Filenews 20 February 2025 - by Andreas Kluth
President Donald Trump has shaken so many institutions and rules that it's hard to keep track of what matters and what doesn't. Is the chaos it causes just superficial (like a celebrity looking to make an impression)? Or is it a historic rupture? Much suggests the latter, as Trump is on a collision course with a grand idea: that of the "West."
Like the Global South, the West is not primarily a geographical concept, as its European and American trunk spreads many branches. It is, instead, as German historian Heinrich August Winkler defines it, a "normative" project – an evolving, sometimes vague but coherent set of values.
Trump and his movement do not share these values, at least not without asterisks, and this has now begun to be felt throughout the rest of the West, which has been led by the United States for the past eight decades. This awareness can be catalytic. I quote Christoph Heusgen, a German diplomat whom I met when he was national security adviser to former Chancellor Angela Merkel and who is now the outgoing chairman of the Munich Security Conference held last weekend.
"We have to fear that our common basis of values is no longer so common," Heusgen said at the close of the conference. A few minutes later, he broke down in tears and left the stage, having touched the entire audience with his words. He was responding to another speech, that of Trump's vice president, J.D. Vance.
A day after his visit to the Dachau concentration camp, Vance had advised the European audience in Munich to worry less about Russia and China and more about the "threat from within." And what is this threat? This appears to be an anti-democratic, woke wave of censorship manifested in the cancellation of elections such as those in Romania (corrupted by a Russian disinformation campaign) and the repression of movements such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party which German secret services have put under surveillance for neo-Nazi tendencies, but which nevertheless enjoys the same rights in parliament. the media and society with all other parties.
Most Europeans and many Americans in the room were stunned by the audacity of a Trump devotee — a man who agrees with the Big Lie that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was "stolen" — to berate Europeans for the integrity of their election. Germans in particular could not believe Vance's distortion—indeed reversal—of the message they had drawn from the Holocaust and camps like Dachau, "Never Again."
For Germans, this exhortation means that they must never again allow lies to go unanswered—that the tyranny of the majority must never again crush the rights of minorities or individuals—that "human dignity will be inviolable," whether a person is born in his own country, an immigrant, whether he belongs to the intragroup or to any extragroup. And yet, now comes the Trump administration, broadcasting Russian propaganda, joining far-right movements like the AfD, and reversing the lessons of history while posing for the camera from Dachau.
There is a reason why Germans are particularly shocked at the cynicism emanating from this new White House. I can understand this because, as a citizen of the US and Germany, I have spent my whole life on the verge of two cultures. After the Holocaust, West Germans became good Europeans and democrats, but they did so under U.S. tutelage and protection. They learned their "Western" values from their occupiers, who became liberators: the Americans.
I return to Winkler, the historian. My library shelves groan under his grandiose anthologies on history, values, and the current crisis of the West. But his magnum opus is an investigation into why the Germans took so long to figure out whether or not they are part of this West. When they turned in the wrong direction, between 1848 and 1945, the result was tyranny and totalitarianism, two world wars and holocausts. When they finally joined the West, under the benevolent gaze of Washington (as well as Elvis and the Marlboro Man), the story became much brighter.
What, then, is it called the West? Its philosophical seeds were sown in Athens and Rome, but its womb was the medieval West (as opposed to the East in the "Middle East"), specifically the Catholic and later Protestant (as opposed to Orthodox) countries of Christianity. It was born by the Enlightenment – and the American and French revolutions it gave birth to – with an emphasis on individual freedom, rationality and self-determination.
In the two centuries that followed, the West never ceased to evolve to support democracy, the rule of law, human rights, tolerance and constitutionality. She constantly had to confront and defeat her own demons, from slavery to colonialism to authoritarianism. Each time, it prevailed – at least so far.
The West became a geopolitical concept only after the defeat of Nazism and fascism in World War II. Its first formal institution was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, originally established "to keep Americans in Europe, Russians out, and Germans down." Others included what is now the European Union.
Many countries want to join these institutions because they are also organs of the West. Ukrainians protesting Euromaidan in 2013-14 wanted to join the EU but also distance themselves from Moscow, which for them represents an authoritarian "East," like Beijing for Taiwanese or Pyongyang for South Koreans.
Hence the cognitive dissonance now being caused in the non-American West, as U.S. officials negotiate directly with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia — over the fate of Ukraine and apparently for a more general de-escalation between Washington and Moscow — even as Europeans not invited to the table gather separately in Paris to understand where they stand after Trump's U-turn. Hence the anguish that overwhelms America's allies whenever they see Trump threatening Canada or Denmark, say, while finding good words for his counterparts in Moscow or Beijing.
Nothing suggests that Trump, as leader of the most powerful nation in history, understands the West's value to both America and the world. This does not mean that the West is doomed. But it does not bode well for Ukrainians and Europeans – and for anyone who wants a world with more, not less, freedom and justice.
Performance – Editing: Lydia Roumpopoulou
