Choosing U.S. Nuclear Protection: The Growing Costs of German Status Quo Policies
Journal: The MIT Press eBooks
Year: 2025

R ussia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has thrown German for- eign and security policy into disarray.The war has triggered a fundamental rethinking of longstanding German policy principles, captured under the term Zeitenwende ("watershed moment"). 1As a result, Germany has doubled down on U.S. nuclear protection by acquiring U.S.-made F-35 nuclear-capable aircraft for more than 8 billion 2 Throughout most of the post-Cold War period, such protection was comprised of a small number of U.S.