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After the end of World War II, the United States remained in Europe – politically, economically, and militarily. The institutional framework for its long-term commitment was to be NATO, an alliance system whose very name underscored the transatlantic nature of the new geopolitical arrangements. The North Atlantic thus became the »West’s« mare nostrum, and what we have referred to as the West over the past eight decades was a stable geopolitical and geoeconomic link between North America (the U.S. and Canada) and the countries along Europe’s Atlantic coast – from the North Cape to Gibraltar – as well as those along the northern Mediterranean coast from Gibraltar to the eastern end of that sea.
The end of geopolitical isolationism
The United States was the guiding spirit behind the NATO alliance. By joining it, the USA implicitly corrected its mistaken decisions to withdraw from European affairs after the First World War and decline to join the League of Nations in Geneva. Albeit belatedly, American leaders had evidently realized that the broad North Atlantic Ocean did not provide enough protection against threats emanating from European soil. Thus, the era of geopolitical isolationism was over for the time being – that is, the notion that the northern part of the American double continent should neither become entangled in Europe’s alliances nor be drawn into its conflicts and wars. Conversely, however, the Europeans had no business in America: certainly not on U.S. territory, but also not in Central and South America or the Caribbean.
This exclusionist principle was first formulated by U.S. President James Monroe in the 1820s. It became a geopolitical doctrine named after him. The Monroe Doctrine presumed that there were two distinct political spheres, the American and the European, which should remain separate from one another. In the short term, that was a defensive position for the U.S., as the European powers were then entering another round of colonial expansion. Over the long term, however, it represented an offensive U.S. claim to power over the entire Western hemisphere, including the islands of the Caribbean.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson abandoned this position when, in 1917, he entered World War I on the side of Great Britain and France in response to Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare. American participation in the war brought the North Atlantic into Washington’s geopolitical focus for the first time. There were ties between the United States and some European countries that ran counter to the territorial separation of the two continents proclaimed by Monroe: The Atlantic region had become so densely interwoven in terms of financial policy, for example, that the United States could not remain indifferent to political developments on the European continent. Geoeconomics undermined geopolitics. That was to remain the case from then on; it was evident during the Great Depression of 1929, when U.S. capital was pulled out of Germany, and it was further evident after World War II, when U.S. capital seeking investment opportunities poured into Europe and accorded a high value to political security guarantees. Economic interdependence thus became an integral part of geopolitics.
A narrative that stresses shared political values
The structural ties between the US and Europe are one thing; the narrative of shared political values is quite another. This Western framework of meaning emerged in the 1960s and centered on the revolutions in which, on both sides of the Atlantic, nations had fought to attain political liberty and impose constitutional limits on state action. Important chapters in this story included the English Revolution of 1640 and beyond; the American Revolution, which took the form of a war of independence from British colonial rule; the French Revolution of 1789 and beyond; and the revolutions of 1848–49, which, though they had only very limited political consequences, nevertheless signaled something akin to an ideological and political unity within the European sphere.
This narrative embodied the shared values of the Atlantic community and conveyed the message that the West was not to be considered an entity dependent on geopolitical arrangements, but rather that what belonged together had come together here. This narrative became something of a »guarantee of permanence« for the West. The Germans, in particular, believed in it, and for German politics, it has become a kind of dogma.
Already during his first term, Donald Trump raised significant doubts about the future of the »West,« and in the first year of his second term, those doubts turned into facts: The transatlantic alliance is more fragile than ever before, and the West as a political, economic, and cultural actor no longer exists. And, even more worrisome, It will not exist in the future either. In principle, this development has been on the horizon since Barack Obama’s 2011 statement that, in light of the economic dynamism of East and Southeast Asia, the U.S. would focus on the Indo-Pacific in the future, its so-called pivot to Asia).
Death knell of the West
President Trump’s remark earlier this year that he wanted to annex Greenland—which belongs to Denmark—to the U.S. was the death knell of the West even though he subsequently downplayed the project and seemed to put it on hold for the time being. Even staunch transatlanticists in Germany had to admit that everything had now changed. Ever since that moment—if not before—the Europeans have realized that they can no longer rely on the U.S. for security policy, because the U.S., at least under Trump, will put its own interests first. That means Europe must stand on its own two feet if it does not want to be marginalized between the major players, China and the United States.
Yet the limited relevance of the shared-values narrative should have been apparent early on: If it had truly been the West’s guiding principle, neither Portugal (until 1973) nor Turkey (almost throughout) nor Greece during the dictatorship of the colonels could have belonged to the NATO alliance. But they did, because otherwise it would have been much harder to cut off the Soviet Union completely from »warm waters« such as the Mediterranean. When the two are pitted against each other, geopolitics simply trumps commitment to values. Many Germans did not want to accept the validity of that observation; otherwise, they would have had to think more about power relationships than about values and how they were to be fleshed out—at least in the spheres of politics and political science.
Thus, geopolitical analyses and theories were set aside and treated as if they belonged to the past and had been rendered obsolete by the emergence of international institutions, treaty obligations, and complex economic interdependencies. If one had taken a dispassionate look at past U.S. policy, one would not have been so surprised by Trump or so disappointed in the United States. So, what does the United States‹ geopolitical repositioning look like? And what strategic lines can be discerned behind Trump’s generally annoying, opportunistic, ad-hoc behavior?
First, it must be noted that the U.S. has abandoned the role of »guardian of the world order« that had been its lot since the end of the bipolar era and no longer aspires to be a global hegemon. This self-imposed role of providing global public goods and ensuring their availability ultimately has overextended the U.S., as demonstrated by its withdrawal from Afghanistan and the earlier dismantling of the Iraq project. The recent war against the theocracy in Iran, which Trump explicitly justified on the grounds of U.S. citizens‹ security interests, does nothing to alter this. Regime change, he went on to explain, is a matter for the Iranian people, for whom the military defeat of the Iranian government offers an opportunity to take matters into their own hands. But the U.S. would neither moderate nor finance this regime change; it would merely create the preconditions for it.
In principle, the geostrategic guideline of the U.S., as formulated in the new American security strategy, boils down to leaving most regions of the world to their own devices and intervening only where a threat to U.S. security interests arises. The U.S. thus has a defensive-negative, but not a constructive, interest in large parts of the world. The situation is different when it comes to the American double continent. Trump has declared the Western hemisphere to be a largely exclusive U.S. sphere of influence, where others – namely the Chinese and Russians, but also the Europeans – should not interfere. Components of this project include the declaration that Canada should become the 51st state, as well as the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, which was intended to bring Venezuela and its resource policy into line with US interests. Thie latter operation was a warning signal about how the US intends to deal with governments that do not follow American directives. Colombia and Mexico evidently have gotten the message. Moreover, Trump knows that Argentina and Chile are politically on his side anyway. Brazil is likely to be the »toughest nut to crack« for him in implementing his policies.
And how does the American claim to Greenland (and Iceland) fit into this strategy? The two islands are intended to replace the US military’s dwindling presence on the European mainland and serve as bases of control for the North Atlantic, thus replacing control by forces on or near Europe’s Atlantic coast. From the current US administration’s perspective, this opposite-shore control ties up too many forces in a region where the US believes it no longer has essential interests. They want to have their hands free to be able to turn their full attention to the Pacific region. The flirtation between Trump and Putin likely serves this purpose as well, though it does not seem to be making much progress. And another problem with this geopolitical repositioning is that the U.S. is being challenged – or feels challenged – by various actors around the world, most recently Iran. Those multiple challenges lead to a fragmentation of power politics and actually makes the European bases indispensable.
There is much to suggest that, in the post-Trump era, the U.S. will be weaker and poorer than before, and that its repositioning project, which includes the demise of the transatlantic West, will be a major failure. In attempting to escape the trap of hegemonic overreach, the U.S. may have fallen into the trap of an empire without reliable friends and allies, which, left to its own devices, will end up being overwhelmed by the challenges it faces. Then what Loge calls out to the gods in Wagner’s Rheingold might come true: »They are rushing toward their end, those who imagine themselves so strong that nothing can touch them.«