RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mr. Macron’s description of Europe’s current predicament is brutally frank. With the U.S. losing interest in NATO (a shift Mr. Macron believes predates the Trump administration), Europe can no longer count on American protection as much as it did in the past. Intensifying U.S.-China competition leaves Europe high and dry; neither China nor the U.S. seems particularly interested in what Europe wants or thinks.

In its own neighborhood, Mr. Macron believes Europe is almost helpless before rival powers like Russia and Turkey. Europe’s continuing failure to develop its own Silicon Valley means that the continent risks losing control of its own future. Dependent on American or Chinese tech giants, Europe won’t be able to guarantee the security of its own data or communications. Meanwhile, even as a rigid adherence to outdated ideas about fiscal austerity limits the growth of the eurozone economies, the EU has overstressed the market side of the European project, and paid too little attention to the concept of “community.”

If Mr. Macron’s diagnosis of Europe’s woes is grim, his remedies are traditionally French. Since the time of Charles de Gaulle, French presidents have argued that Europe needs to reduce its dependence on NATO, place the development of European welfare systems and industrial champions ahead of an “excessive” adherence to market ideology, privilege deepening European integration at the expense of expanding the union, and convert the ramshackle, often ineffective governance structures of the EU into the kind of sleek and effective state machine that Louis XIV or Napoleon would admire. Germany has always resisted these ideas, but Mr. Macron hopes that the shock of the anti-EU, unpredictable Trump presidency will stir Berlin at long last to support the French blueprint for a strong Europe.

That doesn’t seem to be happening. The sense that the U.S. is no longer the responsible power that Germany has relied on for 70 years has shaken German politics to the core. But not even Trump Shock seems to be enough to push the German establishment into embracing France’s European vision. At a speech last week at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s designated successor, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (often known as AKK), made clear that even in these new and challenging circumstances, Germany remains committed to NATO and the trans-Atlantic relationship.

This is partly because many German politicians believe that the Trump administration isn’t the last word on American foreign policy. Moreover, any sign that Germany supported a European drift away from NATO would cause a crisis for Poland and the Baltic states. France may be prepared to ignore their disquiet in the interest of a European grand strategy, but for both historical and practical reasons, Germany can’t deal with its eastern neighbors that harshly.

AKK presented an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary view of German foreign policy. Change will be incremental, but real. Defense spending will increase, but will reach the NATO target of 2% of GDP only in 2031. Germany must develop a stronger awareness of its strategic interests, she declared. It may even have to use military force more frequently abroad and participate in security activities as far afield as the Indo-Pacific.

Europe’s real problem isn’t that the French or Germans are brain-dead, but that they don’t agree—on the basic shape of the EU, on its defense policy, on its foreign-policy priorities. These disagreements don’t make progress on important EU issues impossible, but they make the process of reforming the union painfully slow, and they limit what can be done. To add to the complication, establishment political parties in both countries must increasingly fend off populist parties that bring very different ideas into the foreign-policy debate.

On the American side, the debate is also confused. The bipartisan foreign-policy establishment remains committed to NATO and to European defense, but it isn’t clear how strongly the presidential candidate of either party in 2020 will uphold this consensus. As concern about China grows across the American political spectrum, what roles will NATO and Europe play in U.S. strategy?

While President Macron is to some degree concern-trolling an alliance that has always been a problem for France, he is right that the status quo is in deep trouble. Those who believe in the importance of the West cannot take its cohesion for granted. To survive, the trans-Atlantic alliance must adapt to the rapidly changing world.