The Vision Thing

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, December 10, 2021

 

In the late 1970s, German chancellor Helmut Schmidt was asked about his “vision” for Germany. Schmidt scoffed at the question: “People who have visions should go see a doctor.”

 

Germany has just elected a new chancellor, Olaf Scholz. Like Schmidt, he is a member of the Social Democratic Party but is not the kind of social democrat given to the utopian reveries that afflict Americans of that persuasion. “Sell the world a BMW” — that’s the German ideology in our time. Germany has had worse ideas.

 

Modern German coalitional politics — and the rest of modern German politics — can seem damned peculiar to an American. Scholz is nominally a socialist, but he served as finance minister — the second-most-powerful position in German government — under the conservative Angela Merkel. His new coalition government comprises three parties: the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Free Democrats, who are Germany’s libertarian party. The new finance minister, Christian Lindner, comes from those libertarian Free Democrats, but he is expected to follow much the same policy as Scholz did before him. Put another way: The libertarian serving under the socialist is expected to conduct business in much the same way as the socialist did when he served under the conservative.

 

The thing about German socialists and German libertarians is that they are German, and as finance minister Scholz was much more a fiscal conservative than any Republican actually holding high office in the United States. You want fiscal conservatism? Germany’s debt-to-GDP ratio is just over half that of the United States, and, in spite of its more-expansive welfare state, Germany’s government spending as a share of GDP isn’t much more than ours: 51 percent for Germany vs. 46 percent for the United States. Germany’s new socialist leader ran on a platform of no tax increases and no new debt. These will be difficult promises to keep, but the fact that he made them and was elected on them should tell us something about how he sees the world and what to expect of him. Don’t think that he is going to get carried away by any “visions” — not his own, and certainly not Joe Biden’s.

 

The United States needs to figure out its relationship with Germany, because Germany is the key to American relations with the European Union and the European Union is critical to dealing — as we eventually must — with China.

 

Things are not off to a great start there. President Biden had been hoping that some other democratic powers would join in our not-quite-a-boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Biden found no taker in Olaf Scholz. When asked whether he was signing on, the new German chancellor took about 600 words to say Nein. That shouldn’t surprise us: Biden’s policy is a stupid and cowardly one, and there wasn’t anything in it for the Germans. A “diplomatic boycott” is a protest that nobody would have noticed if there hadn’t been a press release: “Where in the World Is Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs Melissa A. Brown” is not a game that anybody really plays. Of course, we’re still sending the athletes — the only people anybody cares about when it comes to the Olympics — because this is America, where sports is the most weirdly sensitive nexus of capitalism and nationalism. That’s American diplomacy in our time: China may be a genocidal police state and our No. 1 global adversary, but, by God, our figures skaters stay off the ice for nothing and no one!

 

The problem with bringing the Germans around to the U.S. position vis-à-vis China is that the Germany–China relationship already is too much like the U.S.–China relationship: Germany’s leaders, like ours, will occasionally make some ceremonial gestures toward democracy or human rights, and there are a few German and American policy thinkers who still take a long-term geopolitical view, but the governments of both countries still approach their respective relationships with China as an almost exclusively economic matter.

 

And the economic footprint there is a big one. Trade between the United States, the European Union, and China accounts for almost half of the world’s total trade in goods, and Germany is both Europe’s largest economy and its largest exporter. While the prominence of Chinese imports in the United States is wildly exaggerated in our political discourse (Chinese goods account for only about 18 percent of U.S. imports), China does send more goods to the United States than any other country, well ahead of No. 2 Mexico (11.8 percent of U.S. imports) and No. 3 Canada (11.4 percent). China is the third-largest buyer of U.S. exports, behind Canada and Mexico. The biggest buyer of German exports is the United States and the biggest source of German imports is China. Germany is the sixth-biggest buyer of U.S. exports.

 

That’s a lot of trade, a lot of money, and a lot of jobs.

 

Nobody wants to put all that at risk — yet. And, furthermore, nobody wants to be the first to admit that the turn-of-the-century confidence that economic liberalization would bring other kinds of liberalization to China has not been borne out by subsequent events, partly because Chinese nationalism is a real and organic phenomenon rather than a mere instrument of the Communist Party, partly because the credibility and prestige of Western liberalism have been damaged in recent years, and partly because the assumption was unrealistic to begin with. And so the fruitful and dynamic commercial relationship with China remains the dominant consideration in both the United States and in Germany, while other aspects of the Chinese challenge to the liberal-democratic order produce neither consensus nor urgency — only a vague sense of dread.

 

Joe Biden may not take precisely Donald Trump’s elbows-and-knees posture toward Xi Jinping, but, like Trump, he sees the U.S.–China relationship basically in terms of steel-mill jobs and “Made in China” stamps on flip-flops at Walmart. Biden sees China that way, he sees the European Union that way, and he even sees the United Kingdom, our closest ally, mainly as a trade challenge. And, in spite of a slight stiffening in the European attitude toward China in the past two years, it is safe to expect the new German chancellor to take roughly the same nickel-and-dime view of China for the immediate future — but with a twist: The Europeans increasingly see the United States as a potential long-term threat, too, an unpredictable, unreliable, mercantilist power willing to deploy economic coercion (among other means) in the service of a foreign-policy agenda entirely dominated by domestic political calculation. From the European point of view, the transition from Trump to Biden has only confirmed that the United States is a country with two nationalist-populist parties and no party with anything more than a superficial commitment to trans-Atlantic cooperation.

 

Olaf Scholz couldn’t really overturn the status quo if he wanted to, because Germany is not the kind of power the United States and China are. Germany cannot lead the world, but it can lead Europe, and that makes it worth having as an ally — preferably, an active and invigorated ally, not one whose alliance is a matter of inertia. Unfortunately, the reality is that when Olaf Scholz asks, “What’s in it for us?” Joe Biden is not going to have much of an answer. It is peculiar: In spite of the fact that the United States and China maintain more or less ordinary diplomatic relations and vigorous, mutually beneficially commercial relations, that there is a coming existential conflict with Beijing is practically the only matter of broad bipartisan consensus in Washington. And nobody seems to have even four or five practical ideas for what to do about that, even as the Washington Post takes note of “the president’s oft-stated vision that democracies are locked in a must-win historic battle with autocracies.”

 

President Biden may have a vision. He may have several of them. There are doctors for that.