With America in crisis, a reluctance in Germany to be ‘leader of the free world’
- Civil unrest in US has fed into angst in Berlin and other capitals that America has lost its way
- Opinion polls in Germany are showing a major shift towards a more favourable view of China
Germans have long viewed the United States as a protector of human rights and democracy around the globe, the undisputed leader of the free world.
The eruption of violence across the United States, coupled with the disorder in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic there, has fed into angst in Berlin and other capitals that the United States has lost its way and could be inexorably abdicating its status as leader of the free world. That could create an ominous vacuum that neither Germany nor the European Union is equipped to handle or eager to fill.
“Germany is not the leader of the free world,” Juergen Hardt, the head of foreign policy affairs in parliament for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, told South China Morning Post, flatly making clear that Europe’s leading nation has no such aspirations.