Cut and run

Struggling German factories are being repurposed for defence. In the UK, American academics are queueing for jobs. How will former allies adjust to the US's altered relationship with the world?

- By Emma Graham-Harrison

THE GERMAN ELECTRONICS FIRM Hensoldt has a backlog of orders for its technology, including radars that protect Ukraine from Russian airstrikes. Meanwhile, Germany's car industry is struggling with low European demand and competition from China.

As Europe worries about how it can weather the economic and political turmoil unleashed by Donald Trump, executives from Munich and Düsseldorf say they have at least a partial answer.

In January, Hensoldt offered to take on workers laid off by the car parts suppliers Bosch and Continental. The defence giant Rheinmetall made a similar proposal last year, and in February announced it would repurpose two automotive component factories.

It was a pivot that offered hope amid America's rapid dismantling of the postwar global order - protecting jobs and Germany's industrial base as access to US markets shrinks, while ramping up Europe's capacity to protect itself.

As politicians around the world try to work out how best to protect their countries from Trump's capricious policymaking, the one constant in all their calculations for the future is a diminished American role in their countries. Trump has mooted plans for a 25% tariff on EU goods, including cars, and has already put duties at that level on steel and aluminium from the bloc.

In February, his vice-president, JD Vance, launched a blistering attack on European democracy in Munich, questioning whether it was worth defending.

In his first term, Trump touted decoupling from China as a way to bolster US jobs and the economy against a rapacious rival. Now, in his second term, he is pursuing a much broader decoupling from the country's historical allies - a shift that few had anticipated or were prepared to face.

The new US administration is sealing off its markets, retreating from America's global security role, and cutting soft-power projects that aimed to shape the world through research, aid and culture.