Europe Caught in a Pincer Grip

What Donald Trump understands as the victory of the West is the very opposite of what most Europeans want. It is imperative to deal with this contradiction in a productive way.

This year’s Munich Security Conference has not been a pleasant event. At least not for those politicians who feel they belong to the West. Having been dedicated to increasing “Westlessness,” the conference could be understood as a farewell to the geopolitical homeland of whole generations.

In the end, the conference did not go quite like that. The West is alive, but it exists in various forms. As a concept of the enemy, which the Russians and the Chinese once again established in Munich. As a narcissistic muscleman, embodied by the U.S. under Donald Trump. And lastly, in the shape of all those who are caught in a vise between the two sides. It is those people on whom the future of the West depends.

In this respect, the appearance of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was a significant moment during the security conference. Pompeo objected to criticism by Federal President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who asserted that the U.S. has turned its back on the idea of an international community. He also celebrated an ostensible triumph of the West. But only those who don’t understand, or don’t want to understand, the newspeak of the Trump era will take this as good news.

The victory of the West which Pompeo celebrates is the very opposite of the West in which most Europeans once felt at home. Pompeo’s West is one in which nation states are mainly following their own interest. A West in which sovereignty and not cooperation is the top priority.

Reliant on a US President Who Thinks He Is above the Law

The Europeans have to deal with a Russia, which has violently relocated borders in Europe, which is using every military loophole that arises, and which pampers the enemies of democracy whenever it seems opportune. Furthermore, they have to steel themselves for handling a totalitarian China aspiring to enforce its will more and more violently. Despite all of this, they remain reliant on a U.S. president who has torn up international agreements one after the other, who attacks the media, who thinks he is above the law and who torments the independent judiciary. The notion of the West, whose victory Pompeo declared, is empty, or one could say it has even been thrown into reverse.

That is the pincer grip: On one side is the threat of erosion by a diminished West essentially deprived of its values. On the other side lurks the danger from the West’s overt enemies. It is interesting how carefully Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Jacek Czaputowicz repudiated the mention in the same breath of the U.S., Russia and China as a challenge. On the one hand, he is right because the U.S. is still a functioning democracy with which most EU countries are still connected through a functioning military alliance. On the other hand, Poland in particular shows how complicated things have gotten.

On the eastern edge of the EU and NATO, the West is being protected in a way that has once again become necessary during recent years, that is to say, militarily. This would not be possible without the U.S. At the same time, the destruction of the constitutional state in Poland is threatening the EU at its core. The U.S. is playing a major role here as well because Trump encourages and empowers the rulers in Warsaw. The U.S. under Trump does not see the European Union as a partner anymore. Instead, the United States is longing for the EU to end, a fact that Secretary of State Pompeo barely glossed over during a speech in Brussels one year ago.

The security conference did not lack a call for realism. Federal President Steinmeier lamented the deep cracks in the international order, but at the same time warned of overconfidence and moral arrogance. French President Emmanuel Macron once again diagnosed the weakening of the West and warned against the delusion that its values will somehow prevail internationally. All of this is true, but any realistic assessment must acknowledge that for Europe to assert Western values, it can only succeed by undertaking a complicated process full of contradictions.

Whenever possible, Europeans will have to make an effort to find common cause with the very U.S. that has rejected the idea of an international community. By undertaking heavier burdens, Europe will have to contribute to the preservation of NATO. At the same time, however, Europe will have to confront the U.S. time and again and, especially under Trump, Europe will not be able to trust the U.S. to interpret what the West is. Anything else would destroy Europe from the inside and deprive it of its credibility to the outside world. It is a difficult path, but it is the only one. The news about the death of the West is greatly exaggerated. Yet.