{However, the war in Ukraine is about more than Ukraine; it’s about the global world order. If Russia doesn’t lose completely and even gains compared with the status quo ante, the current Western-led global order ends. Thus, the West cannot accept such a peace deal.
The conversation is about prolonging the war, supplying more ammunition, more weapons, and trying to prevent Ukraine from losing. Any end to the war would signify the end of Western global dominance.
This is why the elites in Brussels and Washington DC are committed to continuing the war and preventing any peace initiative.
When I spoke to Weltwoche, I emphasized that Germany should be a “Macht für den Frieden” (a power for peace). But Germany today is not a power at all; it is more like a weasel. There is no independent German policy thinking. When Donald Trump was president, all of Brussels and Berlin called for strategic autonomy. When Joe Biden came back to lead the world, everyone was happy because the political elites lacked the intellectual capacity for independent foreign policy.
To understand European policies, just look to Washington, DC. The fight we face is to save Western global dominance, which means American global dominance.
My vision is for Germany to understand it is the loser in this war and seek support from other European countries for an independent foreign policy. Many smaller European countries, like Hungary and Bulgaria, understand this, and even the Netherlands. But as long as Germany is the front-runner in a policy that harms itself the most, there will be no change.}
{The vision is to accept that there are different understandings of a perfect order.
Let the Chinese be Chinese, the Indians be Indian, the Africans be African and the Europeans be European. We must abandon the idea that the whole world must follow the same political and legal culture. Asia has its traditions, and they should govern themselves accordingly. The same goes for the Islamic world. Let Muslims follow their own order without trying to impose Western values on them.}
{We must make it clear that there is an alternative in political thinking. The liberal era is ending. The Global South is rising, bringing traditional thinking back. We should rediscover our own Western traditional thinking.}
{But the most important question is foreign policy. And unfortunately, the European right is completely divided. You have a part of the European right, which in my view is the majority, that has a Cold War thinking, which has more to do with the 1980s than with 2024. So for them, international politics is not about the shift of power from the Atlantic to the Global South, etc. They still believe in the old rhetoric of war between the free world against the world of darkness. They are deep state agents when it comes to foreign policy, even more sometimes than the Socialists.}
{Now, in the brave new world that we find ourselves in, thanks to our American friends, we don’t get cheap energy from Russia anymore, because our pipelines were destroyed. So the prices of our manufactured goods are increasing, and they no longer are competitive. And we are not allowed to export to wherever we want, because of a global sanctions regime designed by the United States.
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What we see today is the complete destruction of the German economy and the German manufacturing industry because of this new foreign policy approach of America. And I’m not willing to accept that.
The whole Western or American empire is in decline. The decline of Western dominance or American dominance is not a matter of five years. It is a process with periods in which this decline is visible and quite rapid. And there will be times in which there’s a counter-strike, and American and Western power will increase for a short period. But in the long run, I’m convinced that the world of the future is a world of multipolarity, which is not run by Washington, DC, and Brussels anymore. The demographic and economic data are clear.
In 1913, one-third of the global population lived in Western Europe and North America. Now, it’s just one-sixth. And the age pyramid in the Western world is horrible. The same is true of global GDP. When I was born in the mid-1970s, almost three-quarters of the global GDP was produced in the G7 countries. Now, we are on the same level as the BRICS. We only dominate in terms of military power. But as Talleyrand said, you can’t sit on bayonets.}
