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62 Opinion bne October 2018
The G20 is the nearest thing there is to global governance these days and Merkel leads Europe.
The end of the post WWII world order
Ben Aris in Berlin
It's a tough time to be a diplomat at the moment as the madness of US President Donald Trump has caused so much chaos on the international stage that he is catalysing the break-up of the post WWII order. Germany is now vocally saying it wants to leave the US security umbrella and take
its place as a leader on the world stage. Many of Berlin’s proposals dovetail with policies the Kremlin has been pursuing to break Washington’s hegemony over global politics.
Germany’s new Foreign Minister Heiko Maas recently called the US an “unreliable partner,” as he grapples with a range of crises. Missile strikes on Afghanistan and Syria. The destruc- tion of a delicately built Iranian nuclear sanctions deal. US sanctions imposed on enemies and allies alike. Destabilising the Middle East by inflaming Sunni and Sufi sensibilities.
And threats to pull out of a raft of international organisa- tions including Nafta, Nato, the UN Commission on Human Rights and the Paris climate accord. All this is a nightmare for countries on the other side of the table, but it has reached a point where those on the same side of the table have decided that the US is as much of a liability as a partner. The US has not become irrelevant. It remains the largest economy in the world and has the most powerful military by a long chalk. But what has changed is the other leading powers are now actively trying to make it as irrelevant as they can.
The turning point came following German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first private meeting with Trump at the G20 summit earlier this year in Munich. A consummate politician with
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decades of experience of dealing with some of the most awkward leaders in the world, Merkel was visibly shocked by Trump and called for an end to Europe’s reliance on the US immediately afterwards.
“I have experienced this in the last few days,” she said a few days after Munich without mentioning Trump by name. “And that is why I can only say that we Europeans must really take our fate into our own hands – of course in friendship with the United States of America, in friendship with Great Britain and as good neighbours wherever that is possible also with other countries, even with Russia.”
Since then Maas has taken up the baton and in the last two months has started to lay out a blueprint for a new world order where Germany steps up to its responsibility as Europe’s leader and openly challenges the US’s predominance.
What is so ironic about this change in mindset is that it will align Germany and its partners with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who has made abandoning the “unipolar” model of run- ning the planet for a “multipolar” version where the emerging markets – led by Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa
– in addition to western Europe, play a much larger role. That process has already started as the G20 summit that so shocked Merkel has taken precedence over the smaller and increasingly irrelevant G7 summits. This year’s G7 summit in Canada barely made the press, while the G20 in Munich was marred by mas- sive and violent demonstrations by anti-globalists.