Dignified Decline? Germany and Europe in the Changing World Order

The changing world order is a topic now discussed so widely that it has given rise to its own set of clichés. In recent years, few commentators on global current events have managed to avoid quoting the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote from his prison cell that an old world is dying, and the new one struggles to be born. Such a transitional period, Gramsci said, is a “time of monsters”.^[1]

Another well-worn insight, which likewise does not become any less true through repetition, is that the “end of history” postulated by Francis Fukuyama did not correspond to the subsequent course of world events. In the summer of 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama – an as-yet unknown employee of the U.S. State Department – wrote an article that would make him famous overnight. Fukuyama argued that the market-based, democratic nation state is the best possible model of political community. Therefore, he contended, it was no longer necessary to engage in fundamental quarrels about the ways in which humans should coexist. If history had run its course, there was no longer any need to wage wars over its direction.

Today, not only is history continuing, but its future also appears completely open. It is unclear where the current transitional period is leading, or whether it is currently leading anywhere at all. It may well be the case that the perceived and very real state of upheaval will remain the new normal for the time being. One thing seems certain, however: the course of history will be shaped less and less where it used to be shaped – that is, in the West.

Amid this uncertainty and the sense of history slipping from our hands, a wake-up call is spreading in Germany and Europe – which, in turn, threatens to become a cliché. Namely, that we have done business with the wrong powers for too long and relied too heavily on the United States for our security. Now, the argument goes, it is time to think in terms of “realpolitik” or “geopolitics” once again, and pursue a resolute policy of military expansion.^[2]

Germany in particular might be in danger of overlooking a crucial point: military expansion cannot replace a political vision of a future worth living. The not-so-new underlying idea of this article is that the future world order will be multipolar – and that German and European foreign policy must develop concrete and actionable ideas for how Europe hopes to position itself in a world after Western hegemony.

The end of the end of history

When did the end of history end? Perhaps with the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent wars in the Middle East. Not only did these wars fail to turn countries like Afghanistan and Iraq into liberal democracies in their own image. They also, once again – though not for the last time – exposed a gulf between the liberal self-image and the destructive reality of foreign policy. In economic terms, the West’s star began to wane around the same time. The 2008 financial crisis triggered a recession that hit the old economies of the West harder than those of the emerging markets. Western growth rates were unable to regain their pre-crisis levels, while those of developing countries remained high. Since then, the West’s share of global economic output has been steadily declining.^[3]

A more recent date on which the West’s loss of power became apparent was February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, although it did not feel that way at first. NATO, the Western military alliance that had already been written off, gained new members: Sweden and Finland. Ukraine’s resilience and initial successes on the battlefield convinced even the skeptics in the German chancellery at the time that repelling the Russian aggressor was not only desirable but also possible. After a year of war, literary scholar Albrecht Koschorke wrote in a newspaper article: “The imperial nostalgia attributed to the Russian power elites meets, on the opposing side, with a distinct kind of nostalgia which they themselves are not yet fully aware of. It centers on the past future of liberalism as a global model and universal doctrine.”^[4] The historical triumph of the liberal model, as Fukuyama asserted over thirty years ago – might it still come to pass, thanks to Ukraine? Fueled by a warmongering fervor that was hardly matched by their own level of commitment, London, Brussels and Joe Biden’s Washington almost anticipated Putin’s downfall, barely noticing that this perception placed them in a global minority. The West portrayed Ukraine’s defensive struggle not so much as what it is – a struggle for state and national sovereignty against an imperialist aggressor. This interpretation would have resonated more widely outside the Western global minority. Rather, it was portrayed as a fight for democracy against dictatorship and oppression. In a sense, past sins caught up with the West here. The U.S. could hardly invoke the United Nations Charter, whose principle of non-aggression Russia so flagrantly violated, given that the U.S. had itself repeatedly flouted this principle.

A large portion of the non-Western majority in the world did indeed condemn Russia’s violation of international law through a vote in the United Nations General Assembly. However, only those states commonly considered part of the West have since participated in sanctions against Russia or in arms deliveries to Ukraine. Twenty years ago – or perhaps even fewer – this might have been enough to bring Russia to its knees. Today, Russia has economic and political alternatives, particularly in China and India, but also in Brazil, South Africa, and other countries.

The West’s sanctions policy thus falls far short of the desired effect. This fact is only one of many signs of a process that the countries just mentioned would also describe as the “multipolarization” of the world order. This term implies a rejection of Western hegemony and support for a world with multiple and alternative centers of power. At the same time, the concept of multipolarity polarizes political debate, not least in Germany.^[5] There are those, not few in number, who use it as an anti-Western rallying cry, which is why pro-Western defenders of dominance see it primarily as a threat to be averted.

However, the fact that a world after Western dominance is taking shape is, first of all, a reality that should be observed as objectively as possible, regardless of what name one gives to this development. It is a reality that Europe and Germany should base their policies on. Whether this post-Western world is something to fear remains, as is so often the case, a matter of perspective. Before 1914, Europe was a multipolar system of states. The failure of this system led to the First World War. That is the main reason why the word “multipolarity” has an ominous ring in Europe. In the frequently referenced Global South, the situation is different. There, multipolarity may well sound like the promise of a fairer and more democratic world, one that has been dominated by the West for too long.^[6]

Since October 7, 2023, global positions on the Gaza war have taken shape almost as a mirror image of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Following the Hamas massacre in southern Israel, it was primarily the United States, followed by Germany and the United Kingdom, that supported Israel’s actions in Gaza by providing weapons and diplomatic backing. The destruction of Gaza is a reality that the German public has long refused to acknowledge, yet it is one to which the German government has contributed. Alex Lo is a longtime columnist for the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, and is considered to be pro-China. In May 2025, Lo wrote in an almost triumphant tone that the Western world had dug its own grave in Gaza. While the West would endure as a geographical and political entity, he sustained, it had died as a moral ideal – independent of any actions by Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, both of whom simply welcomed the collapse of Western hegemony.^[7]

Donald Trump: the West’s decline manager?

In Germany, meanwhile, the end of the Western-dominated order is associated with one name above all others: Donald Trump. For the German public, Trump’s reelection as President of the United States in the fall of 2024 came as a shock. Afterwards, newspapers loudly proclaimed the end of the West – at least as we knew it. Germany and Europe, all agreed, would now have to go it alone. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was elected just a few months after Trump. In the traditional post-election televised round-table debate, he announced that the era of foreign policy dependence on the United States was over. For a fleeting moment, the seasoned transatlanticist Merz sounded like the French General Charles de Gaulle, who had called very early on for post-war Europe to play an independent role on the world stage. Previously, the idea that Germany was less sovereign in foreign and security policy matters than it pretended to be had been voiced only on the far left or far right of the political spectrum in Germany. Now it became the majority opinion overnight, because of Donald Trump.

In one of his last interviews, Henry Kissinger was asked about Donald Trump. Kissinger – who passed away in 2023 – served as Richard Nixon’s national security advisor during the Vietnam War. Since then, he had been regarded as a geostrategist, a war criminal, or both. He replied that Trump was one of those historical figures who swept away the hypocrisy and false certainties of his time, and marked the end of an era. That need not mean, Kissinger said, that Trump had an alternative to the old order to offer, or was even aware of his historical role. It could all just be an accident.^[8]

Trump, lord of chaos and renewal sent by history? It is true that Trump knows how to bury the promises of the liberal order, which have lost all credibility. His response to the globalized market economy’s broken promise of prosperity is tariffs. His response to the often-criticized hypocrisy of Western foreign policy is to prioritize “might is right” and a narrowly defined, often erratic self-interest. He thus strips the West’s global role not only of its veneer of integrity, but also of its claim to moral superiority. To put it another way, Donald Trump solves the problem of double standards in foreign policy by stripping that foreign policy of any moral basis whatsoever.

Behind Donald Trump’s campaign slogan America First is the idea that the international order maintained by the U.S. has cost its guarantor more than it has benefited it. Perhaps one could say that the United States is an empire that is learning to think of itself as a nation again.Yet America First also means that an America with a strengthening sense of national identity will not simply relinquish its position of supremacy. So for the time being, we should perhaps speak of a contraction or streamlining of the hegemonic model of order, and a reduction towards a transactional approach. After all, the United States is still militarily dominant, and the dollar is still the reserve currency. The latter continues to secure a privileged position for the U.S. in the global business and financial markets. However, the evidence for a contraction is not only that former alliances are being weakened, but also that soft power is being rapidly reduced, for example by cutting development aid or the U.S. withdrawing from international cooperation organizations one after another.

After Trump: no return to liberal hegemony

Anyone in Germany and Europe who still hopes today that four years of Trump will be followed by a Joe Biden equivalent in the White House fails to recognize that, even under the Democratic Party, liberal market globalization is no longer the governing model, and Europe has slipped down the list of American priorities. Trump I (2017–2021) was followed by a president – Joe Biden – who continued his predecessor’s policies on key issues. One issue takes up a lot of space on the global economic map and in the minds of policymakers in Washington: China. In his address to a joint session of Congress in April 2021 to mark his first 100 days in office, Biden announced that the U.S. was in a competition with China to “win the 21^st century”. To this end, his administration continued the punitive tariffs against China that Donald Trump had previously imposed. Added to this were industrial policy measures such as the CHIPS Act or the Inflation Reduction Act. These can be understood as attempts to sell the hegemonic competition with China to the American working class as the reindustrialization of the country, while simultaneously attempting to curb Chinese growth in high-tech sectors.

During Donald Trump’s second term, the economic rivalry with China, having intensified under Joe Biden, is escalating into a trade war whose outcome remains uncertain. It is clear, however, hat since 2016, there has been a striking continuity spanning the presidencies of Trump, Biden, and Trump’s return to power. This continuity is defined by a sharedcommitment to limiting China’s rise and defending the dominant position of the United States.^[9] As a matter of fact, former President Barack Obama had already announced a “pivot to Asia”. But at that time, U.S.-China relations seemed friendly compared to today. The contemporary great-power rivalry between the United States and China is the defining conflict that will shape the nature of a post-Western world and dictate how peaceful the transition toward it will be.

China’s resurgence

There is something puzzling about the story of China’s rise. And the more one examines this rise, the stronger that impression becomes. Individual factors are easy to identify: land reform, industrial policy, the absorption of technological know-how from foreign companies, the rapid development of the education system and infrastructure, and the sheer size of the population. Nevertheless, this rise cannot be distilled into a coherent development package ready to be replicated in other countries. Instead, it is a success story that has a lot to do with improvisation and a few strokes of luck. Only in hindsight does this rise appear to be the realization of a long-cherished plan.

At the same time, talk of China’s “rise” is misleading. Given that the country had always been a center of economic activity until its decline in the 19^th century, one should rather speak of a “resurgence”. Over the centuries, China has consistently accounted for about a quarter of the world’s population on average. China’s current return to the center looks like a return to the normal course of world history. The relative decline of the West appears to be a return to a historical norm, with the Indian subcontinent and China once again as centers of global economic and political power.

To understand this resurgence, it is useful to take a look at China’s position within the global economic structure. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the United States was the world’s dominant trading power. According to the Australian Lowy Institute, the United States was a more important trading partner than China for 80 percent of countries at that time. That relationship has now reversed. Today, about 70 percent of countries worldwide trade more with China than with the United States.^[10] This amounts to nothing less than a fundamental and lasting restructuring of the global economy. On the African continent, the shift is most striking. China is now Africa’s largest trading partner by far. In 2003, China was a bigger trading partner than the U.S. for only 18 African countries. Today, it is 52 out of 54 African countries, covering nearly the entire continent.^[11]

Driven by the world's largest industrial base, China is the world’s dominant trading power by far. The People’s Republic manufactures nearly one-third of global goods, with a rising trend that surpasses the combined output of Germany, Japan, South Korea and the U.S. combined. These enormous numbers explain why China is the undisputed world leader in exports and and is poised to maintain this supremacy. In 2024, Chinese exports to the U.S. tripled American exports to China. In trade with the European Union, China exports twice as much as it imports.^[12] China’s trade surplus for the past year was 1.2 trillion U.S. dollars – a record set despite Trump’s tariffs.

A multipolar present?

China’s economic power, which has been outlined here only in broad strokes, has led many commentators to speak of a “multipolar” world order even at this early stage. However, this is a complex matter, as a look at the current situation in the Middle East demonstrates. Despite the apparent lack of planning, U.S. action against the Iranian regime demonstrates that, at least in military terms, the United States remains the only superpower capable of projecting its power far beyond its own borders. For various reasons, neither Russia nor China were willing or able to provide military assistance to Iran during the airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear program in June 2025 or against the Iranian regime in the spring of 2026.^[13]

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States accounted for 33 percent of global military spending in 2025. China ranks second in military spending at 12 percent, Russia at 6.6 percent, followed by Germany at 3.9 percent.^[14] On top of that, the U.S. armed forces maintain some 750 military facilities and bases all around the world. China, in contrast, officially has only one military base outside the People’s Republic, in Djibouti, situated on the Horn of Africa. It may have a second one in Cambodia. These figures alone show that it would be premature to talk about the end of American military supremacy. Particularly in the military sphere, the world remains far from a truly “multipolar” system of equally balanced powers. It might be more accurate to speak of a “multipolarizing” world, in which actors such as Russia or, above all, China are increasingly able to establish regional – but not global – hegemonies to rival the United States.^[15]

Hugh White, a longtime professor at the Australian National University and sought-after security expert, argues along these lines. In June 2025, he published a lengthy and highly acclaimed essay, in which he states that security policy multipolarity is emerging in both Europe and East Asia. According to White, China is not only at least equal to the Soviet Union as an economic rival, but – because its military security thinking is regionally limited, focusing mainly on Taiwan and the South China Sea – it is also an equal to the U.S. on the military level, to the extent that the U.S. would have to wage a potential war far from its own shores. Since China’s shipbuilding capacity already far exceeds that of the United States, time is on China’s side. Of course, no-one knows how the People’s Liberation Army would fare in a war. The last, brief armed conflict – with Vietnam in 1979 – was rather embarrassing. Today things are likely to be different.

Rethinking Europe

What should Europe’s role be in a world where American hegemony and the liberal world order are in decline, yet no alternative form of unipolarity is in sight? Currently, Germany and Europe in particular are responding to the upheavals of the present day in one way above all else: military expansion. Few among the German public are currently interested in an absence of war that is based on more than the hoped-for deterrent effect of military power.

Of course, it would be reckless to deny the facts touched upon in this essay: On the eastern border of the political continent known as Europe, at least since the invasion of Ukraine, there is an enemy – Russia. Though Russia was not always an enemy and need not remain one, it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. In the West, the United States has abandoned its role as a benevolent hegemon – a privilege that was never universal, but specifically reserved for Europe. The U.S. assumed this role first and foremost for the Federal Republic of Germany; however, this Cold War-era commitment must now reinvent itself in an increasingly post-American world. Looking again and farther to the east, there is China – a new-old superpower that has overtaken Germany as the dominant industrial nation and left it behind in future technologies. While all of this may be true, it scarcely scratches thesurface of the multiple challenges confronting Germany and its neighbors: the climate crisis, the migration issue, the AI revolution, or the rejection of liberalism within Western societies. Nevertheless – or perhaps precisely for these reasons – the question arises as to whether we might not be able to make more of the historical moment outlined here than just a military buildup that seems devoid of any forward-looking narrative.

Let us start with the military question. The territorial integrity of European Union member states faces no threat from China and is only abstractly challenged by the U.S. regarding Greenland; it remains, however, credibly and severely threatened by Russia. Although defense capabilities are necessary to deter this Russian threat, Europe's primary issue is not one of insufficient funding. It is a problem of coordination. As economic historian Adam Tooze has calculated using data from SIPRI, European NATO members have spent over three trillion U.S. dollars on defense over the past decade. That is significantly more than Russia has spent over the same period. The key difference, as Tooze points out, is that Russia possesses a unified and focused defense production system, whereas Europe’s apparatus remains fragmented and inefficient.^[16] Under current conditions, an increase in European defense spending primarily means higher revenues for national and American defense industries. Yet the goal should be to establish efficient defense capabilities within existing budgetary constraints. Nevertheless, shortly before the June 2025 NATO summit, Alliance members agreed to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035 – with 1.5% earmarked for critical infrastructure and resilience measures, a figure that doubles the global average. According to SIPRI, countries not currently involved in a conflict generally spend less than 2% of their GDP on defense.

Within the framework of a militarily integrated Europe, a strategically autonomous and non-aligned continent remains a compelling – and historically rooted – concept for debate. This concept has long been discussed in Paris, and the current Spanish government is taking steps in that direction. However, Berlin is reluctant to follow.

Thus the Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, unlike the German governments, was quick to voice strong doubts about whether the war in Gaza was in line with international law. The message coming from Madrid is likely to go down better with the global majority. Spain also spoke out early on against the war in Iran, which violates international law and makes no sense politically, while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz referred to it as “dirty work” that the U.S. and Israel were doing on behalf of the West back in June 2025.

And on the quintessential issue of the future, too, the social democratic government in Madrid is one step ahead of the European mainstream. Renewable energy makes up a larger share of electricity production in Spain than in Germany, and Spain uses much less coal in its energy supply than Germany.^[17] The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz has once again underlined the need for the energy transition.

As for the stance toward China, Prime Minister Sánchez gave a speech at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing in which he managed to frame a pointed critique of Sino-European relations in a way that was likely to strike a chord with Chinese government officials rather than hurting anyone’s pride. Sánchez acknowledged the reality of a world that is becoming multipolar, recognized China as the great power it has always been for most of its history, and praised China’s rhetorical advocacy for a multilateral and rules-based world. However, Sánchez noted, with regard to Russia’s economic dependence on China, Beijing must use its power responsibly and do more to end the wars of the present. Beside the closeness of Russian-Chinese relations, the second major European problem with China is the enormous trade deficit. Sánchez addressed this too, as a structural problem that must be resolved on the path to improved relations, while holding out the prospect of growing cooperation in the energy transition.^[18]

A new narrative

The idea of Europe only briefly outlined here, centering on non-alignment and non-aggression while maintaining a defense capability, could lead to a vision for the future that would be appropriate for a post-Western world. A political strategy based on historical realities should be geared toward managing decline with dignity and fitting into a world order that is still taking shape, rather than toward cultural conflict and old fantasies of superiority.^[19] Here we can learn from the world outside the West. The countries of Southeast Asia, in particular, have long excelled at balancing U.S. and Chinese influence, securing optimal outcomes for themselves while consistently prioritizing non-military conflict resolution.^[20] This vision of the future is neither radically pacifist nor is it hawkish. Yet there is little indication that it will gain much traction in Germany. Politicians are trying to bridge the gap between rhetoric and war-fighting capability by ramping up military spending. The opposite would be better: adjusting the tone to match one’s own capabilities. A military buildup without a positive vision of the future could, in retrospect, turn out to be preparation for war. Developing a vision of the future for a world worth living in after the end of Western hegemony is one of the most urgent policy tasks of our time.