Stanford professor and Hoover fellow Russell Berman asks: “Who leads the West, Trump or Merkel?”
“Who leads the West, Trump or Merkel?” This is the question posed by Russell Berman, the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The essay is online at the Hoover web site, and we highly recommend it to our readers. For this reason, we will not summarize it here but simply note that it contrasts George Washington’s ideas to those of the speculative Thomas Jefferson and Germany’s Immanuel Kant. Professor Berman then skips forward in time and finds similar contrasts between Donald Trump’s thought shaped by liberty-oriented American political culture versus Angela Merkel’s German statist traditions.
We will attempt an answer to Professor Berman’s question as to which leader, Trump or Merkel, has the better claim to the mantle of “leader of the West,” on the basis of facts on the ground.
Merkel’s Germany is now in crisis. She cannot form a government because she refuses to form a majority government of the right. That would mean allying with the anti-immigration, Euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD), which goes against her unpopular policy of open borders for African and Asian refugees, many of whom are Muslim, poorly educated, and hostile to Western mores. As a result of her opening Europe’s gates to a Muslim demographic invasion, half of Eastern Europe now has conservative governments hostile to both the immigrants and the European Union. German-speaking Austria is the latest adherent to this shift to the right. It’s now governed by a coalition of the conservative Austrian People’s Party and the nationalist Freedom Party, which is similar in viewpoint to Germany’s AfD.
Conservative victories on four continents
Nord Stream 2 pipeline route
President Trump is not a conservative himself but, pragmatist and populist, he leads an unruly Republican Party coalition of conservatives, libertarians, evangelicals, and some independents. Today it is likely to achieve its greatest legislative victory by enacting in both houses of Congress the most important tax reform since President Reagan in 1986. Under President Trump, the US is also moving toward full energy independence. Germany under Chancellor Merkel, by contrast, may approve Nord Stream 2, a pipeline from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea. This would make Germany and the European Union more, not less, dependent on Russia for its energy. Earlier, Chancellor Merkel made that dependence even greater by shutting down Germany’s nuclear power plants.
India’s Prime Minister holding up his inked finger after voting, confident of victory for his conservative government and its growth-oriented tax and economic reforms
In contrast to Chancellor Merkel’s so far failed attempt to form a Grand Coalition government with the leftist Social Democrats — and her refusal to form a majority coalition of the parties to the right of her Christian Democrats — conservative parties or leaders have recently assumed the leadership of governments on four continents. We’ve mentioned the Austrians already. Chile and Honduras have both elected conservative governments, although the Honduran election results are being contested. South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, has just replaced its statist leader with a successful businessman. And India’s Prime Minister Modi’s conservative Hindu party, the BJP, has just defeated the leftist Congress Party in the important Gujarat state elections.
Trump’s National Security Strategy (NSS) needs to be fleshed out
Actual Trump administration energy policies have excellently meshed with its critique of the Obama administration’s economy-damaging radical environmentalism. But the Wall Street Journal‘s lead editorial today has a point. While it praises the President’s “realism” in his NSS speech yesterday, it adds the following qualification:
“The strategy cites Russia’s attempt to destabilize Ukraine, but Mr. Trump has declined Ukraine’s repeated requests for lethal military aid to raise the cost of Russian intervention. This is no different from Mr. Obama. Mr. Trump is also letting Russia and Iran dominate on the ground in post-Islamic State Syria. Mr. Trump’s anti-Iran rhetoric is more muscular than Mr. Obama’s, but his policy isn’t.”
The President has also committed to spending more money on missile defense, but more money spent on ground and sea-based platforms isn’t what’s needed: it’s the rolling out of space-based platforms that can destroy enemy missiles on launch, not when they’re about to crash into a major population center at supersonic speed. The technology is already available. See Angelo Codevilla’s articles referenced in earlier Founders Broadsheets: here and here.
Will this toy moon astronaut turn into a fully funded moon-and-Mars landing program or remain just a speech and a toy?
The President also says he wants the US to go to the moon and beyond:
“The announcement drew support from NASA, aerospace proponents, and Congressmen Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee….
“But not everyone is as sanguine. Many Americans view their President as flighty, lacking on follow-through.
“And Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, points out that when John F. Kennedy announced his dream of putting a human on the Moon, he did so in a speech before a joint session of Congress, not in a lightly attended press conference. “There’s no evidence whatsoever of any serious commitment,” Zubrin says — not to mention that it is far too early to know if Congress will even fund the idea.
“If the proposal does turn out to be taken seriously by both the Trump Administration and Congress, however, Zubrin is supportive — even though his organisation’s long-run target is Mars, not the moon. The moon, he says, could be a useful test-bed for spacecraft designs and other technology ultimately designed to reach beyond. And, he notes, it’s only possible to launch for Mars once every two years: “[In the interim] you’d be idle, so you want to do the moon and Mars in parallel.”
But despite these qualifications regarding a gap between some Trump speeches and administration actions, the President has followed through on many of his campaign promises. One early skeptic, Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, now writes that “Trump’s first year is starting to look like a big win.” On the basis of these accomplishments and recent elections abroad, one would have to conclude that the West is looking more to Donald Trump for leadership than to Angela Merkel.
hat tip: Eaglebeak
Click here for yesterday’s Founders Broadsheet (“Trump National Security Strategy interlocks with trade policy shift”)
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