The Programme Without a Compass

I. Two Speeches, Two Worlds

On 13 and 14 February 2026, two men delivered speeches at the Munich Security Conference that could hardly have been more different. Marco Rubio, the American Secretary of State, delivered a diagnosis: the West succumbed to illusions, deindustrialised itself, squandered its sovereignty, destabilised its societies — and now that is over. Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, delivered a programme: four points, military strengthening, European integration, transatlantic renewal, global partnerships.

The difference is not that one is right and the other wrong. The difference is that one knows why he is speaking, and the other does not. Rubio has a compass — it points in the wrong direction, but it points somewhere. Merz has a roadmap — that leads nowhere, because the question of where the journey should go is never asked.

Rubio's speech was that of a man who believes he is defending something. Merz's speech was that of a man who believes he must manage something. And in precisely this difference lies the entire drama of European politics.

II. The Speech of an Administrator

Read the Merz speech with a single criterion: does it contain a single sentence that could not have been spoken by any other CDU chancellor of the past thirty years? The answer is: no. Every paragraph sounds as if it had passed through a committee ensuring that nobody objects and nothing is said that might cause trouble on Monday.

Merz says: "At the latest with Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, we have entered a new phase." His predecessor and her predecessor said the same thing, albeit about different crises. The phrase "new phase" is the standard building block of German foreign policy when it registers that the world has changed but does not wish to explain why.

Merz says: "China is asserting a global claim to shape the world order." Every newspaper reader has known this for ten years. The question would be: why did Germany not use those ten years? Why did it instead deepen its dependence on Chinese supply chains? Why did German industry, whose interests Merz knows so well from his years as a BlackRock manager and CDU economic spokesman, walk into the trap with open eyes? Merz does not ask these questions — because the answers would fall back on him and his party.

Merz says: "A frank word: measured against its means of power, German foreign policy of recent decades had a normative surplus." That is the boldest sentence in the speech, and it is telling: the frank word consists in admitting that Germany talked too much and did too little. But the conclusion is not to change the structures that produced this imbalance. The conclusion is: more money for weapons. As if the problem had been too few tanks — and not that the political class deciding about tanks has lived for decades in a bubble where reality is replaced by resolutions.

III. Four Points into the Void

Merz's "programme of freedom" has four points. It is worth examining each — not for what it says, but for what it conceals.

First: military strengthening. The Bundeswehr is to become the strongest conventional army in Europe. A brigade in Lithuania, Eurofighters in the far north, conscription reform, hundreds of billions of euros. Against whom? Against Russia, which generates one-tenth of Europe's economic output but has been unable to defeat even Ukraine in four years? The military build-up follows a logic that sounds plausible on the surface — deterrence — but evades the real question: why does a continent with ten times Russia's economic power have a defence problem at all? The answer is not military — it is institutional. Europe does not have a capability problem. It has a decision-making problem. And that problem is not solved by more money for the Bundeswehr.

Second: European strengthening. Europe is to become more sovereign, build its own pillar within NATO, organise its defence industry more European, conclude free trade agreements. This is the standard programme that has been repeated since the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007. Merz adds one sentence that catches the ear: "We must end the proliferation of European bureaucracy and regulation." True — but the sentence stands utterly isolated. There follows not a single concrete proposal about which regulation should be abolished, which bureaucracy is superfluous, which institution should be dissolved. The sentence is a fig leaf: it signals awareness of the problem without the slightest intention of solving it. For solving Europe's bureaucracy problem would mean shaking the institutions on which his own class depends.

Third: transatlantic renewal. Here Merz becomes unintentionally honest. He invokes Kant's famous formula — "self-inflicted immaturity" — to describe Europe's dependence on the United States, and then says: "We are now leaving this condition behind." But Kant's solution was: sapere aude — dare to use your own understanding. Merz's solution is: build a stronger European pillar within NATO. That is not maturity — it is a request for one's own room in someone else's house. Those who become mature leave the parental home. Those who redecorate their room remain children.

Fourth: global partnerships. Canada, Japan, Turkey, India, Brazil, South Africa, the Gulf states. This is a shopping list, not a strategy. What connects Germany with Turkey other than the desire to be somewhat less dependent on China? What connects it with the Gulf states other than oil and arms deals? Merz says: "Partnership does not presuppose complete alignment of all values and interests." True, but it raises the question: if values and interests are not the criterion — then what? The answer is: Realpolitik. And Realpolitik without a compass is nothing other than opportunism in state form.

IV. What Is Missing

In a speech of over thirty minutes, announced as a "keynote address," the following words do not appear: citizen. Subsidiarity. Cooperative. Self-determination. Non-military innovation. Small and medium enterprise. Education. Individual freedom from the state. Administrative reform. Democratic renewal. The only freedom Merz knows is the freedom of the nation — not the freedom of the people who live in it.

This is no accident. It is the worldview of a man socialised for thirty years in the CDU's career track and therefore capable of thinking only in the categories that track permits: state, alliance, army, trade, diplomacy. The citizen appears in this worldview only as object — as someone to be protected, provided for, and led — never as subject who governs himself.

Merz speaks of freedom but means sovereignty. He speaks of strength but means military budget. He speaks of Europe but means the EU institutions. He speaks of renewal but means better management of the status quo. In each of his formulations lurks a confusion — the confusion of rule and order, of state and society, of institutions and the people they were meant to serve.

Peter Sloterdijk, whom Merz quotes at the beginning of his speech — Europe had "ended a long holiday from world history" — has written more to the point than Merz realises. For Sloterdijk has also observed that European states in their present form are "insolvency administrators of the post-war order" — institutions that have long lost their legitimacy but continue to function because nobody has the courage to question them. Merz is the perfect representative of this condition: competent enough to keep the machine running, but incapable of asking whether the machine still goes where anyone wants to go.

V. The Contrast

Place the two speeches side by side, and the contrast is devastating.

Rubio speaks of a civilisation and means it. He names Mozart and Beethoven, the Sistine Chapel and Cologne Cathedral. He tells the story of American immigrants — Italians, Irish, Germans, Spaniards — who built a country. He speaks of a shared Christian tradition linking America and Europe. One may find this bombastic, one may find it calculated — but it is an attempt to name something larger than a NATO brigade.

Merz speaks of freedom and means defence budgets. He speaks of Europe and means council resolutions. He speaks of history and means the lessons of 1945. His speech contains not a single moment in which something shines through that transcends the management of the existing. No image. No vision. No sentence one would remember because it says something new.

Rubio has the wrong compass. Merz has none at all. And a programme without a compass — four points all leading into the same bureaucratic cul-de-sac — is worse than a wrong compass. For whoever walks in the wrong direction can turn around. Whoever walks without direction walks in circles.

VI. Self-Inflicted Immaturity

The most revealing moment of the Merz speech is the Kant reference. Merz invokes Kant's most famous formulation — "self-inflicted immaturity" — to describe Europe's dependence on the United States. But he does not understand what he is quoting.

Kant wrote in 1784, in his essay "What Is Enlightenment?": "Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another." The cause of immaturity was not lack of understanding, but lack of resolve and courage. And the way out — sapere aude — was not to seek a better guardian, but to cast off guardianship itself.

What does Merz do? He diagnoses the immaturity — correctly. And then he proposes to reorganise the guardianship. Rather than freeing Europe from American dependence, he wants to build "a strong, self-sustaining European pillar within the alliance." Rather than dismantling European bureaucracy, he wants to "organise it more European." Rather than returning decision-making power to citizens, he wants to "flip the switch in our heads" — where "we" is apparently the government that operates the switch, and the citizen is the device being switched.

That is the punchline: Merz uses the language of the Enlightenment to demand its opposite. He proclaims maturity and means that the government should now govern more decisively. Kant would have called this "self-inflicted immaturity of the second order": the inability to recognise one's own immaturity as such.

VII. The Career Track on the World Stage

Friedrich Merz is not unintelligent. He is one of the most gifted speakers the CDU has ever produced. He understands balance sheets, he understands power politics, he understands the game. And that is precisely what makes his Munich speech so instructive — not as evidence of individual failure, but as evidence of systemic failure.

Merz is the product of a political career that for thirty years rewarded those who knew the right people, struck the right compromises, occupied the right positions — and punished those who asked uncomfortable questions. He did not become Chancellor because he has a vision, but because he survived long enough to be the last one standing. The career track did not make him a visionary — it systematically trained the visionary out of him.

The system that produced Merz reliably generates politicians who can describe situations but not name causes. Who can formulate measures but not goals. Who can deliver "keynote addresses" in which not a single keynote appears. Merz's Munich speech is not the failure of an individual — it is the calling card of a system that regards visionlessness as qualification.

In the companion essay "The Answer America Cannot Give," we described what a European statesman worthy of the title could have said in Munich. Merz's speech shows why such a statesman cannot emerge from the German career-track democracy. The system selects against him. Whoever builds a career in the CDU learns that visions create enemies and compromises create friends. The perfect CDU chancellor is one who says nothing that disturbs anyone — and that is precisely what Merz did in Munich.

VIII. What Oppenheimer Would Hear

Franz Oppenheimer, who made the distinction between the "political means" — appropriation through force and monopoly — and the "economic means" — voluntary exchange — the foundation of his social analysis, would have heard in Merz's speech exclusively the political means. Every one of the four points is an instrument of state power: military, EU integration, NATO pillar, diplomatic partnerships. Not a single point concerns the empowerment of citizens to manage their own affairs.

Oppenheimer would say: Chancellor, you speak of freedom, but you mean the state. You speak of strength, but you mean apparatus. You speak of Europe, but you mean a system of institutions that systematically excludes citizens from deciding their own lives. Your "programme of freedom" is a programme of rule — an enlightened, well-meaning, democratically legitimised rule, certainly, but rule remains rule, even when it calls itself freedom.

The acratic answer to Merz's speech would have been a different speech — one that thinks not from top to bottom, but from bottom to top. That asks not: how do we strengthen the state? But: how do we liberate the citizens? That thinks not in NATO brigades and EU roadmaps, but in subsidiarity, cooperatives, digital self-governance, decentralised production. That would have the courage to say: the problem is not that we have too few tanks. The problem is that five million civil servants paralyse the productive forces of this country and no politician has the courage to say so, because they depend on precisely those civil servants.

But such a speech cannot be given in Munich. Not because it is forbidden, but because the system that selects the speakers produces only speakers who think within the system. The Bayerischer Hof is not a place for visionaries. It is a place for administrators. And Merz was the perfect speaker for this place.

IX. The Dark Place

Merz ends his speech with the sentence: "A world in which only power counts would be a dark place." He says Germany knows this from historical experience. He is right — and he is wrong. Germany knows that naked power leads to catastrophe. But the lesson it drew was not freedom — it was administration. The lesson was not: give people the power over their own lives back. The lesson was: build institutions that prevent anyone from ever having too much power again. The consequence: a society in which nobody has too much power — and nobody has enough to change anything.

The dark place Merz fears is not only the world of great-power politics. It is also the world in which a gifted nation with enormous resources — the tenth-largest economy in history, heir to Kant and Goethe, Siemens and Bosch — stands on the world stage and has nothing to say except: we want to remain in the alliance and do our homework.

Rubio asked Europe: what do you want? Merz answered: we want to be better allies. That is not an answer. That is the capitulation before the question.