The Trump Administration Is Playing With Fire in Germany

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

The Trump Administration Is Playing With Fire in Germany

 

Feb. 22, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/opinion/trump-germany-election.html

James Kirchick

By James Kirchick

 

Mr. Kirchick is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age.”

 

Vice President JD Vance’s address to the Munich Security Conference last week was the most shocking thing to happen at that annual summit since President Vladimir Putin of Russia condemned the American-led liberal international order there nearly two decades ago. And just as that tirade presaged the era of diplomatic tension and violent conflict in which we’re currently embroiled, so too did Mr. Vance’s speech augur a coming dark age.

 

After a few perfunctory sentences about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the most destructive conflict on European soil since World War II, Mr. Vance explained the real problem facing the West. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia” or China, he said, but “the threat from within.” Government censorship, Mr. Vance averred, threatens the very basis of the trans-Atlantic alliance between Europe and the United States. Having portrayed longstanding European allies as adversaries, Mr. Vance then declared that “there is no room for firewalls,” a reference to the informal agreement among mainstream political parties not to form coalitions with the extreme right.

 

Mr. Vance’s astonishing intervention in European politics was accompanied by an equally striking break with diplomatic protocol. While Mr. Vance declined to meet with the leader of the country hosting him, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he did make time to confer with Alice Weidel, the co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, known as the AfD, currently polling second in Sunday’s federal election. By his actions and through his words, Mr. Vance all but endorsed the AfD.

 

Mr. Vance is not the first high-ranking Trump administration official to back the far-right party. Since December, when Elon Musk endorsed the AfD as the “only” force that can “save Germany,” Mr. Musk has repeatedly expressed his support for the party to his over 200 million followers on X, the social media platform he owns. Last month, addressing AfD supporters via video link, Mr. Musk asserted that in Germany, “there is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” German children, he said, “should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents.” (In Munich, Mr. Vance joked that “if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk,” a tacit stamp of approval for Mr. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD.)

 

Devoid of context, Mr. Musk’s statements might seem unobjectionable. The extent to which a nation’s atonement for past sins should influence present-day policy is a legitimate subject for debate. But Mr. Musk didn’t share his thoughts in an airy seminar discussion. He stated them defiantly at a political gathering of right-wing German nationalists. To anyone remotely familiar with the country’s political vernacular, his statements sound uncomfortably close to the acrid lamentations, equal parts self-pitying and resentful, of Germans who wish to dismantle their country’s much-admired memory culture and minimize Nazi crimes.

 

As Molly Ivins said of Pat Buchanan’s speech to the 1992 Republican National Convention, the musings of Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk sound better in the original German. According to Ms. Weidel, who introduced Mr. Musk at last month’s rally, Germany’s scrupulous Holocaust commemoration is a “guilt cult” and Adolf Hitler was not “right-wing” but rather a “communist.” Alexander Gauland, one of AfD’s founders, grumbled that the Third Reich was “just a speck of bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, said Björn Höcke, a prominent provincial party leader, shows that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital.” Mr. Höcke, who once called for “nothing less than a 180-degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance” and has been convicted of using Nazi rhetoric in his speeches — presumably a victim in the eyes of Mr. Vance — complains that Germans have the “mentality of a totally vanquished people.”

 

The AfD is not, as some critics hyperbolically allege, a “neo-Nazi” party. And the party has denied those allegations. As Mr. Vance alluded to, Germany has strict laws regulating speech and political activity that promote the aims of national socialism or evoke nostalgia for the Third Reich. Legal efforts to ban another party significantly further to the right of AfD have repeatedly failed.

 

But the defense of the AfD mounted by Mr. Musk and others is equally lame. “Portraying the AfD as far right is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka!” Mr. Musk has written. “Does that sound like Hitler to you?” Mr. Musk, who is clearly unfamiliar with the long and far from entirely hostile relationship between fascist movements and homosexuality, appears to think that Ms. Weidel’s personal life alone somehow negates the assessment of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, which has labeled the party a suspected extremist organization and placed it under surveillance as a potential threat to the constitutional order.

 

So extreme is the AfD that not even the French far-right politician Marine Le Pen will associate with it. Last year, after an AfD leader said that the Nazi SS were “not all criminals,” a coalition of far-right parties in the European Parliament, Le Pen’s National Rally among them, expelled its German affiliate. Notwithstanding the recent decision by the leader of the center-right Christian Democrats, Friedrich Merz, to rely on AfD votes to pass a nonbinding resolution calling for stricter immigration measures, Mr. Merz strongly backs the firewall Mr. Vance condemns.

 

Of perhaps more relevance to Mr. Vance and Mr. Musk is the AfD’s deep-seated anti-Americanism. In an interview with The American Conservative, Ms. Weidel described Germans as “a defeated people” who are “slaves” of the United States, their country a “colony” of the American “empire.” In December, her co-leader Tino Chrupalla complained that “Europe has been forced to implement America’s interests. We reject that.” Mr. Chrupalla, who attended President Trump’s inauguration last month, says that Germany should withdraw from NATO unless the alliance accommodates itself to Russian prerogatives.

 

Even more alarming than the AfD’s anti-American attitudes are its pro-Russian sympathies. When the embattled President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine spoke before the Bundestag last year to rally support for his country’s defense against Russia’s illegal invasion, all but four of AfD’s members boycotted. “We refuse to listen to a speaker in camouflage,” Ms. Weidel and Mr. Chrupalla sneered, mocking Mr. Zelensky’s battle fatigues. The AfD opposes arms shipments to Kyiv as well as sanctions on Moscow, and advocates a settlement of the war on Putin’s terms. AfD members travel frequently to Russia on official delegations and have served as observers of rigged elections in Russian-occupied Crimea. Some elected AfD officials at the federal and European levels are being investigated over possible links to Russia, and parliamentarians from other parties have expressed unease about their AfD colleagues’ attending sensitive intelligence briefings.

 

Since the onset of the Cold War 80 years ago, American presidents of both parties have understood the necessity of a Germany reliably rooted within the Western alliance. From West Germany’s controversial rearmament in the early 1950s to the deployment of American Pershing missiles on German soil three decades later and the rallying of support for Ukraine today, the possibility of the European Union’s most populous country's adopting a position of strategic neutrality, of “equidistance” between America and Russia, has been a perennial concern. For the United States to put its considerable clout behind a German political party whose leaders minimize Nazi crimes, portray their country as a victim of scheming outsiders and parrot talking points from the Russian Foreign Ministry would be a blunder of historic, and potentially catastrophic, proportions.

 

James Kirchick is a contributing Opinion writer and author of “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age.”