Anglo-German ties have shifted from post-Brexit drift to more deliberate strategic cooperation. Security coordination is tightening, with North Sea cooperation a second anchor. Incentives are strong: Germany draws on the UK’s operational strength and energy potential, and the UK on German industrial scale, investment capacity and EU anchoring. But impact depends on turning alignment into capability, accelerating Europe’s energy build-out and easing EU–UK frictions.
The recent flurry of UK ministerial visits to Berlin reflects both shifts in European diplomacy and the warming of Anglo-German relations. Prime Minister Starmer, Defence Secretary Healey and Foreign Secretary Cooper were all in the German capital only last month, with President Steinmeier due in London for his first state visit this week.
European diplomacy has moved towards flexible groupings such as the E3, the Group of Five, Weimar Plus and the Ukraine coalitions, where Germany and the UK increasingly find themselves aligned. At the same time, bilateral ties have strengthened markedly over the past two years, most visible in a new and wide-ranging Friendship and Bilateral Cooperation Treaty.
What was once a drifting post-Brexit relationship has become more purposeful. But its significance for Europe will depend on what follows. As security pressures mount, the value of this alignment will turn on whether it delivers usable defence capability, accelerates Europe’s energy-industrial build-out and contributes to easing EU–UK frictions.
Shared pressures, unequal capacities
Meeting these tests will begin with what London and Berlin can sustain at home, where pressures in both capitals are strikingly similar, even if fiscal space differs.
Both are attempting deep shifts in their economic models. Germany must refit its industrial engine for a world defined by innovation, climate constraints and geopolitical competition. The UK must complement its strong services base by rebuilding industrial capacity whilst addressing decades of weak investment and productivity.
Both face electorates unsettled by economic transition and exposed to rising cost-of-living pressures. Meanwhile, significant pressure from nationalist right-wing populism means both governments have limited political headroom.
The key difference is fiscal: Germany can marshal larger public investment, the UK cannot. Yet both are trying to square domestic adjustment with external credibility at a moment when Europe faces simultaneous crises of security and competitiveness.
Against this backdrop, defence cooperation — less contested domestically and more shielded from day-to-day politics — emerges as the most practical anchor of bilateral momentum, with energy and economic resilience forming the next frontier.
Underneath this convergence lie clear structural incentives — Germany benefits from the UK’s expeditionary posture and complex-weapons expertise, while the UK gains from Germany’s growing industrial depth and central role in shaping EU rulemaking.
New strategic posture in Berlin
The German Zeitenwende of 2022 signalled intent but struggled to translate ambition into sustained capability. The constraint was less a matter of political will than the difficulty of delivery: fragmented procurement authority, risk-averse contracting and weak links between strategy, industry and production. London saw few entry points, and Germany’s slower pace created an asymmetry with the UK’s early clarity on Ukraine, aided by a culture of strategic permissiveness.
Almost four years on, British officials increasingly see Germany as a serious defence actor, a potential industrial powerhouse and a prospective strategic anchor for Europe. The 2024 Trinity House Agreement on Defence has given this posture a practical foundation for UK cooperation: a mechanism for joint capability development, procurement coordination and industrial integration.
The broader bilateral Friendship Treaty of 2025 builds on this by restating mutual assistance commitments — not insignificant in a time of unreliable Western allies — and explicitly emphasizing European capability-building and interoperability.
While these routines help reduce ambiguity about both sides’ strategic trajectory, political alignment alone does not translate into credible military capability. Europe still produces too little, too slowly and too expensively, and cross-border procurement remains the exception rather than the rule.
In terms of contributing to NATO capabilities, Anglo-German defence cooperation runs below potential but offers complementarities. Germany brings industrial scale and financial weight, while the UK contributes technological depth, operational experience and greater strategic permissiveness. Together, these strengths map directly onto some of NATO’s most acute shortfalls, giving the bilateral axis potential leverage if it can translate alignment into delivery.
Accordingly, Trinity identifies “lighthouse projects” led by firms with Anglo-German footprints: German investment in a UK artillery-barrel plant, new Boxer variants and longer-term precision-strike cooperation. These projects matter not for their scale alone, but because they test whether bilateral cooperation can overcome national procurement bottlenecks.
More recently, smaller defence-tech firms have expanded into the UK, drawn not least by more flexible procurement rules. The new Ministerial Group on Equipment and Capability Co-operation (MECC) spelt out in Trinity is often cited by industry as a promising mechanism for turning political intent into real procurement decisions.
A strategic breakthrough would be the bridging of FCAS, the Franco-German-Spanish next-generation fighter project, and GCAP, the UK-Japan-Italy programme. With FCAS under strain and doubts about sustaining two competing systems, today’s cooperation at least builds habits that could make future convergence possible. The idea remains speculative but illustrates why current alignment matters — and why French strategic and industrial preferences will ultimately shape the ceiling.
These developments still fall short of Europe’s needs but help revive cooperative practices and industrial links that have atrophied for decades. Joint action remains difficult where thinking is national, spending internal and decision-making political. But even limited progress in production, procurement and scale can have outsized effects in a system as slow as Europe’s.
Energy as a second anchor
Beyond defence, the most consequential complement lies in energy. The UK controls one of Europe’s largest offshore-wind and hydrogen resource bases while Germany faces the steepest industrial-decarbonisation challenge. Anchored in their bilateral treaty and the earlier Energy and Climate Partnership, both governments aim to turn the North Sea into a shared renewable-energy hub.
The bilateral Friendship Treaty commits both sides to North Sea renewables, hydrogen infrastructure and green industrial cooperation. Under the Energy and Climate Partnership of 2023, they are advancing new interconnectors and a hybrid cable-storage project.
Three trajectories are plausible: high coordination (aligned standards, integrated hydrogen and CO₂-storage systems); fragmented standards (regulatory divergence limiting scale); or a security-led push in which energy cooperation accelerates as a hedge against geopolitical shocks. The current path sits between the first two.
But obstacles remain: slow permitting, unaligned hydrogen standards, uncertain CO₂-storage frameworks. Many of these are regulatory rather than political, and will require more sustained coordination given they sit at the EU–UK boundary.
Still, the wider outlook is improving. A survey by the British Chamber of Commerce in Germany highlights renewed optimism at firm level, with opportunities beyond defence and energy emerging in dual-use technology, advanced manufacturing and life sciences. German regions – notably Baden-Württemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria – are targeting these sectors, offering a broader horizon if regulatory barriers ease.
The return of bilateralism
UK–German rapprochement is part of a wider trend of functional bilateralism and minilateralism operating alongside EU structures. Brussels itself increasingly relies on “mini-deals” with external partners to compensate for unanimity constraints, most notably in economic security.
The new Friendship Treaty and Trinity fit this ecosystem. They give the UK structured access to Europe’s security core and offer Germany a complementary partner to France, while creating parliamentary-backed and bureaucratic routines — including regular senior official meetings — that persist beyond shifts in political mood.
Yet the scope of what bilateralism can achieve depends on the EU frameworks surrounding it — decisive in energy, still emerging in defence.
On the latter, the EU is only beginning to develop tools that encourage joint procurement, reduce fragmentation and strengthen Europe’s defence-industrial base. Whether these instruments support or constrain UK–German initiatives will depend on how far third-country access is permitted. The breakdown of talks on UK participation in the Strategic Action for Europe (SAFE) underlines the political and financial sensitivities around access, though SAFE itself is not yet decisive for UK–German cooperation or European industry. Its significance would grow only if the EU succeeds in expanding its defence role substantially — a major open question for now.
Energy presents a different picture. Here the EU’s role is already foundational: market design, grid integration and regulatory alignment all fall under Single Market competences. Ongoing EU–UK discussions on future electricity-market access underscore that North Sea cooperation cannot be separated from the wider regulatory frameworks shaped in Brussels.
Together, these developments highlight a structural reality: bilateralism can move where the EU is slow, but it cannot override the boundaries set by EU law. Anglo-German bilateral alignment is therefore not easily translated into better EU–UK relations. This is not because Germany lacks strategic interest, but because its influence is primarily political and procedural rather than rule-setting. Germany often sees UK involvement as strategically desirable and can help reduce political friction. It can shape agenda-setting, coalition-building and sequencing, even where it cannot rewrite core Single Market or defence-industrial rules. But its instinct for EU solidarity ultimately prevails, meaning that when decisions touch core Single Market or defence-industrial rules, Berlin is more likely to side with the bloc’s cohesion, even if its strategic leanings point toward London.
The wider European impact of Anglo-German cooperation will also depend on how this bilateral axis connects to the continent’s third centre of power, France. Deeper ties broaden Europe’s strategic geometry, without reordering it. Paris thus remains pivotal, notably in that it shapes the direction of EU defence-industrial integration and guards access to key markets, thereby setting the effective ceiling of any broader convergence.
From momentum to strategic shift?
Can this bilateral momentum shift Europe’s wider trajectory? Its significance lies less in sweeping fixes than in rebuilding the habits, links and political confidence Europe needs to expand its hard-power and economic capacity in the first place.
London and Berlin have rebuilt trust, created institutional machinery and found alignment in defence and energy. Their cooperation strengthens Europe where EU processes can be slow: capability generation, industrial scaling, North Sea integration and flexible coalition-building.
Measured against Europe’s larger imperatives, progress remains modest. But the direction is sound. Germany, the UK and France – the three major European powers – are far from aligned, yet they now share a wider zone of overlapping priorities than in the immediate post-Brexit phase, most visibly on Ukraine and on the need to bolster Europe’s broader capacity to act. This is not a coherent triangular strategy, but it marks a shift away from the divergence of recent years.
Differences endure on migration, economic openness and the future of EU–UK relations (as the ongoing Strategic Partnership negotiations illustrate). Even so, a looser pattern of partial alignment is taking shape, helped by UK–German proximity on defence and energy questions and by France’s readiness to join wider coalitions on issues such as Ukraine, where delivery pressures increasingly outweigh institutional preferences.
In a Europe struggling to turn ambition into capability, this movement matters. Whether it can shift outcomes will hinge on three tests: generating usable defence capability, accelerating Europe’s energy-industrial build-out and easing the EU–UK regulatory frictions that still slow cooperation. On these, only results will count.
About the author
Jake Benford is Senior Expert Europe and Geopolitics at the Bertelsmann Stiftung.
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