Germany: forget greens, time to become a co-leader of a renovated West

The collapse of the German traffic light coalition of the Social Democrats (red), Greens (green), and Free Democrats (amber), isn’t either surprising or altogether unwelcome. The Chancellor Olaf Scholz is a worthy but ungalvanising leader, who often has the right instinct, but insufficient popularity or moral authority to lead decisively. He is the flipside of Benjamin Netanyahu: his integrity is greater but partially as a result, but more particularly because of his bland personality, he is much less effective and durable. Germany has generally been the most powerful country in Europe since it was unified by Bismarck in 1871. But the only time that it has acted responsibly in that role was when Bismarck himself was the imperial chancellor from 1871 to 1890. Thereafter, Germany acted irresponsibly under Kaiser Wilhelm II, (1890-1918); responsibly but meekly, under the Weimar Republic (1919-1933); irresponsibly and with evil disregard for the civilized conduct of nations and great peoples under the Third Reich (1933-1945), and responsibly but very tentatively in a cocoon of a military and economic alliances with the principal democracies throughout the life of the Federal Republic (1949 to the present).

Now, the  West as a whole is gradually recovering from a peculiar hiatus of self-reproach and disorderly melancholia following its unprecedented bloodless strategic victory in the Cold War, when a mortal adversary, under the firm but nonviolent pressures of the inspired American containment strategy of 45 years, fell like a soufflé and disintegrated without a shot being fired. At varying speeds of response, the major western nations which flopped into this general slough of despond are emancipating themselves from it, having determined that massive collective self-hate on the grounds of being largely white peoples which could conceivably have advanced civilization even more swiftly and equitably than they did, is both unjust and, beyond a certain ritualistic minimum, insufferable. They are recovering their collective judgment as the US election last week demonstrated and are returning to their natural vocation as responsible nations.

Uniquely, we have been led in this matter by Italy, a country so egregiously misgoverned that it is appropriate that it should take the lead in moving from the muddled insipidity of the Left, where we all landed, towards the responsible Right. But the pre-eminent influence, as always in the post-Second World War era, is the United States, who on November 5 resoundingly proclaimed the end of woke, crypto-self-hating racism, and a renewed the auto-recognition of the indisputable greatness and general benignity of America. This is appropriate to the country to which we chiefly lay the victory of the West in World War II and the Cold War, the great spread of democracy and the free market in the world in the last 80 years, and which has made an unprecedented effort to raise up a formerly forcibly servile minority to absolute equality with the formerly slave-holding majority.

Germany should be the second of the major western countries to reboot from a pacifistic East-West ambivalence and the self-flagellation of nonsensical green impoverishment, back to being the proud and civilised nation of Goethe and Beethoven, and a co-leader with its national peers of a renovated West. The West, led again from Washington, will now grant Russia less than it has already occupied of Ukraine, so that Putin, having been severely defeated in his attempt to reabsorb Ukraine, can claim something for his heavy casualties and embarrassment. Ukraine can be fast tracked into NATO and the EU with absolute guarantees of its revised borders from Russia and NATO, and the West can gradually out-bid China for the attentions of the Kremlin, without compromising our strategic interest. This, along with the deliverance of Ukraine from the attempted Russian conquest, are the West’s two strategic objectives in this war.

Canada will follow Germany next year when the Peter Pan fairyland of political correctness and universal brotherhood of Justin Trudeau is replaced by responsible Conservatism, and France will follow Canada in 2027 when the Macron experiment vanishes, and the National Rally of Marine Le Pen will be sufficiently house-trained to be sold as a party of Gaullist not Poujadist inspiration.

When the German election comes, probably in January, the burning question will be whether the ruling coalition at the end of it, since in German proportional representation assures a coalition government, will be a grand coalition of Christian Democrats and the detritus of the Social Democrats, or a new grouping with the Alternative for Germany Party. This will depend not only on the result of the election, but also on the conduct of the leaders of the Alternative. It will be important to see if the leadership of the German Left is taken over by Sahra Wagenknecht, a relatively glamorous traditional German leftist on the model of Ferdinand Lasalle (1825-1864), who wants to scrap NATO and have an alliance with Russia. It will also be vitally important that the new government abandons the self-destructive de-carbonization of Merkel and Scholz, and shrinks the deficit, revives the struggling German automobile industry, revives nuclear power, and bankrolls its planned defence build-up. Europe and the world are awaiting the return of Germany s a responsible Great Power after an absence from that position of 135 years.