Welcome to the President's inbox. I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boyes

distinguished senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This

week's topic is Germany's rearmament.

With me to discuss Germany's ambitious proposals to rebuild its military amid growing doubts on the continent about the U.S. commitment to NATO and European security is Sophia Besh.

Sophia is a senior fellow in the Europe program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she specializes in European defense policy. She was previously a senior research

fellow at the Center for European Reform. Sophia has written for the Atlantic,

foreign affairs, foreign policy, and politico, among other outlets, and she has testified

as an expert witness before the U.K. House of Commons, the German Bundestag, and the European

Parliament. She recently co-authored a white paper for Carnegie titled, Who's Going to Unite

Europe on Defense? And she contributed a chapter

titled a Zeitendenda for Germany's defense industry to a monograph published by the Strategic

Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College. Sophia, thank you very much for joining me

on the president's inbox, and it sounds like you've been very busy.

Jim, thank you for having me back, and it's a busy time for all of us.

Well, I want to begin with sort of the big picture here. Tell me how things look from Berlin,

particularly with a new administration in the United States, that is staffed with people who, shall I say,

seems skeptical about America's security interests in Europe. Yeah, thank you. Starting this broadly,

I do believe that it's hard to overstate the significance of the new fiscal regime announcements that have come out of Berlin.

I would probably call it a second Zeitenwenda.

Merz, the new chancellor, has toyed with the idea of an epochenumbrch, but I'm not sure

we can ask the world to learn another German abstract.

You may want to tell people who missed the first Zeitn Venda.

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