Growing German Anti-Americanism

There is an interesting opinion piece written by Anna Sauerbrey that appears in today's paper. Sauerbrey, a German newspaper editor, asks, "Is the Trans-Atlantic Relationship Dead?"

Two camps have emerged in German politics -- those, usually conservative, who believe that American hegemony can pick up where it left off with Obama once Trump exits the stage, and those, notably Social Democrats, who think Germany should steer its own hegemonic course. Sauerbrey concludes with an expression of futility:

As a world player, Germany can act only through Europe, the British historian Timothy Garton Ash writes. But as it does so, it is inhibited by the inertia of masses in movement, the other 26 European Union states. Germany must fill the post-American vacuum; Germany cannot fill the vacuum. Talk of a strategic shift is a reverie — a way to escape the limitations to real action.

What's encouraging about the piece is its articulation of a growing anti-Americanism in Germany:

Today, though, there is a new current of anti-Americanism rising as well, different from the usual continental grumblings. It believes that America has overstayed its welcome on the world stage, that it still insists on dominating both culturally and politically. It believes that American culture is superficial and phony, that Americans are hypocritical and uneducated. “What good has ever come from the United States of America?” a reader in Berlin wrote to me recently in response to an editorial.

The roots of this new anti-Americanism go deeper than Mr. Trump. Germans point to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and war on terrorism, and to Barack Obama’s tendency to overpromise American action on foreign policy while furthering many of his predecessor’s worst policies. But finally, in Donald Trump, we have a cartoon bad guy, the essence of every anti-American prejudice: a rude, uneducated bully who drinks giant amounts of Diet Coke.

Note the inclusion of the sainted Obama in the rogues gallery, a telling clue that there will be no successful reboot of the trans-Atlantic relationship post-Trump.

For the last couple decades, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. global leadership has been used to destroy sovereign states. The unstated but official policy of the United States is permanent warfare, which creates blow back to Europe, to give one example, in the form of refugees (not to mention jihadists).

There is no going forward on this path. The problem for Germany is that its deep state is tied by an umbilical cord to the U.S. So the parting of ways is going to be truly traumatic.