Clearly there has never been seamless agreement among the leading national politicians of the West – and, more broadly, of the G7 countries – on their political perspectives; but they have always shared a background understanding of their affiliation to “the” West under the leadership of the United States. This political constellation has disintegrated with the most recent return to power of Donald Trump and the systemic change in the United States that this has set in motion, even if, formally speaking, the fate of NATO remains an open question for the time being. From a European perspective, this epochal break has far-reaching consequences – both for the further course and possible end of the war in Ukraine and for the need, willingness and ability of the European Union to find a redemptive response to the new situation. Otherwise, Europe will also be drawn into the maelstrom of the declining superpower.
The incomprehensible short-sightedness of European politics brings the sad connection between these two depressing topics into clear focus. It is difficult to understand why the European leaders, and especially the German leaders, did not see this coming, or at least why they turned a blind eye to a convulsion of the democratic system that has been brewing in the United States for some time. After the US government made no attempt to initiate negotiations to avert the threatened Russian attack flanked by troop deployments, military assistance was certainly necessary to preserve the existence of the Ukrainian state. But it was incomprehensible how the Europeans, under the mistaken assumption that the alliance with the United States remained intact, completely surrendered the initiative to the Ukrainian government by pledging unconditional support for the Ukrainian war effort without any objective or orientation of their own.
It was an unforgivable political mistake that Germany in particular, with its unshakable confidence in the “unity of the West,” repeatedly shirked the long-evident challenge of strengthening the European Union’s capacity for international action. That is what makes the narrow perspective from which we are currently discussing the quite unusual effort to rearm the Bundeswehr in a climate of heated anti-Russian sentiment so oppressive. This is fueling old prejudices. For the immediate concern of this long-term rearmament program cannot be the fate of Ukraine, which is currently particularly risky and rightly worrisome; nor is it a possible or talked up current Russian threat to NATO countries. Rather, the overall goal of this rearmament is the existential self-assertion of a European Union that can no longer count on the protection of the United States in an increasingly unpredictable geopolitical situation.
The bizarre behavior and confusing speech of the re-elected Donald Trump at his inauguration was a bombshell that probably shattered the last remaining illusions about the stability of the United States as a leading power, even in countries like Germany or our neighbor Poland. While at least Michelle Obama was smart enough not to expose herself to the eerie spectacle, the former presidents in attendance had to passively suffer the abuse. For an unprepared television audience accustomed to the ceremonies of previous inaugurations, Trump’s fanciful evocation of the dawn of a golden age and his narcissistic posturing gave the impression of a clinical presentation of a psychopathological case. But the resounding applause he received and the expectant approval of Musk and the other Silicon Valley bigwigs left no doubt about the determination of the inner circle around Trump to carry out the institutional reorganization of the state according to long-known roadmap of the Heritage Foundation. As always, of course, political goals are one thing, their implementation another. The examples from Europe, such as Orbán’s Hungary or the now-replaced Kaczyński regime in Poland, resemble Trump’s plans only in terms of the statist restrictions on the legal system.
The new president’s first decisions have focused on electorally popular directives to deport illegal immigrants, many of whom have been living in the country for decades. This was immediately followed by the legally problematic cancellation of internationally important aid programs. It is no coincidence that these first, largely illegal interventions in the administrative apparatus of the federal government are being orchestrated by the newly appointed purge commissar Elon Musk, who had already purged Twitter in a similar style after taking over that organization. These initial measures signal the broader political goal of a radical retrenchment of the government administration and point to a libertarian economic policy. But this characterization falls short, because in the longer term, the “downsizing” of the state is probably intended to go hand in hand with a shift to a digitally controlled technocracy.
Silicon Valley has been dreaming of this kind of libertarian “abolition of politics” for some time: the idea is to transform politics en bloc into a mode of corporate management steered by new technologies. It is still completely unclear how these more far-reaching ideas will fit in with Trump’s style of action, a politics of abrupt arbitrary decisions detached from valid norms. The style of the unpredictable dealmaker acting in the short-term national interest is not the only source of irritation. As in the case of the real estate broker’s obscene fantasy of rebuilding the emptied Gaza Strip, it is the irrationality of this probably also deliberately unpredictable person that could clash with the longer-term plans of the vice president or his new technocratic friends.
The Authoritarian Figure of the Digital Age has Nothing to Do with Historical Fascism
What is most difficult to predict is the political implementation of the planned and initiated regime change, which is intended to lead to a new form of technocratic-authoritarian rule, while largely formally retaining a constitution that has in effect been gutted. Since the problems in need of political regulation are indeed becoming steadily more complex, such a regime would meet the growing need of a depoliticized population, relieved of the burden of momentous political decisions, for a self-regulating system. This trend has long found terminological expression in political science with its deflationary notion of “regulatory” democracies. In these cases, conducting merely formal democratic elections is deemed sufficient, regardless of enlightened voters actually participate in any meaningful way in the formation of informed public opinion. This new type of authoritarian rule would bear no resemblance to historical forms of fascism. In the United States, uniformed marching columns are nowhere to be seen, only life continuing as normal – except for a smattering of rioting hordes like those pardoned high traitors who stormed the Congress at the behest of their president four years ago. The population remains roughly equally divided along relatively clear social and cultural lines. The lawsuits against the government’s brazen violations of the constitution have only begun to work their way through the lower courts. The press has conformed in part, but has not yet been brought into line. In universities and other cultural sectors, initial resistance is still developing. But there is no doubt that this government is moving quickly.
This upheaval had been foreseeable for some time. At the beginning of the 1990s, the United States, with the program of George H. W. Bush, could still claim undisputed superpower status: it was quite credible that the West was in a position to advance the human rights regime worldwide. The end of the Cold War had raised hopes for the lasting development of a pacified global society. At that time, new democratic orders were emerging in many places around the world. Humanitarian intervention was a major theme – even if the successful attempts at intervention later proved not to be enduring. The Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court was adopted in 1988. The Kosovo war sparked the debates that led to the recognition of the “responsibility to protect.” But this idealistic perspective changed at the beginning of the new century with the rise to power of George W. Bush after a dubious Supreme Court ruling against Al Gore. And the political climate in the country changed radically with the terrorist attack of September 11, the subsequent declaration of a “war on terrorism,” controversial restrictions on fundamental rights, and increased nationwide surveillance. The febrile atmosphere then formed the background for the aggressive turn against “rogue states” and the invasion of Iraq in violation of international law, the authorization of torture practices, the establishment of Guantanamo – for the whole attempt to aggressively mobilize the West.
No – Institutions, Once Destroyed, Cannot be Easily Repaired
After Bush was re-elected despite everything, this first term was recognized as the turning point that it subsequently proved to be. Since then, there has been talk of the decline of the superpower. The election of Barack Obama, the nationally and internationally acclaimed first black president, did not bring the hoped-for turn. During his tenure, the practice of using remote-controlled drones to kill people deemed to be “enemies” anywhere in the world, which is questionable under international law, also became established. And at the very latest, the victory of an erratic figure like Donald Trump in 2016, which triggered protests at the time, could not fail to highlight the political and cultural divisions of the electorate, which obviously had deeper socio-economic causes.
At the latest this election should have alerted Europeans to the upheaval in American political institutions. The plebiscitary infiltration of the Republican Party, which began in the late 1990s, had led to the collapse of a stable two-party system. Today, it is clear that institutions like these, which are in long-term decline, cannot be repaired within a single term in office, even if Trump’s system were to be voted out of office again. No less alarming is the politicization of the Supreme Court, which, for example, just before Trump’s re-election, acquitted him in a case involving his conduct during his first term, on the grounds that presidents cannot be prosecuted retroactively for a crime committed while in office. This ruling gives Trump a completely free hand for the erratic elbow politics of his current term.
Only with the necessary passage of time will historians be able to pass judgment on the competing assessments of the prehistory of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and whether it could have been avoided. Whatever the outcome, the political situation after February 23, 2022 was clear: Europe, with the help of the United States, had to come to the assistance of Ukraine under attack in order to secure its existence as a state quickly enough. But instead of flag-waving war cries and full-throated aspirations of “victory” over a nuclear power like Russia, what was called for at the time was a realistic reflection on the risks of a protracted war. There was a lack of critical awareness of the danger of a break with the existing global economic system and a world society that had been more or less balanced until then. It would also have been in the West’s own interest to try to negotiate as quickly as possible with Russia, an irrational imperial power long in decline, an arrangement acceptable to Ukraine, but this time with Western guarantees. On the very first day of the Russian invasion, a sober look at the date of the next American presidential election should have convinced the Europeans of the fragility of the long-shaky NATO alliance.
For a halfway enlightened contemporary of my generation, the smug triumphalism over the unity of the West and the resurrection of the ability to act of a NATO that had already been declared dead had an uncanny quality. Equally disconcerting was the public insensitivity to the outbreak of military violence in Europe. Any sense of the deterrent violence of war and the fact that wars are easy to start but hard to end seemed to have evaporated.
This makes it all the more shocking that Trump’s unprincipled pandering to Putin is currently dividing the West and calling into question the normatively justified reasons for supporting Ukraine. Although the duped allies can still cite good reasons under international law to justify their commitment, they must now sheepishly acknowledge that its success is dependent on Trump’s sheer power politics. The couple of days at the Kursk front during which the United States interrupted its logistical support were already sufficient to demonstrate this. As a result, the UK and France had to reluctantly abstain from voting on a Security Council motion on Ukraine passed jointly by the USA, Russia and China. While France stresses the need for the European Union to become independent of the United States in terms of security policy and that this is only possible by extending its nuclear umbrella to all member states, British Prime Minister Starmer reiterates the meek promise of support for Ukraine with a coalition of 30 more or less “willing” supporting states. Incidentally, no one in this “coalition of the willing” seems to be bothered by the adoption of the name that George W. Bush gave to his war that violated international law. Irritatingly, the European Union is not playing a politically significant role in the negotiations over a possible cease-fire. It is the United States and Russia, and at most the UK and France, who are negotiating about and with Ukraine.
Is the United States Still a Superpower? Trump Seems to Have his Doubts
Whatever the outcome, the US U-turn on Russia is merely a surprising twist in a geopolitical development that has been in the making for some time and has only intensified as the Ukraine conflict has unfolded. Regardless of whether it succeeds, Trump’s shift toward Putin seems to acknowledge that the United States, despite its economic predominance, has lost its global supremacy as a superpower, or at least has abandoned its political claim to be a hegemon. The war in Ukraine has only accelerated the geopolitical power shifts – the unmistakable global rise of China and the longer-term successes of a strategically astute Chinese government’s ambitious Silk Road Project, coupled with the ambitious claims of rival India, and finally the growing global political claims of middle powers such as Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. The Southeast Asian region is in a similar state of flux. It is no coincidence that the literature on the reorganization of a multipolar world has proliferated in the past decade. This change in the geopolitical situation, which has only been dramatized by the division of the West, casts the current German rearmament in a completely different light than the highly speculative assumptions about a current threat to the EU from Russia suggest.
In my opinion, the mood in our country has let itself be drawn into the maelstrom of mutual hostility with the aggressor, driven also by a one-sided formation of political opinion. Of course, the final decision of the Bundestag that has been voted out of office is also an unmistakable signal of determination not to allow Ukraine to become the victim of a deal made over its head. But the primary purpose of our planned long-term rearmament is different: The member states of the European Union must strengthen and pool their military forces, because otherwise they will no longer count politically in a geopolitically turbulent and disintegrating world. Only as a Union capable of independent political action can the European countries effectively bring their common global economic weight to bear in support of their normative convictions and interests.
Since Merkel, Germany has Ignorantly Shunned the Efforts of France in Particular
This raises a question that has been ignored until now: can the EU be perceived as an independent military power factor at the global level as long as each of its member states retains ultimate sovereignty over decisions regarding the structure and deployment of its armed forces? It will only gain geopolitical independence if it is able to act collectively, including in the use of military force. Of course, this presents the German government with an entirely new task. It will then have to cross a political threshold of European integration that the German government under Schäuble and Merkel had studiously avoided, not to mention the ignorance and inactivity of the recently ousted coalition government when it came to Europe – and this in the face of the long-standing efforts of our neighbor France!
For historically understandable reasons, the countries least willing to take this step are precisely the new and not-so-new member states in the east and northeast of the Union. Therefore, in this case too, the “closer cooperation” that the Union’s treaties allow willing portions of its members in relevant cases will probably have to come predominantly from the historical core countries of the EU. This is a daunting task, and one in which Friedrich Merz could grow in surprising ways, precisely because public confidence in his leadership abilities is not overwhelming.
However, the wave of rearmament is currently eliciting more strident tones. And this line is being taken not only by the usual suspects, who celebrate nationalism, a long-since historically superseded sentiment, as a timeless virtue, but also by politicians who want to revitalize the younger generation, which has good reasons for its post-heroic outlook, by reintroducing compulsory military service. And this in the midst of countries almost all of which have long since abolished or suspended conscription for good reasons. The abolition of compulsory military service is a reflection of a learning process in world history, namely the insight gained on the battlefields and in the cellars of the Second World War that this murderous form of the exercise of violence is inhumane – even if it is still the last resort for resolving international conflicts and can certainly only be abolished politically step by step. I am alarmed by support that the German government, which is now embarking on an unprecedented rearmament of the country, is receiving from some quarters, unthinkingly or even explicitly, with the aim of reviving a military mentality that was rightly thought to have been overcome.
I can only defend the political reasons I have cited to justify the strengthening of a joint EU military deterrent force on the condition that a corresponding further step is taken in European integration. The one idea upon which the old Federal Republic of Germany was built and expanded should suffice to justify this reservation: what would become of Europe if the most populous and economically leading state at its center were also to become a military power far superior to all its neighbors without a constitutionally binding commitment to a common European defense and foreign policy based on majority decisions?
This article was originally published on Süddeutsche Zeitung on March 23rd, 2025.
Cover photo: Internationally renowned German philosopher Juergen Habermas speaks to journalists in an auditorium of the Philosophical School of Athens on August 6, 2013. Greece, widely considered as the birthplace of western philosophy, hosts the 23rd World Congress of Philosophy, organised by the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP), which runs until August 10. (Photo by LOUISA GOULIAMAKI / AFP)
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