20.2.2025

The phone call

Last week, a criminal convicted of 34 counts of fraud called a convicted war criminal and asked for a meeting. What is to be negotiated is peace in a country that has been bombed by the war criminal for three years and covered in war crimes and crimes against humanity, where civilians, hospitals, kindergardens and the infrastructure are targeted in order to freeze people to death. In order to speed up peace, the perpetrator grants the war criminal his conditions in advance through his ministers.

The criminal

The criminal has been President of the United States of America, the oldest democracy, largest economic power (GDP 2023 USD 28 trillion) and largest military power (453,000 soldiers and over 500,000 reservists) in the world, for a month. But the criminal doesn't like democracy, nor does he like law and order, because he can't get anything out of them and they get in the way of his ego. He would rather be king. That is why he is abolishing democracy and the separation of powers. Ministers who do not have sufficient qualifications but are subordinate to him have been waved through by the Congress. The latter has now done its job and is no longer needed. Laborious legislative processes that would require his approval are being replaced by decrees with which the president is flooding the country, following the advice of his former senior adviser Steve Bannon: “The real opposition is the media. And the best way to deal with that is to flood the zone with shit.” The courts that have stepped in to stop the illegal decrees are said to have no say in the executive branch. Media that is not “in line” are banned from the White House. Personal protection is withdrawn from former high-ranking opponents. Tens of thousands of civil servants are being fired as alleged employees of the deep state. Agencies that do not adhere to the “America first” postulate, such as USAID, have been closed within a few hours. Much of this has been announced, but the speed of implementation takes many people's breath away.

Ego needs space, in this case beyond America. If Canada became the 51st state of the United States, the Panama Canal and Greenland were under American control, and the Gulf of Mexico was called the Gulf of America, that would create additional space for this ego. Because agency AP continues to use the term “Gulf of Mexico,” its reporters are banned from the White House.

Ego also conflicts with multilateralism, loyalty, partnerships and alliances such as the world's largest defense alliance, NATO. For the president, a businessman, NATO is worth nothing if it is a losing proposition for the USA. America is still a member of NATO, but Article 5, which, with its obligation to provide help to offended allies, forms the basis of the Western democratic world's deterrent effect against the Eastern autocracies such as Russia in particular, has been called into question by the President.

And ego likes ego. Trump's admiration for people like Putin, Kim Yong and Xi Jinping is well known and also stems from the fact that they are not hindered by annoying democratic control mechanisms, but have already built the kingdom in their country that he is still working on, have their country under control and have the strength that he still wants to achieve.

The war criminal

The war criminal is the ruler of Russia, an economically small country (GDP $2 trillion, less than half the size of Germany), but which has immense energy reserves and a large army of approximately 1.3 million active soldiers and 2 million reservists. This ruler's openly communicated goal is to restore the Soviet Union and sees himself in a tradition with Peter the Great. This ruler therefore also wants to have NATO members such as Poland and Hungary “back in the family”. At first, however, Ukraine, which had developed into a free democracy right in the Russian neighborhood, had become unbearable. Therefore the invasion took place.

On the face of it, this ruler's ego is comparable in extent to that of the American president. However, in some areas of his rule he moves in other categories, which makes him partly stronger and partly weaker:

He goes much further in the brutality of his assertion of power. For the US president, other people don't count, for the Russian president, human lives don't count. Anyone who is not “in line” will not be expelled from the press room or have personal protection withdrawn, but will be put in a prison camp or killed outright. Having now burned out over 800,000 soldiers at the front, some of them untrained and mere cannon fodder, doesn't give this man any headaches. If success is not achieved, the relevance of the laws of war and international law will no longer apply, and civilians, kindergardens, hospitals and infrastructure will be bombed.

While the US president tends to use kind of a wrecking ball when it comes to communication, the Russian president operates a finely woven propaganda toolkit that has expanded like an octopus with false information on social networks, and a reliable network of representatives who sit in the chair of the Hungarian president or who determine the polls for the election of the German Bundestag with the AfD and the BSW and thus a share of around 25%. This is accompanied by widespread cyber attacks. He also has much more elegant manipulative techniques and knows where to grab the psychopath and narcissist in Washington.

While the US president is canceling agreements such as those with the WHO or the Paris climate agreement, the Russian president breaches them. The Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for security guarantees, was reduced to a worthless piece of paper.

While the US President acts erratically and impulsively, looking for simple and quick results, his counterpart is an ex-KGB man who works with secret service techniques that the US President probably doesn't even recognize. This may also include Russia, after its rapid successes so far, letting the US President fidget again until a meeting can be held “in due course”.

A weakness lies in the fear-driven apparatus, where the president sometimes only hears embellished truths and believes that he has a stronger army than he actually does. The idea of taking Ukraine in a few days turned out to be a dramatic miscalculation. Even after 3 years, the terrain gains are “only” around 20 percent.

After the successful test balloon with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, perhaps the Western world's biggest failure in this war, the headwinds blew significantly harsher after the invasion in February 2022. Western sanctions massively weakened the Russian economy and the country became isolated in terms of foreign policy.

That isolation was lifted in a phone call last week. Russia is back at the table and the US President is recommending its readmission into the G8 states. The perpetrator's admiration of the war criminal even goes so far that he adopts Russian propaganda unfiltered, describes the Ukrainian president as a dictator without legitimacy and blames him for Russia's war of aggression. If there is a so-called peace on the terms of these two powers, the sanctions will logically be lifted, Russia's economy can recover, and rearmament can begin at full speed so that the next parts of Ukraine can be taken over in a few years. It is hardly surprising that the messages from the USA so far are being celebrated by senior Russian representatives and in the Russian media. The two weaknesses of the Russian position were eliminated in a phone conversation.

Somewhere in between: Europe

The European Union has developed over decades from a bureaucracy that was ridiculed for its standardization of measures into a community of states that, among other things, saved Greece from national bankruptcy and has become a real economic union with the corresponding power. But the same European Union has also increasingly become the scourge of its unanimity requirement, which has been open to blackmail by strong egos like the Hungarian president. Right-wing populist and anti-European centrifugal forces continue to weaken EU. Its Franco-German engine is no longer in harmony, and its two heads of government are politically weakened.

Moreover Europe has relied for decades on the partnership with and security policy support from the USA, criminally neglected its duty for its own security, and thereby financed a good part of its prosperity. Europe played no role at all in the phone call between the Russian and American presidents, and Europe is not invited at all to the planned peace negotiations. The Western alliance is dissolving.

The CDU's candidate for chancellor, Friedrich Merz, once said in a talk show: "If Ukraine falls, it will be very, very expensive for all of us." This would – or probably will – have several implications:

The subsequent flow of refugees will flood a Europe that is already complaining about reaching its breaking point. Not only corresponding financial burdens on public budgets, but also further changing moods among the population and the associated strengthening of right-wing populist parties will pose enormous challenges.

Transatlantic cohesion, which has become a question mark, suddenly brings with it an acute need for Europe to quickly cut itself off from the USA and become capable of defending itself. The bosom of America, in which Europe has made itself comfortable for decades, is no longer there since January 20th. This has been a real scenario for years, but people have turned a blind eye to it. The rearmament will require amounts that will make the laborious previous discussion about the 2 percent target seem downright ridiculous, not to mention the production capacities of the defense industry that need to be built up quickly, which in turn require planning security and public commitment.

The dramatic necessary changes do not yet have support among the population. The geopolitical significance of the war in Ukraine has not yet been widely recognized and has only played a subordinate role in the current federal election campaign compared to issues such as migration and inflation with their effects on prosperity. In Ukraine we have seen for three years how quickly and suddenly prosperity can disappear.

The previous world order was based on a Western community of values built up over decades on an equal footing with the Eastern autocracies, supported by multilateral partnerships, a reliable defense alliance led by the USA and the deterrence this enabled for the autocratic world. One of the shared values was respect for the national sovereignty of states, which would therefore not be invaded. With a phone call, the US President broke up this community of values, and equality and deterrence are largely a thing of the past. The community of values has been massively weakened. China, which has its eye on Taiwan, will be watching this development with favor and has commented positively on it. The world's most important chip manufacturer in autocratic hands will result in a gigantic dependence of all Western countries on China, which could significantly exceed Europe's previous dependence on energy supplies from Russia.

Since last week's phone call, Europe has been left orphaned in the crosshairs of an insatiable imperialist and ruthless war criminal and doesn't really have much to counter him.