US President Donald Trump is disrupting so many institutions and norms, it is hard to keep track of what matters and what does not. Is the chaos merely performative (befitting a celebrity who got his big break on reality television)? Or does it amount to a historic rupture? Much suggests the latter, because Trump is well on the way to burying a large idea: that of “the West.”
Like the Global South, the West is not primarily a geographical notion, for its European and North American trunks have antipodean, Asian and other branches. It is instead, as German historian Heinrich August Winkler defines it, a “normative” project — an evolving, sometimes vague, but nonetheless coherent bundle of values.
Trump and his movement do not share those values, at least not unequivocally, and that is now sinking in across the rest of the West, which the US has led for the past eight decades. That realization can be cathartic. Take Christoph Heusgen, a German diplomat whom I got to know when he was national security adviser to former German chancellor Angela Merkel, and who is now the outgoing chairman of the Munich Security Conference, which took place last weekend.
“We have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore,” Heusgen said in closing the conference. Minutes later, he broke down in tears and left the stage, with nary a dry eye in the audience. He was responding to another speech given by US Vice President JD Vance.
A day after visiting the Dachau concentration camp, Vance had harangued the audience in Munich that Europe should worry less about Russia and China and more about its “threat from within.” And what is that threat? It is apparently an anti-democratic, woke-ish outbreak of censorship that manifests in cancelling elections such as Romania’s (which was corrupted by a Russian disinformation campaign) and suppressing movements such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that German intelligence services are monitoring for neo-Nazi tendencies, but that nonetheless enjoys the same rights in parliament, the media and society that all other parties have.
Most Europeans and quite a few Americans in the audience were agape at the chutzpah of a Trump acolyte — one who goes along with the “big lie” that the US’ presidential ballot of 2020 was “stolen” — lecturing Europeans about the integrity of their elections. The Germans in particular could not believe Vance’s distortion, and indeed inversion, of the message they had drawn from the Holocaust and camps such as Dachau, which is: Never again.
To Germans, that exhortation means that lies must never again be allowed to stand unopposed; that the tyranny of a plurality must never again crush the rights of minorities or individuals; that “human dignity shall be inviolable” whether a person is native-born or migrant, whether she belongs to the in or any out-group. And yet here is the Trump administration, rebroadcasting Russian propaganda, wooing far-right movements such as the AfD and flipping the lessons of history while posing for pictures at Dachau.
There is a reason Germans are especially shocked at the cynicism coming out of this new White House. It resonates with me, because as a dual citizen of the US and Germany, I have spent my whole life in the liminal state between both cultures. After the Holocaust, the West Germans became good Europeans and democrats, but they did so under US tutelage and protection. They learned their “Western” values from their conquerors-turned-liberators: the Americans.
Go back to Winkler, the historian. My bookshelf groans under his weighty anthologies about the West’s history, values and current crisis. However, his magnum opus is an investigation into why it took Germans so long to figure out whether they were or were not part of that West. When they veered in the wrong direction, between 1848 and 1945, the result was tyranny and totalitarianism, two world wars and at least as many holocausts. When they finally did join the West, under the benevolent gaze of Washington (as well as Elvis Presley and the Marlboro Man), history became much brighter.
What, then, is this thing called the West? Its philosophical seeds were sown in Athens and Rome, but its womb was the medieval Occident (as distinct from the Orient in the “Middle East”), and specifically the Catholic and later Protestant (as opposed to Orthodox) lands of Christianity. The gestation was the Age of Enlightenment — and the American and French revolutions it birthed — with its emphasis on individual freedom, rationality and self-determination.
In the two centuries since, the West has kept evolving to stand for democracy, the rule of law, human rights, tolerance and constitutionalism. It constantly had to confront and vanquish its own demons, from slavery to colonialism and authoritarianism. Each time, it prevailed — at least so far.
The West became a geopolitical concept only after defeating Nazism and Fascism in World War II. Its first formal institution was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, originally founded “to keep the Americans in Europe, the Russians out and the Germans down.” Others included what is today the EU.
Many nations want to join those institutions, because they are also organs of the West. The Ukrainians protesting on the Euromaidan in 2013 to 2014 wanted to get into the EU and away from Moscow, which to them represents an authoritarian “East,” as Beijing does to the people of Taiwan, or Pyongyang to South Koreans.
Hence the cognitive dissonance in the non-American West as US officials negotiate directly with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia — about the fate of Ukraine and apparently a more general detente between Washington and Moscow — even as the Europeans who were not invited to the table gather separately in Paris to figure where that Trumpist turn leaves them. Hence the angst gripping the US’ allies every time they behold Trump threatening Canada or Denmark while finding kind words for his counterparts in Moscow or Beijing.
Nothing suggests that Trump, as leader of the most powerful nation in history, understands the value of the West to the US and the world. That does not mean that the West is doomed. However, it does bode ill for Ukrainians and Europeans — and for anybody anywhere who yearns for a world with more freedom and justice rather than less.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist. James Gibney is an editor for Bloomberg Opinion. Previously an editor at The Atlantic, the New York Times, Smithsonian, Foreign Policy and the New Republic, he was also in the US Foreign Service from 1989 to 1997 in India, Japan and Washington.
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