The government politicians of the Western powers are currently coming to a painful realization: categorizing the world according to good and bad, according to morally clean business partners and politically dubious types, is unsustainable in the long run.
You can’t see the changing tide in international politics, but you can feel it. You just have to close your eyes for a moment and remember. Take Angela Merkel, for example, and her concept of a “value-based foreign policy”.
Or to the Greens, who campaigned in the opposition to export not only automobiles, but also human rights and environmental standards. Also unforgettable is Joe Biden, who said after the murder of the Saudi journalist Khashoggi on October 2, 2018: “The Saudis will have to pay a price for this.”
This price – he promised during the election campaign – will also consist in personal exclusion by the new president: “I will treat you as the pariah that you are.” Tempi Passati.
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Merkel is still best off. Their time is up, their government policy remains frozen for historians’ scrutiny.
Even Robert Habeck does not have to explain the change of tide. He embodies him. With his trip to Qatar and the negotiation of a fossil energy injection for the German economy, he sacrificed the humanitarian and ecological ethos of an economically dominated Realpolitik. It wasn’t pretty, but it was sensible.
But nobody goes as far as Joe Biden on his current trip to the Middle East. During his visit to Saudi Arabia today, he does not want to hold the royal family responsible for any of the atrocities (after all, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was captured, murdered and dismembered on behalf of the king in Istanbul).
He doesn’t want to treat the alleged murderers like pariahs, but like partners. The ratio should be “recalibrated”; people close to Biden say they want to press the “reset” button.
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The driving forces behind the turning tide are the war, the energy price explosion and the inflation that has spread from there to all other products. The heads of government are no longer concerned with defending values, but with saving their domestic basis of legitimacy.
Government politicians took this opportunity to come to a bitter but necessary conclusion: categorizing the world according to good and bad, according to morally clean business partners and politically dubious types, is unsustainable in the long run.
The idea of ignoring the price signal from the markets and replacing it with a degree of political purity is a downhill road. Products are not suitable as weapons because the ammunition that is wasted is the wealth of the common man. Surf tip: You can find all the news about the corona pandemic in the FOCUS Online news ticker
F. Gregory Gause, III, Professor of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A
He recommends a cool balance between “the costs of instability and the advantages of a functioning order”. If one follows this line of argument, the aggressive American China policy is out of the question. And all apodictic statements about Russia and Iran appear misguided in this light.
There is also a recognizable right of self-determination for the despotic, which does not draw its strength from the laws or our feelings, but from the facts. Tyranny, whether of a secular or religious nature, are part of a pluralistic world, which, in continuation of Hannah Arendt’s “Banality of Evil”, reproduces as if through self-fertilization.
As far as we can survey world history, it is by no means striving for Western dominance or even free-democratic unipolarity. The overthrow of despots organized by the CIA and the US Army does not usually stimulate the people affected – see Iraq, see Afghanistan – not longing for democracy, but the desire for revenge.
Perhaps the West should remember the rules of the game in decades of systemic competition between the Soviet Union and the NATO countries. The system rival was attacked ideologically, but not militarily. Nonviolence was the basis for the post-war rise of Western Europe.
The other power was not loved but respected as a power. One made deals and no prisoners. Wealth was maximized, not anger.
And when Erich Honecker was short of cash, Franz Josef Strauss organized him a loan worth billions. In return, the GDR dismantled large parts of its automatic firing systems.
In short, communists and capitalists renounced the idea of ultimate victory and finality. Each assumed that he would not be able to bring the other to his knees. Ironically, the red revolutionary (and pragmatist) Lenin gave this concept its name. It was called “peaceful coexistence”. Today we have a single word for it: globalization.
Gabor Steingart is one of the best-known journalists in the country. He publishes the newsletter The Pioneer Briefing. The podcast of the same name is Germany’s leading daily podcast for politics and business. Since May 2020, Steingart has been working with his editorial staff on the ship “The Pioneer One”. Before founding Media Pioneer, Steingart was, among other things, CEO of the Handelsblatt Media Group. You can subscribe to his free newsletter here.
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