whole, the impression that lingered was, more than anything else, one of radical uncertainty.

This has not really changed since Trump moved into the White House. The president has continued to make laudatory statements about Putin—yet seemingly avoided forging closer ties with Russia. He has continued to criticize American allies—yet failed to act on those criticisms. Finally, he has expressed support for dictators like Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt and seemingly accepted that Bashar al-Assad would stay in power in Syria—only to bomb Assad’s troops a few days later. For now, uncertainty and unpredictability remain the hallmarks of American foreign policy in the age of Donald Trump.

For countries like Germany, whose safety has long depended on America’s military might and strategic reliability, this is a glaring wake-up call: They need to rethink their foreign policy from the ground up.

For decades Germany has, for all intents and purposes, outsourced its own security to the United States. While the Bundeswehr would have made a significant contribution if Germany had come under attack, it was clear that the country’s security ultimately depended on NATO and the American nuclear umbrella. With Trump casting doubt on his willingness to come to his allies’ defense, and potentially willing to accommodate Putin, Germany’s security is therefore looking less secure than ever.

And yet Germany’s small and cohesive foreign-policy community seems to be choosing the course of maximal inaction. While concerns about the implications of Trump’s ascent run deep, most German politicians, civil servants and think tankers have sought to maximize continuity with the policies of the past. The dominant approach has been to wait and see. And so even those lone voices that call for change envisage reforms that are in the realm of the miniscule: according to one senior member of Germany’s timorous foreign-policy community, the right response to Trump’s rise is to revisit a recent policy paper that advocates closer cooperation with France in matters of border security and the sharing of biometric information. According to another senior member, it is to equip the member states of the European Union with better tools to tackle cybersecurity.

The absence of proposals for real change has been most striking in the area of military policy. There would seemingly be good reason to expect that a country would scramble to beef up its own defenses when a friendly superpower that has long guaranteed its security calls into doubt its willingness to protect erstwhile allies. There would seemingly be even better reason to expect increased military spending when the new president of this superpower has repeatedly linked his willingness to continue defending the country with its willingness to spend a substantial portion of its budget on its own defense—something the country has failed to do for many years. And yet Germany seems to be doing nothing of the sort.

On paper, Germany is committed to spending 2 percent of GDP on its military by 2024. But the current budget, announced with much pride and fanfare, only raises military spending from 1.12 percent to 1.18 percent—a rate of increase that barely puts the country on track to meet its target by 2030. Even that seems unlikely. As Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s foreign minister, put the point at the latest NATO summit, it is “completely unrealistic” that Germany will spend so much of its budget on the military: “I don’t know any German politician,” he said, “who would claim that is reachable nor desirable.”

THERE ARE good reasons why German foreign-policy makers are determined to maintain a close relationship with the United States. Since World War II, the erstwhile enemies have built a close relationship that includes both a formal political alliance and strong personal links. As a constitutive part of the wider transatlantic partnership, it is one of the many building blocks of an international order that sets global norms, provides public goods and protects human rights. German politicians thus see their close alliance with the United States both as a cornerstone of their foreign policy and as a key contribution to a stable regime of international norms.

What’s more, Germany’s relationship with the United States is deeply bound up with the country’s self-perception. In the postwar era, Germans went from seeing defeat at the hands of the Allies as a catastrophe to viewing it as a liberation “from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National-Socialist regime.” They also saw their economy boosted by the Marshall Plan, West Berlin defended in the airlift and Soviet expansionism contained by the promise of American arms. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, a Rhenish nationalist, viewed Prussia as a bad dream from which a spanking new Germany, shorn of its eastern territories, could emerge. The nation-state was out; Westbindung was in. As a result, the country’s political elites have not only come to see America as a vital ally for strategic reasons. Rather, they also see their partnership with the United States as an important testament to the country’s embrace of democratic values and its political orientation towards the West.

The reluctance to ponder a radical change to German foreign policy is therefore owed in good part to a laudable desire to preserve the transatlantic relationship. And yet the very desire to rescue the transatlantic relationship and preserve liberal values should now push Germany to rethink its foreign policy in a much more radical way than has been seriously entertained in the past months.

In the new environment, Germany can no longer count on the United States for its own defense. A major rethink is thus not only in the interest of Germany, but also in that of other liberal democracies across Europe. Germany’s commitment to the United States has always been a commitment to a liberal world order. With the supposed leader of the free world less committed to that order than any predecessor in living memory, Germany’s commitment to these values would best be expressed through its willingness to do more to fight for them independently from the United States. This is by no means an abstract concern: Russia has already breached the territorial integrity of Ukraine and Georgia. An increase in German military capacity is urgently needed if Russia is to be deterred from going on similar adventures in the Baltics or in central Europe.

Even more importantly, it may seem as though a wait-and-see attitude is much more likely to preserve Germany’s relationship with the United States than a sudden determination to become more autonomous. But the opposite comes closer to the truth. For if Germany increases its ability to defend itself, and to come to the assistance of other liberal democracies around the world, it will be less tempted to strike an alliance with autocratic regimes in Russia or China in an hour of need. Conversely, if Germany does not take the necessary measures to become militarily self-sufficient, the United States turns out to weaken its commitment to NATO and autocratic regimes continue to project their force, the country could suddenly find its foreign policy subject to blackmail. Faced with threats from Moscow or Beijing, a weak Germany would have strong reasons to take a neutral role between East and West.

LIKE HIS predecessors, Donald Trump has called on America’s allies to make a bigger financial and military contribution to NATO. Unlike his predecessors, he has suggested that his willingness to honor the mutual-defense pact may be conditional on their willingness to pull their weight. This sea change gives European countries two superficially contradictory yet ultimately complementary reasons to spend heavily on their militaries in the coming years.

First, a rapid increase in military spending by European countries would maximize the chances of holding together the Western alliance. Since Trump is less guided by shared values than former presidents, the relative military prowess of his European allies is going to play a much larger role in his decisions about how to treat them. If Europe wants to keep Trump invested in the Western alliance, it must do all it can to strengthen his incentives to keep them on his side.

Second, the same tactic that helps to keep the Western alliance together in the short run can also double as a strategy for making European countries better able to provide for their own defense in case such efforts ultimately prove futile. Given radical uncertainty about America’s future course, making a plan for a future in which the alliance with the United States can no longer be taken for granted should be at the top of the agenda of every European leader. And though it largely goes unspoken, the ultimate upshot of losing America’s shield would be obvious: Europe would then need enough military strength to provide for basic forms of self-defense on its own.

At first glance, it may seem as though pondering the possibility of a European defense system that no longer relies on a partnership with the United States betrays a lack of investment in the survival of the West as a moral and strategic entity. But that is not the case. If America becomes increasingly unpredictable and Europe remains militarily weak, European countries will grow more and more vulnerable to forms of blackmail from dictatorial powers like Russia and China. Accepting that democracies in central and eastern Europe should fall under Russia’s sphere of influence—or indeed that democracies in Asia should fall under China’s sphere of influence—may then start to look like a reasonable moral price that largely defenseless western European countries have to pay for their own physical safety. Preparing for the day in which the United States might prove unreliable therefore shouldn’t be seen as an abandonment of the hope that the Western alliance might be preserved or reestablished; rather, it helps to make a radical—and deeply destabilizing—realignment of alliances less likely even if the worst should come to pass.

INVESTING IN military spending is an important first step towards becoming less dependent on domestic developments in other countries amid a decline in stability. But the greater versatility that Germany now needs should take many other forms as well.

For a start, Germany should critically rethink common defense projects that make the country deeply dependent on its neighbors. Given the considerable gaps both in the availability of sufficient military personnel and in the quality of existing military materiel, it is obvious why European countries have increasingly opted for a form of codependency. This is reflected not only in forms of joint command for specific army units, but also in a strategy that sees different nations take on responsibility for different aspects of their mutual defense: the logistics come from Sweden, the transport planes from the Netherlands, the soldiers from Italy and the medical personnel from Germany.

In calmer times, this division of labor was a sensible use of sparse resources—a way of making one plus one add up to more than two. But in the politically uncertain times we have now entered, this division of labor may only succeed in ensuring that European defense capabilities go unused in an hour of need. For if each country contributes some core function to European defense capability, then every country enjoys de facto veto power over the missions all countries can undertake. And this, in turn, means that the ascent to power of one far-right populist allied with President Putin could in effect neutralize the capabilities of all European powers. One plus one plus one plus one plus one may then add up to zero.

MILITARY VERSATILITY is key. But taking seriously the need for strategic flexibility in uncertain times will also require a radical reorientation in other policy areas. Perhaps the most obvious is that the potential rise of populist powers within western Europe vastly increases the strategic risk of energy dependence on Russia. If the United States, as well as some western European nations under populist leadership, should have friendly ties with the Kremlin, the ability of Putin (or his successors) to blackmail Europe’s remaining liberal democracies by threatening to cut off gas supplies to those countries would vastly increase.

This possibility is still widely dismissed among German foreign-policy experts. Russia, they argue, is deeply dependent on revenues from gas sales in western Europe in general, and Germany more specifically. But Russia’s ability to blackmail Germany by cutting off supplies is more robust than they admit.

First, especially in moments of crISIS, autocrats tend to prioritize short-term over long-term considerations. This is especially true in countries in which a dictator’s loss of power may well entail his loss of life. If Vladimir Putin, or some successor, should start to feel that his hold on power is threatened in the immediate future, and that ratcheting up international tension is the best way to ensure his (literal and metaphorical) survival, he may well be willing to inflict very serious economic damage on his own country. Russia’s dependence on Western oil revenue thus translates into less energy security than German policymakers usually assume.

Second, any scenario in which Russia either cuts off gas supplies, or can credibly threaten to do so, would create a huge political crISIS in Germany. If Russia should cut off gas delivery for long enough, German pensioners would start to die of cold in their own homes. This would create huge political damage to the ruling coalition, and constitute a big incentive to make painful foreign-policy concessions.

Germany thus needs to think of energy independence as an urgent matter of national security. As such, this important goal justifies an all-of-the-above approach that rapidly develops a mix of energy forms. This includes continued subsidies for the installation of clean forms of energy, as well as greater investment into research and development of technologies than can economically compete with fossil fuels in the long run. But it also includes more politically contentious measures. Germany should reassess its nuclear-energy policy, invest in the port facilities that are necessary to receive shipments of oil and gas from across the Atlantic, and even consider loosening policies on fracking.

EVEN IF the two countries should no longer share a deep commitment to liberal democratic values, Germany will continue to share some key security and strategic interests—like the fight against Islamist terror and the need to manage China’s rise—with the United States. For parallel reasons, NATO has included countries that fell far short of liberal democracy, including Turkey under military tutelage or Portugal under Salazar; similarly, even an American government that turns to the hard right should not automatically prompt Europeans to disband NATO or discontinue all forms of intelligence sharing.

But at the same time, the desire to cooperate even as things take a turn for the worse will tempt Germany to soft-pedal its criticisms of American domestic developments, or to forego whatever limited opportunities may present themselves to strengthen Americans who fight for a survival of basic democratic norms. This would be a great error, both morally and strategically. Morally, Germany should feel deep loyalty to America’s liberal-democratic tradition, not to the government of the day. And strategically, America will only return to being a reliable ally if populism is defeated in the long run. A tactical willingness to continue a long-standing alliance thus must not transform into strategic complaisance with populists.

Policymakers in liberal democracies now need to avoid two twin dangers: They cannot assume the best case, making them vulnerable should the worst case arise. But neither can they assume the worst case, needlessly damaging valuable alliances that might have proven more resilient than meets the eye. Instead, they should recognize that both outcomes are possible, charting a course that helps to maximize the likelihood that the optimistic scenario will come to pass, even as it energetically goes about the necessary preparations for the worst case.

In the age of populism, a responsible German foreign policy must thus have two concurrent goals. It must work to lessen the risk that populist governments decide to break with the values-based alliances that have been so crucial to peace and stability in the West. At the same time, it must prepare for a future in which remaining liberal democracies can defend themselves if these alliances do prove to be beyond salvation.

In the era of Ostpolitik, German foreign-policy makers famously hoped that a closer cooperation with the Eastern Bloc might pull it in a democratic direction. The slogan that Egon Bahr invented for this hope was “Wandel durch Annäherung,” or change through rapprochement. At this unexpected and rather scary historical juncture, with the United States less committed to liberal-democratic values than at any point in since World War II, the inverse slogan might help to guide German foreign policy. What the country now needs is “Annäherung durch Wandel,” or rapprochement through change. What I mean by that, of course, is not that Germany should emulate Trump’s America. On the contrary, Germany needs to recognize that, in the wake of Trump’s victory, only a willingness to rethink its foreign policy in a radical manner can preserve the possibility that the transatlantic relationship will survive the coming years.

Yascha Mounk is a lecturer at Harvard University. His latest book, The People versus Democracy: Why Liberal Democracy is in Danger and How To Save It (Harvard University Press) will be published in March 2018. The German Marshall Fund published an earlier version of this essay under the headline “Wake Up, Berlin!”

Image: Reuters