After the Election: Will It All Be Good Again?

Thanks to Watching America.com for a translation of an article by Germany’s former Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, who ponders what will change in international politics and, in particular, trans-atlanticism, after the U.S. presidential election.

Fischer recognizes,

George W. Bush neither invented the unilateralism of the United States nor the transatlantic drift between the United States and Europe. Certainly, he has considerably increased debilitating trends in the West (mainly the Americas and Europe), but their real causes lie not in his policy.. They have much more objective historical reasons that arise from the end of the Cold War, America’s being the sole resulting world power and the self-determined weakness of Europe.

However, the presidential elections of the U.S. represent a real decision:

Beyond this basic orientation of American foreign policy, however, is the core question of whether in the coming American presidential elections, the candidate whom is elected will continue the foreign policy of George W. Bush or even escalate it (Rudi Guliani example), or whether there will be a reorientation .

This is pretty well-worn stuff, but Fischer recognizes America’s upcoming choice as an opportunity for Europe also to take responsibility for restoring a healthy trans-atlanticism, working with the U.S. to tackle the challenges of failed policies in the Middle East and the rise of China, to name just a couple.

The unilateral overextending of American power provides for a new beginning in US-European relations and is an opportunity.

But interestingly, Europe and U.S. share responsibility for getting us to this point of weakness of “the West”:

Objectively strong but subjectively just a step from the sanitorium, the constitution of the EU can be summed up as a controversial political exaggeration. So, Europe and the politics of George W. Bush created a vacuum that has not been filled, and thus the crisis of the West has significantly worsened in the past seven years.

Fischer explains why “The West” needs to be maintained as a force in the world and offers specific proposals for how we might do that: and he should know, since he was the foreign minister of the country with the third largest economy of the developed world for half of Bush’s term, and years before.

Read it all here at Watching America.com, in the article, After the Election: Will It All Be Good Again?