Part 1/2 - Merz stood before his CDSU party and did two things in the same speech that should have stopped Europe cold.
He declared that “Pax Americana is over.” And he reached for Europe’s darkest memory... Munich, the Sudetenland, Hitler, to argue that Russia “won’t stop,” projecting expansionist intent onto Moscow while erasing the long trail of Western promises broken and red lines ignored.
Together, the lines function as one device: announce the old security arrangement is fading, then slam the door on compromise by turning diplomacy into a moral crime.
Of course it isn't leadership. It’s a choreographed script, and everyone is expected to follow it.
“Pax Americana is over” is marketed as emancipation, Europe stepping out from under American guardianship, finally standing on its own feet. But the second half of Merz’s message tells you what this really is, not independence being offered to the public, but discipline demanded from it.
Because once Hitler is invoked, the field of legitimate diplomacy shrinks to a pinhole. Negotiation becomes appeasement. Restraint becomes cowardice. Doubt becomes disloyalty. History stops being a teacher and becomes a weapon, the kind you swing at your own citizens.
The Munich analogy is the most reusable instrument in European politics precisely because it abolishes alternatives. It does not illuminate the present, it pre-bans future choices. It declares in advance that off-ramps are immoral and escalation is virtue. This isn’t historical memory, but rather coercion by myth.
If Pax Americana were truly ending in a mature way, Europe’s response would look very different. It would begin with realism instead of hysteria, diplomacy instead of demonology, rebuilding industry, securing energy, restoring social consent, and cooling the temperature of a continent already exhausted by crisis.
Instead, Merz reaches for the most radioactive symbol available, because he does not trust the public to accept the costs of confrontation if those costs are explained honestly as tradeoffs rather than destiny.
That tells you everything.
For decades, Western Europe made a choice. It dissolved sovereignty into bureaucracy and outsourced strategic hard power to Washington. American protection became a political convenience, it allowed a managerial class to sermonize while someone else absorbed escalation risk, strategic liability, and blowback. Pax Americana was not just a shield, it was branded as a restraint on Europe’s own worst historical reflexes.
Now the umbrella is thinning and what’s being revealed underneath is not leadership, but dependency. A political class so long insulated from consequence that the moment protection fades, it reaches not for strategy, but for myth, coercion, and panic.
Merz doesn’t pivot to restraint. He pivots to moral absolutism.
This is where projection enters.
By invoking Hitler and the Sudetenland, Merz is not describing Russia so much as advertising elite panic, panic at the return of responsibility, panic at publics who might choose peace, panic at the dawning reality that American power is no longer an inexhaustible insurance policy.
Panic always produces the same politics: narrow the debate, raise the stakes, demand unity, punish dissent.
Germany is already entrenching long-term military posture on NATO’s eastern flank. At the same time, talk of mandatory service reappears when voluntary enthusiasm fails. These are not metaphors. They are signals. When persuasion runs dry, compulsion is prepared, and wrapped in moral language so it looks like virtue.
This is not fate. This is choice.
Germany is not being dragged into inevitability by history. It is choosing inevitability language because inevitability language disciplines the public. It converts policy into destiny. It turns citizens into assets. And it allows leaders to say “there was no alternative” after they have deliberately scorched every alternative.
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