The 2025 US National Security Strategy (NSS 2025) codifies what has long been visible in practice: an “America First” hierarchy of interests in which Europe is a useful but expendable asset rather than a protected core. The document pushes democracy promotion and liberal order-building to the margins, declares the end of the United States “propping up the entire world order like Atlas”, and treats mass migration, globalisation and free trade primarily as security threats rather than engines of Western power.
In parallel, the Five Eyes (FVEY) intelligence alliance is quietly tightening its internal integration across data, technology and operations. Germany, by contrast, is locked in permanent debates about risk, rights and rhetoric. The danger is clear: the BND and the BfV risk drifting into a peripheral role – living off partner reporting, preoccupied with “political correctness” at home, while the real game is played elsewhere.1. NSS 2025: demoting Europe and normalising transactionalism
The NSS 2025 completes a shift away from the post-Cold War language of shared values and global leadership. It states bluntly that the affairs of other countries matter only when they directly threaten US interests, explicitly rejects a US role as global “Atlas”, and calls for a re-orientation of military efforts towards dominance in the Western hemisphere to control migration, drugs and instability. Allies appear primarily as instruments of burden-sharing or as obstacles when they are “weak” or “woke”.
Commentary on both sides of the Atlantic converges on three points:
- Europe as liability, not pillar. The strategy no longer treats Europe as a privileged security community but as a cost centre whose migration and energy policies allegedly undermine US security and cohesion.
- Hostility to the EU as project. NSS 2025 is unusually sceptical of the EU’s integration agenda and openly sympathetic to nationalist forces that challenge Brussels, which European analysts describe as an “existential” political threat.
- Pragmatic accommodation of great powers. On Russia and China the document emphasises “strategic stability” and economic re-balancing over value-based confrontation, a shift underlined by the positive reactions from Moscow and the more cautious tone towards Beijing.
For the BND, this means the old assumption that “the Americans will ultimately carry the strategic burden and share the crucial intelligence” is no longer safe. Washington is signalling that access, attention and protection will follow contributions to US-defined priorities, not historic sentiment. Germany cannot buy relevance with polite speeches; it has to put assets and product on the table.
2. Five Eyes tightening while Europe talks
While EU capitals are still arguing over how far intelligence integration should go, the Five Eyes are steadily consolidating their position as the de facto inner core of Western security.
- Operational and strategic signalling. Five Eyes intelligence chiefs have appeared jointly to accuse China of systematic intellectual-property theft and to launch common guidance on protecting innovation – a rare public show of unity designed to shape global norms.
- Deeper data-sharing. Ministers and officials have discussed expanding biometric and criminal-data sharing, integrating criminal and border databases, and coordinating responses to people smuggling, synthetic drugs and online harms.
- Shared infrastructure. Australia’s classified defence cloud, built by Amazon Web Services, is explicitly designed to hard-wire intelligence and military data-sharing with Five Eyes and AUKUS partners, enabling common AI-driven analysis and future autonomous systems.
- Integrated oversight. The Five Eyes Intelligence Oversight and Review Council now meets annually, aligning accountability practices and indirectly cementing the club’s sense of community and shared standards.
This is not a static arrangement. Concepts such as Pacific Eyes, and moves to involve Japan in AUKUS pillar II for advanced technologies, illustrate how the Anglosphere is creating concentric circles of trusted partners around an inner core that retains privileged access to the most sensitive data, tools and platforms.
Germany and BND are not part of this core and, short of a geopolitical earthquake, will not be. That in itself is not scandalous – it reflects history, geography and law. The problem is that Berlin behaves as if this could be compensated by ever subtler debates on norms and procedure, instead of building a European intelligence pillar that is useful enough for the Five Eyes to take seriously.
To illustrate this, I have put a few examples into a table.
3. Germany at the edge: consumers of intelligence and producers of lectures
German intelligence policy is shaped by a deep culture of mistrust. Parliamentary and judicial controls are extensive, overlapping and often slow; the legal framework is complex; and public debate is dominated by the instinct to see almost any expansion of capability as a civil-liberties risk. Academic and EU-level work on intelligence frequently reinforces this lens by focusing on safeguards and remedies much more than on strategic deficits.
Within this climate, both the BND and the BfV have faced criticism for sluggishness, politicisation and risk aversion. A recent parliamentary report and specialist reporting highlight allegations that the services are:
- slow to adapt to new threats and technologies,
- overly entangled in day-to-day party-political disputes,
- more concerned with reputational management than with disrupting hostile actors.
At the same time, successive controversies – from the NSA affair to domestic extremism debates – have entrenched a public perception that German services oscillate between over-reacting to fashionable domestic targets and under-performing against hard foreign adversaries.
The uncomfortable operational reality is that Germany’s security architecture depends heavily on partner intelligence, especially from the US and other Five Eyes members, in fields such as high-end cyber, SIGINT and parts of counter-terrorism. German research underlines that European cyber security in particular is structurally reliant on US capabilities, data and private-sector dominance. Berlin’s own foreign-policy papers on value-based partnerships in the Indo-Pacific implicitly acknowledge that diversifying partners is as much about reducing strategic dependence as about shared values.
In practice this produces a skewed division of labour:
- Five Eyes partners provide early warning on sophisticated cyber campaigns, hostile state espionage and extra-European terrorist networks.
- The BND and BfV devote a large share of attention and political capital to domestic “Verfassungstreue”, symbolic target groups and rhetorical fights over “extremism” and “delegitimisation of the state” – many of them politically salient, but operationally marginal to hard security.
Critics inside and outside the services argue that this risks turning German intelligence into a compliance-and-communications machine: endlessly documenting proportionality, issuing press releases and counting social-media posts, while living off partner tips for serious threats. In a world where partners increasingly expect real contributions rather than moral lectures, that is an unsustainable role.
4. A harder-edged concept for the BND under NSS 2025
Taken seriously, NSS 2025 and Five Eyes consolidation point towards a more ruthless concept for the BND – and, by extension, for the German intelligence community as a whole.
a) Accept structural exclusion – and build leverage instead
Germany should assume that it will remain outside the Five Eyes core. The rational response is not to plead for admission but to build capabilities that create leverage:
- Unique coverage where Five Eyes have gaps or limited bandwidth: Russia and its periphery, European critical infrastructure, sanctions-evasion networks, energy and technology security along Eurasian corridors, and migration routes into Europe.
- Products partners actually use, not reports written chiefly for German parliamentary consumption – concise, timely, and tailored to operational rather than rhetorical needs.
If Germany becomes the indispensable European hub for these topics, Washington and London will seek its input regardless of whether Berlin appears in the family photo.
b) Move from risk avoidance to risk management
The BND does not need US-style global reach, but it does need a far higher tolerance for calculated operational risk:
- Off-shore HUMINT: targeting high-value individuals linked to hostile states, proliferation or malign influence, not inside the US, but in third countries, international organisations and multinational firms where German activity is less politically explosive.
- A deliberate “grey zone” of sources: long-term, trust-based relationships with think-tankers, consultants, technology entrepreneurs and diaspora figures who operate openly but provide privileged insight – treated internally as managed assets, not just as talking partners.
- Integrated TECHINT/OSINT: fusing commercial satellite imagery, trade and traffic data, financial intelligence and open political discourse into a European early-warning system that is not dependent on US cueing for every serious case.
None of this requires tearing up the law; it does require political leadership willing to accept that, in intelligence, the occasional scandal is the price of relevance.
c) Stop outsourcing the hardest problems to partners
Germany cannot plausibly demand more strategic autonomy in defence while outsourcing the toughest intelligence tasks to Five Eyes services. A sharper concept for the BND would therefore insist on:
5. Conclusion: relevance or ritual politics?
NSS 2025 and the consolidation of the Five Eyes alliance underline a simple uncomfortable truth: the gravitational centre of Western intelligence cooperation is drifting away from a Europe perceived as noisy, divided and risk-averse. If Berlin’s response is limited to more elaborate oversight procedures and carefully balanced speeches, the BND and BfV will continue to live off partner reporting while arguing about vocabulary at home.
A more hard-headed strategy would accept exclusion from the Anglosphere’s inner circle, invest where Germany can genuinely lead, and treat risk not as something to be eliminated but as a resource to be managed. The alternative is ritual: a security policy that is morally comfortable, legally tidy – and strategically irrelevant.
Germany cannot plausibly demand more strategic autonomy in defence while outsourcing the toughest intelligence tasks to Five Eyes services. A sharper concept for the BND would therefore insist on:
- Offensive counter-intelligence against hostile services operating in and around Germany, including active disruption rather than mere documentation.
- Sustained penetration efforts against networks that directly threaten German and European security – sabotage, cyber operations, organised crime, sanctions evasion – instead of assuming partners will always share their own take.
- Joint European products with selected EU partners that can be traded as a bloc with the Five Eyes, rather than fragmented bilateral relationships that leave each service individually dependent.
NSS 2025 and the consolidation of the Five Eyes alliance underline a simple uncomfortable truth: the gravitational centre of Western intelligence cooperation is drifting away from a Europe perceived as noisy, divided and risk-averse. If Berlin’s response is limited to more elaborate oversight procedures and carefully balanced speeches, the BND and BfV will continue to live off partner reporting while arguing about vocabulary at home.
A more hard-headed strategy would accept exclusion from the Anglosphere’s inner circle, invest where Germany can genuinely lead, and treat risk not as something to be eliminated but as a resource to be managed. The alternative is ritual: a security policy that is morally comfortable, legally tidy – and strategically irrelevant.
