In Time of Trump, Can the West Still Be Saved?

Donald Trump is confronting the Germans with their own nationalist past. It is now time for the country to jettison erroneous post-Cold War convictions and save the cohesion of the Atlantic alliance.

U.S. President Donald Trump is challenging the Germans to reevaluate their place in the world. (Photo: Haiyun Jiang / The New York Times / Redux / laif)

A Guest Essay by Heinrich August Winkler

In a certain sense, Trump should not exist, at least not from the perspective of many Germans. The man in the White House seems to refute what Germany’s educated middle class – liberal in the broadest sense of the word – had come to believe, ever since it rediscovered its better traditions a few decades ago and concluded, following one of its greatest thinkers, that a “lawful external relation among states” was necessary in order to establish a “perfect civic constitution” within the state. That was the argument Immanuel Kant advanced in his 1784 essay “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.”