Normally, I wouldn’t applaud the audacious rhetoric of a German chancellor, especially one speaking to right-wing activists in a Munich beer tent. Apart from the bad associations with Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, I find that Angela Merkel is already sufficiently reckless in her conduct on the European scene, where her fiscal intimidation of the Greeks and the Spaniards continues without letup.
But we’re not living in normal times, and the chancellor’s recent speech, in which she advocated for a German foreign policy more independent from the United States under the leadership of Donald Trump, seemed utterly appropriate to me. At the present moment, with an American president so ignorant and dangerous – and under fire from all sides for his more or less criminal conduct – it would be absurd for the heads of European Union member states to act as if nothing but business as usual was taking place internationally. With almost 68,000 American soldiers in Europe, 36,000 of them based in Germany, there’s plenty to worry about.
Historically, U.S. foreign policy has consistently been bound up with its domestic politics. Two examples are the invasion of Mexico in 1846, which was part of the great project of America’s so-called manifest destiny, and the dream of expansion to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. More recently, Trump’s strike against the Assad regime in Syria was more a symbolic strike than a real military intervention, launched for the sole purpose of silencing American critics of his tendency to favor Russia and appeasing the supporters of human rights who consider Assad a war criminal. Just as President James K. Polk in 1846 had no intention of conducting diplomacy with Mexico or of guaranteeing and respecting the borders between the two nations, Trump is uninterested in resolving the civil war in Syria or stopping the slaughter of innocent people trapped between the Islamic State, the various rebel factions, and the Syrian government.
The Mexican-American War, which was provoked by the United States, underscores how the U.S. is motivated more by the ambitions of politicians than by a desire for peace, for cooperation, for constructive alliances, or even for the good health of the country’s economy. Trump doesn’t have Polk’s intelligence, but all the same there are some psychological links between the two men that pass through Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. The slogan “Make America Great Again,” as well as verbal assaults against the “criminal” Mexicans, who are impugned for stealing American jobs, arise from atavistic impulses that go directly back to prejudices common in the nineteenth century. When Trump labels as “unfair to the people and taxpayers of the United States” Washington’s allegedly disproportionate expenses for NATO’s maintenance, the subtext is nearly the same: foreigners of dubious character, simultaneously cunning and lazy, are seizing what rightfully belongs to the honest citizens of Middle America. Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Accord sounded a similar note: “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore…. I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
However, instead of lingering to consider the numerous stupid remarks spouted by Trump, it would be more useful to think about ways of protecting Canada, in conjunction with Europe, from an aggressive, powerful, unpredictable, and obviously unstable neighbor, led by a head of state so narcissistic as to be capable of causing serious damage to the Middle East as well as to the Korean peninsula. Ever since the Kennedy Administration, Washington’s foreign policy has been made entirely in the Oval Office and at the National Security Agency, not at the State Department. Any appeal to the cultivated diplomats of Foggy Bottom is out of the question.
My idea would be to revive and reform the Non-Aligned Movement, which was all the rage during the Cold War, in order to erect a protective barrier made up of usually pro-American countries currently confused by Trump’s incoherent foreign policy. “Neither Washington nor Moscow” could become a mantra again. An unrealistic notion, perhaps, but Canada’s Justin Trudeau could serve as a leader in this endeavor, together with such partners as Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron. The Non-Aligned Movement is still technically in existence, but it’s handicapped by the hypocrisy of its key members, such as Saudi Arabia (a country obviously allied with the United States and Trump), and by its exaggeratedly third-world, anti-West image. Instead of proclaiming its allegiance to neither orthodox communism nor unbridled capitalism, as people said during the era of General Nasser and Marshal Tito, a new non-aligned movement, supported by a “Little Entente” of Trudeau, Merkel, and Macron could have as its slogan: neither national narcissism (à la Trump/Putin) nor nationalist aggression.
