At The Strategist Aussie David Ritchie muses over the direction of the West in the era of Trump:
The tone of the lecture President Trump gave fellow NATO leaders in Brussels on the need to lift their defence expenditure was bad enough, although it could scarcely have come as a surprise to other NATO countries. And Trump is right on that point: the European NATO members need to improve their game significantly. His failure to reaffirm NATO’s mutual defence commitments, however, sent a terrible signal to Europe.
The President’s stance at the recent G7 meeting in Sicily on issues such as climate change and trade simply added to this sense of exasperation. Merkel described the US position on climate change as ‘unzufriedenstellend—unsatisfactory’. Trump’s decision since to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement can only have reinforced this. His various egregious comments about Germany being ‘bad, very bad’ for its success in exporting cars to the US also didn’t go down well. The German reaction was to advise the Americans to make better cars.
There is no such thing as “the West” and never has been. The idea was originally a construct with the explicit objective of bringing the United States into Europe’s wars. Then it was used to distinguish Western Europe and the United States from Russia and Central and Eastern Europe. Now it mostly means Germany.
As long as Germany maintains a mercantilist policy, the idea of “the West” will remain under attack. Our interests are vastly broader than theirs and we should pursue American interests as I would expect the Germans to pursue German interests and Australians to pursue Australian interests.
Unlike Germany we’re not essentially landlocked and again unlike Germany we have both Atlantic and Pacific coasts. We actually have more in common with other countries in the Americas including Canada, Mexico, and Brazil than we do with the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
