On February 27, 2022, three days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Olaf Scholz, who was then the Chancellor of Germany, gave a speech to an emergency session of the German parliament at which he described the attack as a Zeitenwende – an historic turning point. This watershed moment, he declared, meant “that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before. The issue at the heart of this [change] is whether power is allowed to prevail over the law: whether we permit Putin to turn back the clock to the nineteenth century and the age of great powers, or whether we have it in us to keep warmongers like Putin in check. That requires strength of our own.” He announced a major restructuring of the country’s cautious defense policy, including billions for modernization of the military and a promise that defense spending would exceed 2 percent of Germany’s GDP, a level of spending that Scholz’s party (the Social Democrats) traditionally had opposed.
Three years later, Germany has a new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who leads the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He succeeded in amending Germany’s constitution to lift the so-called “debt brake,” which means that the country will spend significantly more on defense as well as hundreds of billions on related infrastructure over the next ten years. But will it be enough to allow Germany to deter Russian aggression against Europe — particularly if the United States under Trump withdraws from its post-1945 role as the guarantor of European security? Can Germany develop a defense industry that can deliver under wartime conditions? Can Germany take on the leadership role in Europe that it long has been reluctant to assume — and will other countries accept Germany in this role?
Jan Techau is a director with the Eurasia Group’s Europe team, covering Germany and European security. He is also a senior fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis. From 2020 to 2023, he served in the German government as head of speechwriting for three ministers in the German Ministry of Defense. In this podcast interview, he discusses the European reaction to Trump’s reelection, the likelihood of Germany’s being able to make the physical and psychological adjustments it would need in order to become the principal provider of conventional deterrence in Europe, the rise of anti-Americanism in Germany on both the left and right, and whether Europeans are capable of keeping peace on the continent without the help of the Americans. He also explains his 2016 diagnosis of what he called “sophisticated state failure,” which long before the Abundance movement was dreamed of predicted that highly developed countries would find it increasingly difficult to get anything done, and that this paralysis would provide an opening for populist uprisings all over the world. “The only lasting way out of sophisticated state failure,” he concluded, “is for responsible politicians to worry less about getting re-elected and start risking their political careers for things that need to be done.”
We welcome your thoughts on this episode and the podcast as a whole. Please send feedback or suggestions to vitalcenter@niskanencenter.org
Transcript
Jan Techau: Germany has done quite a bit, but these deeply rooted cultural obstacles that are there which were built into the Federal Republic as a starting point of the new democracy after the war. When it’s been part of a success story for Germany, then it’s very, very hard to shed that. So the Germans have to learn it the hard way.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by my friend Jan Techau. Jan is a German political scientist, author, and commentator on foreign, security, and defense policy. He’s a director with the Eurasia Group’s Europe team, covering Germany and European security from Berlin (where we are talking now), as well as a senior fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
From 2020 to 2023, he served in the German government as the head of speechwriting for three ministers in the German Ministry of Defense. Before that, he held numerous responsibilities that included serving as the director of Carnegie Europe and running the Europe programs for the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the German Council on Foreign Relations. He is the co-author of the book, Führungsmacht Deutschland, the full English title of which I would translate as Germany as a Leading Power: Strategy Without Fear and Arrogance. And more generally, I would say that Jan is one of Europe’s great public intellectuals, who combines a pragmatic and technical focus on global economic policy with a marvelous sensitivity to history, culture, and national character. Good to be with you, Jan!
Jan Techau: Thank you for having me on the channel.
Geoff Kabaservice: I usually put off till the middle of these interviews my questions about the interviewee’s origins, upbringings, education and so forth. But I think it’s relevant to our discussion to note at the outset, first, that you were born into a rural family and thus have a different perspective than the vast majority of Germans I know who come from urban or suburban origins. And second, while you studied at the universities of Kiel and Osnabruck in Germany, you also studied at Penn State — go Nittany Lions! And I’ve always been struck by your interest in the United States, your curiosity about and appreciation for my country, and your highly perceptive views on American politics. So I’m particularly intrigued to hear about those influences on who you came to be and how you look at the world.
Jan Techau: Yes, thanks, Geoff. Yeah, I’m a village boy. I was born in Lübeck, the old, very dignified “Queen of the Hanseatic League” city on the Baltic Sea coast. But I really grew up in a small village just about eight-to-ten kilometers outside of Lübeck on a farm, a working farm. My father gave up farming in the early ’80s when I was about ten. I’m one of two sons, the elder one, and normally the farm and everything that belongs to it goes to the oldest son in our system up there. But it was quite clear, I think, from the outset — even when I was much, much younger than ten — that I would not stay there. Farming, the rural life, that’s what I was coming from, but that’s not what I would do for the rest of my life. I was always the bookish child. I was always the one interested in politics and abstract ideas. My father was not just a farmer, he was also a local politician, and I was more interested in that than my brother was. So it was quite clear that life would have other things for me in stock.
But it’s interesting to see how over time, when you grow older, that place that you come from… I have a very distinct feeling of heimat, of this kind of place of belonging, that that doesn’t leave you ever, that forms your views and gives you also an anchoring, like the roots in the ground. And so I can firmly say that I am the child of two realms, really. One is this upbringing out there in the boonies, but of course because of my interest in politics, my work on security and defense, speechwriting for the Minister of Defense, think tanking and so on, it has always had also a very strong urban and international thing to it.
And I’m beyond the point where that was a tension inside me. Now it’s all beautifully harmonized. I understand that these things can coexist and don’t have to battle each other. I think it’s very good for me personally to have a sense of rootedness. I see this with many of my colleagues, people with international upbringings who don’t have that, who moved around in their childhoods. I don’t have that. I have a very strong sense of those couple of square miles that I genuinely come from. And I love that place. I don’t live there anymore and I will probably never live there again, but it will never leave me.
I have a very profound sense of heimat. In the German language — we discussed this — in the German language, there are two words for home. One is zuhause, basically the technical world that you’re living in: “Wherever I lay my head, that’s my home.” And then heimat, which is the rootedness. And these can be very different things, but they’re both there and they coexist. And in my case, they’re in beautiful harmony, and I like that. And it also perhaps sometimes illustrates your views or informs your views on politics.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. You’re fond of maps… I’m sure you’ve seen the map of the United States in presidential elections, where each county that votes Republican is colored red and each county that votes Democrat is colored blue. And the United States looks like an unbroken sea of red, aside from a few blue islands, because so much of the Democratic vote is concentrated in urban and suburban areas. And this is one of the major grounds of tension in our politics. Is there something similar that goes on in Germany? And do you have a view of this given that you have been born into a rural area but carried out most of your career in urban areas?
Jan Techau: I mean, that divide exists in this country as well. It’s not as brutal as it is in the U.S., where you really have, as you illustrated it just now, this very stark divide. I think it’s probably a little less pronounced here, but the rural-urban divide also exists here. And on top of that, we also of course have a bit of a North-South divide in terms of economic power in the country. We have an East-West divide that is of course rooted in German division for forty years. So there are lots of front lines and conflict lines on the German map, if you want to look at it that way.
And so yes, the rural-urban divide sits inside me. That becomes very pronounced and very obvious when I go home, when I go back to where my brother lives, when I meet the locals again — people that I’ve known often for many, many decades — and become part of their conversations and listen to how they think about politics. They know that I’m the strange creature that lives in Berlin and is mingling with all of these important television folks. But at the same time, I’m also one of them because that’s where I’m from.
And so they are quite open about what they think, and that can be quite robust. That sort of politics is not always pleasant for the urban ear, but it’s hugely important to have that kind of counterweight to the abstract 30,000-foot world that I live in, where I analyze security issues and balance-of-power stuff, and to hear from them what they all think about it, and also the topics that matter for them in their electoral decisions. They have often very little to do with the stuff that I’m obsessed about.
Geoff Kabaservice: So tell me more about your interest in the United States and how that developed.
Jan Techau: I think that’s also something that was deeply, deeply rooted in my Western German upbringing. I was born in 1972. In terms of my conscious formation, I’m an ‘80s kid. And the ‘80s, in many ways in Germany, were an American decade. This is when American pop culture really became dominant. And for a child like me, consuming healthy amounts of television (I assume) and pop music and of course the movies and all of that, America was quite present and very much there. And I had an interest in the English language also early on, and those two things came together.
So I always wanted to go to America. I wanted to see it for myself, become involved in it. I was endlessly fascinated with all of the strange facets of American life. Of course, as a child you don’t understand that properly, you don’t analyze it, but you get a kind of a sense that something big is cooking there. And that awe and wonder and curiosity about the place has never really left me.
I had the privilege of coming over as a high school student twice for three-week stints — so fairly short — in ’87 and ’88, and I got my first immersion, if you will, into the American scene. And then later, when I studied at university and I became interested in security and defense — which is also the reason why I went to Kiel University, because that was one of those places in Germany to do that — of course America featured very prominently from the outside in all of those security debates, whether that was NATO, and also in the ’90s with the Yugoslav wars, where America played an instrumental role, and then later on Iraq and so on and so forth, all of these things. America was always the center of the story.
So from an early age, where it was more a childlike fascination, on to the analytical world that I moved into professionally, America always featured prominently. It was a seamless move from the TV series of the ’80s to the big stories of today and discussing Trump and the United States and what they mean for Europe.
Geoff Kabaservice: I can confirm that you still have an almost encyclopedic grasp of American TV culture, especially, as well as other aspects of our pop culture. This is quite impressive, I must say.
Jan Techau: You’re very generous. It only attests to the core silliness that I cannot deny, stuff like The Fall Guy and really third-rate stuff that deeply impressed us as ten-year-olds or twelve-year-olds here in Europe. And then when I first came over to the United States, I had this moment when you see these cars, you see these stores, you see the food, you see all of the stuff that you know from the movies and from television, and it’s this feeling of “Oh my God, it’s all true!” And that was a very interesting moment. Of course now you have a much more sophisticated view of things, but as a very young child, the soft power of America had me firmly in its grip. Yes, I can say that.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s good to know. I also noticed that on one of our recent bus tours we passed right by the David Hasselhoff Museum. So some of these aspects of American culture are kept alive even in places where it’s been forgotten in its origin, I would say.
Jan Techau: There are a couple of examples of that. Hasselhoff is interesting because Hasselhoff had this brief moment of importance when he covered a cheesy German song, turned it into an anthem to freedom, and that coincided with the fall of the Wall. And to this day, there is a small group of devoted fans in this country who believe that David Hasselhoff brought down the Berlin Wall. And that’s how important this guy ultimately was to many of us.
Geoff Kabaservice: We all owe a lot to him. For the sake of not ignoring the proverbial pachyderm in the parlor, as a friend and admirer of the United States, how did you feel when the American people reelected Donald Trump in 2024? What was the reaction here, and how would you explain why Americans elected him even after January 6th?
Jan Techau: I think the surprise was bigger the first time he got elected. By the time he got elected again, that was no longer something that we found all that astonishing. For most people in Germany, the overwhelming majority of people here, it was an unpleasant development but it was by no means unimaginable any longer. That was more the case in ’16 when he first got elected to the presidency.
And so in the meantime — and this is probably the biggest difference between ’16 and the second election of Trump — we’ve had our own development of that sort of populism here in Germany. It was more of a fringe phenomenon in ’16, but it’s now a fairly dominant part of our political life here every day with the AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland, a far-right populist party that had massive growth over all kinds of issues. And what’s striking about the reasons for their success, Trump and AfD, is that I think at the core it’s very similar factors that have been driving both. One, of course, is migration. That is probably of all the policy issues the most important one, but there are also broader forces at work.
There’s a loss of trust in existing elites. That I think is a phenomenon which you can find pretty much across the Western world, where the old kind of center-left/center-right powers that used to dominate postwar politics became exhausted, became less convincing, didn’t have a grip any longer on what people were really worried about, at least to a certain extent. And then people find alternatives in the political system. In the German system, we have proportional representation. In our system, it works slightly differently than in the U.S. where you basically only have two parties. In your country, that movement basically hijacked the Republican Party. In the German system, a new party emerged and stole the votes away from the others. But the net outcome is quite similar: a changed political atmosphere. In Germany, the AfD is not yet in power, and I think it’s still unclear as to whether that can really ever happen. It’s by no means impossible, but whether it’s going to really happen is another question. But the phenomenon is similar.
People have very, very similar storylines. What’s unique about Trump, of course, is the Trump personality. We have nobody in the German system who even remotely resembles Trump as this kind of larger-than-life TV figure that turns himself into a politician, is capable of basically dominating an entire very well-established American party with a long tradition, dominates it in a way that is unparalleled. We don’t have that yet.
And so there are cultural differences, and there’s a huge personality difference. But I think the afflictions that Western societies have, that brings this kind of politics into a position that it has never been in, are pretty much the same across the board. And if you add to the internal ongoings — the domestic pressures, the culture wars, declining trust in elites, migration… If you add to this the external pressures of the West being uncertain about its position in the world — can it still dominate? Is it still on top of the pie or will others (whether that’s China or Russia or the Global South) try to claim a part of what we always thought was ours? — that adds additional uncertainty to all of this.
And so we find the West in a position where it’s still relatively the strongest but with a profound sense of malaise and a profound sense of losing superiority. And that permeates the political debate both in Europe and in the United States, I believe.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. And as I’ve traveled in Europe and also in Great Britain, I’ve noticed a lot of similar problems, which have found similar expression in politics as well. I should note that you and I are speaking in Berlin in the aftermath of a fascinating but rather grueling weeklong tour around Germany with the Global Atlanticists program of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is the state-subsidized political foundation associated with Germany’s Social Democratic Party. This was the 23rd annual meeting of the Global Atlanticists, and the Global Atlanticists are a shifting array of German and American politicians, academics, think tankers, and pundits gathering to discuss subjects of mutual interest and concern to parties on both sides of the Atlantic.
This year, under the leadership of the Ebert Foundation’s North American Director, Dr. Reinhard Krumm, the focus was on Germany’s evolving security identity in era of global uncertainty. And we spoke with a number of German figures including former Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the deputy head of the Hamburg Port Authority, military historian Sönke Neitzel… We toured the testing center for Rheinmetall, which is Germany’s largest arms manufacturer. We saw a defense startup producing drones for use in the Ukraine conflict. We visited the Bundeswehr command and staff college in Hamburg, and the Federal Academy for Security Policy in Berlin. And for good measure, we paid a visit to the Cecilienhof Palace, which was the site of the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945, at which Truman, Stalin, and British prime ministers Churchill and Attlee met to plan the postwar global order, with mixed results.
Jan, you’ve been a participant in a number of these Global Atlanticist gatherings over the years. How did this one strike you with relation to some of these past get-togethers?
Jan Techau: On the one hand, the topic that they chose for this is of course the one that is of principal importance for the European security architecture, and that is whether Germany, from a traditional position of military restraint, can mature and develop into basically the principal provider of conventional deterrence in Europe. This is a massive shift for the Germans. This has been going on for a while now. Zeitenwende, as it is called in the German context: a shift in time, a shift in era. And it requires Germany to adopt a new outlook on its own military force, its role in coercive diplomacy, which it’s not deeply steeped in; assuming a new role of responsibility for the defense of Europe against the Russian aggression, but also more generally to make Europe more resilient should the American security guarantee administered through NATO fall by the wayside.
That’s a massive cultural shift. And during this trip that you’ve mentioned, we were basically traveling once through the various hot chambers of that cultural shift as it is going on, talking to a variety of people. On the other hand, the trip was also interesting because it’s a German-American group, and it brings together a small number of people that have known each other for a long time, and then, as you said, a shifting lineup of other folks that come in and go out again.
And the interest in the American side of the equation was of course massive on the German side because of the Trump phenomenon. How far has the American system already been damaged by Trump, if there is such a thing as damage from Trump? Is this a real political revolution going on or is Trumpism a passing phenomenon? These kinds of issues were just as important as the German soul-search. So we had two countries on the couch, and meeting all of these people, and trying to reflect on these big issues.
What struck me on the American side first, perhaps, was that the Americans that were part of the group were bipartisan: predominantly Democrats but also a good number of Republicans in that group. All of them, by and large, are quite concerned about the domestic development of the United States. And yet, at the same time, they are not really as nearly as despondent as the Europeans when they look at America.
The Europeans look at America with utter disbelief. Many of them, if you just follow the mainstream news here, believe that America has basically already gone over the overboard, that it’s a lost case, that Trump is now the all-dominant, near-dictator-like figure, and that fascism is just around the corner. I’m simplifying a little bit. So a great deal of pessimism there — not necessarily with Schadenfreude, but with great worry. Because the Europeans know full well that their well-being depends on the relationship with America, especially on security and defense where America is still the backbone of European security.
And the Americans were a lot less worried. They were worried and concerned about the attack on institutions and various other things, and all of you will know the list of issues that you can bring up. It’s not that they weren’t worried, but they weren’t ultimately worried. They weren’t worried by and large — again, I’m simplifying — that the Republic was already lost and that America was damaged beyond repair. And that was interesting and important I think for the German side of this group to understand, that you can be really, really, really worried and yet still have confidence that ultimately the system will hold. That was an important message, I think, to the German side.
And then when you look at the other side of the equation, the German side, in this soul-search, in this development towards becoming a much more forward-leaning military and diplomatic power in Europe… Germany is doing already a lot. It is spending a whole lot more on defense, significantly more. It has changed its fiscal rules in the Constitution to make that possible. It is beefing up its arms industry. It is now the largest supporter of Ukraine in its efforts to defend itself, militarily and fiscally. There’s a lot going on that Germany does, and stuff that would’ve been quite unimaginable just three or four years ago, including the pledge to spend 5% on defense: 3.5% on core, 1.5% on infrastructure and related issues. Just two or three years ago we were pulling our hair out over 2% in this country, and now it’s all of a sudden 5% — without much of a discussion, without an outcry, without a revolution in the streets.
And yet, despite all of that stuff going on, there is this weird kind of empty hole in the middle of the zeitenwende, of this shift, that the Germans can’t quite fill yet. There is a reluctance to make that final step. They’re spending a whole lot more, but it also has the air of actually throwing a little bit of money at the problem. For me, the conclusion from this is that the genuine zeitenwende has nothing to do with defense budgets, or whether you have 180,000 or 260,000 soldiers. The real question is a mental question: mentality-wise, the attitude vis-a-vis security and defense, the attitude vis-a-vis the use of military power to achieve ends.
And the Germans find that much, much harder to change than the fiscal side. Finding 100 billion (or more than 100 billion) for defense is easy by comparison when you compare it to the cultural shift that needs to happen in this country. I think we’ve also progressed on the cultural shift, but it’s not quite complete, and so a whole lot more needs to be done. There’s a bit of a sense of urgency that’s lacking. There’s a bit of a sense that maybe this brutal role of military protector is perhaps not for us. And so there is a reluctance that you can feel at the center of all of this. And I think it will be, in terms of the European security architecture, that this is the biggest task for Germany now: to develop a new mindset. And we all know how difficult that is,
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. I have to say that maybe I am over-influenced by the fact that when we visited the Rheinmetall testing center, the outfitting of previously used tanks and the construction of new tanks seemed to be going along at a fairly leisurely pace. I was probably over-influenced by the fact that Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing” was playing in the background as one set of people were working on one tank. And nothing against Dire Straits and nothing against Rheinmetall; I’m sure all these workers do a superb job. But there’s a feeling of sort of bespoke production rather than a kind of Freedom’s Forge, all-hands-on-deck American response of the kind we had in the 1940s when we felt that we were under existential threat from the European conflict as well as Japan’s attack.
So what would it take to get that second zeitenwende of the mind, in your view, to make Germans more seriously feel that this is something that it’s not just that they can put money in that direction, but they actually need to have a change of mentality?
Jan Techau: I think it probably needs two things. First of all leadership, and secondly even more pressure from the outside. And I’m not talking about Trump trying to blackmail the Europeans on the security guarantee, but pressure in terms of a clear and present danger coming from Russia potentially, and maybe from other directions as well. So it’s the combination of both.
In the end, if you want to bring about a mentality change, you need somebody at the top of the whole organization — the Chancellor in our case, and his government — that needs to lead on this and explain it to people and live it and really be out there. And this Chancellor is doing a good job. I think he can do even an even better job. I think many of the other members of this government could be a lot more outspoken about this.
So I would demand basically from our leadership to expose themselves more on this issue, and to take greater risks in political communications to explain it. German voters are not stupid. They’ve proven this again and again. They will never jump out of their pants because they’re so happy to become a military power finally, but they can be convinced that certain things need to be done. We’ve already moved considerably into that direction, but more needs to be done, and this is a leadership issue.
To be fair — and this is where the special German factor comes in — there is of course a historic reason for Germany’s reluctance compared to, let’s say, the Brits or the French or the Italians or perhaps the Dutch. And that is World War II, the Nazi era in German history — the atrocities not just of the war but of course of the Holocaust, which for subsequent generations has tainted everything military, everything coercive, tainted it in a way that it’s very, very hard for them to embrace it freely.
And I think in principle that’s a good thing. But if you overdo it, and if you then also apply it to situations where that becomes a liability and no longer a virtue, then you have a problem. And I think Germany has entered that realm.
As I’ve said, since 2014, and especially since 2022, Germany has moved. There’s a much, much more vivid threat perception in Germany. The old kind of quasi-schmoozy romance with Russia has basically fallen by the wayside. There is still a small group of people that are romantically afflicted with Russia, but by and large trust in Putin, trust in Russia has deteriorated completely. So that’s no longer an obstacle.
So again — I can only say this again and again — Germany has done quite a bit, but these deeply rooted cultural obstacles that are there, which were built into the Federal Republic in 1949 as a starting point of the new democracy after the war, that’s not something… When it’s part of your DNA and when it’s been part of a success story for Germany, post-war success story, then it’s very, very hard to shed that. So the Germans have to learn it the hard way.
And I guess a little bit of pressure from the outside, just like the pressure that Putin has put on us, is quite helpful. And some people are openly saying, “Putin has done us a favor because he’s kissed us awake from a geopolitical slumber…”
Geoff Kabaservice: The holiday from history…
Jan Techau: The holiday from history, checking out from that beautiful post-1989 moment where the Germans thought, “Ah, finally history has delivered the perfect world for the Germans: reunited, surrounded by friends, no threats whatsoever, wealthy, accepted, well reputed.” The whole thing. That post-’89 moment… The Germans are quite fond of that feeling that they had in the ’90s, as many Americans are about the ’90s as well these days. And to now learn that almost none of that applies still, and you need to learn a couple of new tricks, is particularly hard for us with this cultural World War II thing in our heads.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me take you on a trip down memory lane. You were one of the German signatories to a rather famous and influential manifesto that was first published in Die Zeit newspaper and then republished in the New York Times in October 2017. And it was entitled, “In Spite of It All, America.” And this manifesto came out, well, nine months or so into the first Trump administration, or approximately at the same time we are now into the second Trump administration.
And this group wrote that the liberal world order, with “its foundation in multilateralism, its global norms and values, its open societies and markets” was in danger from the Trump administration’s America First approach. But, you continued, “It is exactly this order on which Germany’s freedom and prosperity depends.” And further, “If Germany wants to be an effective actor in Europe, it needs the United States.” How do you now look back on that manifesto eight years later?
Jan Techau: I think the manifesto at the time was a statement that the transatlantic community that I’m part of wanted to make. Because with that justified criticism of the Trump administration, a lot of anti-Americanism came to the surface — good old anti-Americanism, the classic European kind of cultural prejudices against the United States — and in Germany, especially, from a very comfortable position of not being part of the tough business out there, the geopolitical restraint.
We felt that, yes, Trump was deeply problematic. And yet, at the same time, America was still America, and the country from which our own country had learned democracy by and large — again, to simplify a little bit — and the country on which we relied for the security guarantees in 2017. We were even more reliant on it than we are now. It was the right thing to do at the time, and to remind the German public also that Trump was not the United States, just as today. And so we made the case that the Germans and we had not given up on the U.S., which a lot of commentators and intellectuals in Germany had done at the time.
And so I think in the context of back then, that was absolutely justified. And very similar arguments, I would say, still apply today. There is more, of course, to America than Trumpists. When you look at the numbers, the country is pretty evenly divided. It’s quite clear that not everybody is a MAGA type in the U.S. Elections are still tight, court cases are still close, and democracy still works.
And so I think that sentiment from back then still to a large extent exists. And yet, at the same time, there’s something different than compared to 2016. And that is that back then we very firmly believed that once the Trump thing was over, the United States would undoubtedly return to its role as the principal power of the West and the principal guarantor of European security. That conviction is weaker now. A lot of people now believe that even if Trump goes, Trumpism remains; that the strategic rationale of reorienting away from Europe and towards Asia or other parts of the planet is irreversible; that the Europeans, no matter whether Trump is in power or perhaps a Democratic president in the future again, will have to completely rely on themselves to an extent that they didn’t imagine in 2016.
And so the situation has changed. Today I would still sign a manifesto that tries to remind the people not to give up on the United States. I would no longer believe that America by necessity must stay involved with the Europeans. I think that’s much, much more open these days, much, much more uncertain than it used to be, than it was almost eight years ago.
Geoff Kabaservice: You had told the New York Times at the time of the manifesto’s publication that its aim was to counter “those who think that Trump has finally shown the real nature of America, and that it’s time for the Germans and French free themselves from transatlanticism.” But you were mostly worried at that point about those on the left who felt liberated to break with America. It seems now that there are actually pressures on the left and also the populist right — the party Alternative for Germany that you mentioned — where anti-Americanism is coming from these days.
Jan Techau: Anti-Americanism in Germany has never been the privilege of either side of the political spectrum. There has always been both left-wing anti-Americanism — greatly fueled by the Vietnam War in the ‘60s and ‘70s — and there has always been a much older conservative anti-Americanism, which often has to do with culture and with the question of a European kind of snobbish superiority over the weird ways of the Americans, the uncultivated ways of the Americans. And there are still remnants of that in the political system today. Of course, there’s also the “insult” of the country that we fought in the war, this seemingly culturally inferior country that defeated us in the war and then taught us how to be proper democrats. That is, for people like me, liberation. But for some people, some of the older dudes, that’s an insult. That’s something that hurts them.
And so remnants of this kind of anti-Americanism — and I’m simplifying greatly, of course, it’s much more subtle than this — are still there. It’s a counter-movement, a pushback against a kind of modernity, the liberal democratic capitalist mass society that America stands for and all of the stuff that brings about. This is a continental European country. Our roots are elsewhere. Germany especially is not, by definition, a fully Western country. It has a very strong cultural and geographic exposure to the East. And it needs to juggle all of these cultural influences on a daily basis. That happens all the time. And anti-Americanism is one way in which this comes out. There are other ways as well.
And so the problem of course is that a fundamental decision was made in 1949 by West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who had at the time decided that it was more important for the western part of the divided Germany to be firmly embedded the family of Western countries and to forego an immediate reunification — because unification, in his opinion, meant neutrality, and neutrality meant ultimately domination by the Soviets. So the only way for the bulk of the Germans to stay free, in Adenauer’s mind, was to associate Germany firmly with the Americans, with NATO, with France, with Britain, and the countries of the West. That was a cultural decision that not everybody liked. It came also with a cultural decision in favor of a market economy instead of a planned economy.
All of these conflict lines of the 1940s and 1950s, all of them still exist. They’re under the surface; they’re much, much less dominant. But they can be reactivated. And Trump reactivated them in a great, great way in 2016, and even more so now. He brought all of the ressentiment, all of the prejudice against America back to the surface: “See, this is the real America all of you romanticists about America were always unable to see. You believed in the American nonsense about freedom and democracy and all of that stuff. And now you see the real brutality of it all.” And the manifesto at the time was a clear statement against the old German ghosts that came to the surface that are less inclined to believe in Westbindung, this firm embeddedness in the West that I think is necessary and healthy for the country.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s an interesting question the extent to which history is reappearing in unexpected guises nowadays. Donald Trump clearly has surfaced an old American tradition of isolationism, which obviously goes back to the America First movement of the late ’30s and early ’40s. But in some ways, he’s really going back to the time when America’s infant industries were protected by tariff walls in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
By the same token, I think some of what you’re talking about makes me think of a discussion we’ve had about the idea that German kultur was different from the “civilization” of the British and of course the Americans. I think that’s potentially a much longer discussion.
But let me say something here about what I found in the manifesto that struck me. It said that “If Germany were to cut ties with the United States, with them go the reassurance that other European countries need in order to accept a strong Germany in the center of the continent. The more leadership that Germany can and should take on, the closer coordination must be with the United States.”
And this was a view voiced by other participants in the Global Atlanticists meeting, including Jeremi Suri, for example, who felt that there was almost a kind of structural inability of Germany to take on a strong military role without alarming other countries, particularly those of its neighbors in the borderlands to the east, between Germany and Russia.
Jan Techau: Yes, this is an old trope when you look at European politics over the centuries. After German unification in the 1870s — a fairly recent thing — Germany was too big to be just another European country, but too small to be a genuinely dominating power. It was this weird in-between thing, uncertain about its own role. And out of this uncertainty ultimately sprang two world wars.
And the answer to this so-called “German question” was to embed the country into very, very strong and firm multinational institutional frameworks: NATO, dominated by the U.S., and the EU in cooperation especially with the French. Germany would deliberately tie itself to these families of nations and not seek domination, and this was the answer to a proper balance of power and ultimately peace in Europe.
The more important of the two, NATO — because it’s about physical security and therefore survival in the end — was dominated by the United States. And here comes something extremely important, and it has something to do with what you’ve just read. The Europeans tried to sort out over the last 800 years who would be the dominant power in Europe. And it turned out that nobody had the stamina, the size, the force to do it properly. The Germans wanted it, the French, the Brits, the Spaniards, Swedish — everybody at some point — and the Russians and the Austro-Hungarians were part of that game. And that game came to an end after World War II, when all of a sudden a non-European power was the dominant power in Europe: the United States. And not only did it settle the power question, but because it settled the power question it infused a massive amount of trust into the European political market that didn’t exist before. The hegemonic quest between the Europeans was over. Somebody else was the hegemon.
And that meant that all of a sudden you were able to cooperate at a level that was impossible before: the European Union, political integration, markets and everything else, a shared parliament, shared institutions in Brussels, the kind of stuff that you do with partners that you can basically trust because they’re not going to attack you tomorrow. That question was removed by the Americans, and it was especially removed by the Americans from Germany. Because as long as the Americans were there, the others could always trust that this country that was slightly too big to be comfortable would be part of that peaceful setup.
And still, historically, if you really take two steps back out of the daily grind of politics and the latest news, if you take two steps back and look at it structurally, that is still not an entirely superfluous question. There is a fear of Germany that has nothing to do with its World War II history, but something to do structurally with its size and population and central location. And to have somebody non-European to balance that out was actually quite useful for Europe. The French slept better because of it. And if you take that trust infusion of America out of the European market now, as Trump intends to do — nobody knows how far he wants to go — but if you take that pacifying substance out of the European market, many including myself fear that this wonderful balance that we’ve had for seventy years might actually crumble, that the old ghosts of distrust between the Europeans, the old hegemonic questions come back.
Now, you could argue that of course this is the twenty-first century and not the nineteenth. The Europeans are exhausted powers. Waging massive war is beyond their means. And that’s true. But at the same time, inter-European rivalries can be just as bitter now as they were two hundred years ago. I’m convinced of this. This is an awful lot of politics in a very, very small space — Europe, I mean. And to take that American trust infusion out of that market is something that creates risks. This is something that Trump is neither aware of nor interested in, but it is, for historically informed Europeans, a question that remains unanswered.
And the Russians have a very wonderful answer to this. They want to become the dominant power of Europe, split the Americans from Europe, and then divide the Europeans amongst themselves, and from each other, so that they can divide and rule in Europe. That’s the stated aspiration of the Russians. And that’s the other reason why the American presence in Europe is so important: not just the trust infusion internally, but also the protection from the outside power that aspires to dominate.
And so you have a double logic for the American presence in Europe, regardless of who is the president. And the manifesto was also meant to illustrate that point and say there’s something bigger at stake than just the next election, or whether you like Trump or you don’t like him. Something much bigger and more fateful is at stake in that connectedness of the Americans with the United States.
And I think that is still to a certain extent true, and fundamentally true. And that’s also the tragedy of the moment, because probably that old American presence is not going to come back. So the Europeans are now forced to ask themselves much bigger questions than just about Ukraine. Ukraine is important, super important also for the rest of Europe. But the bigger and much more fundamental question is: Can the Europeans, for the first time in history, administer proper liberal peace in Europe without the help of the Americans? And the answer to that, nobody knows.
Geoff Kabaservice: This is one of my greatest worries about the Trump administration, because they really have no interest in history. They have no idea of the forces that they might be unleashing. The argument has also been made that in the absence of the United States, German leaders, in order to have credible guarantees in dealing with Russia, would have to have their own nuclear weapons, or at least the proverbial finger on a European nuclear deterrent. And we heard a few people at these Global Atlanticist gatherings mention that, sort of in passing. But even now, there’s too great sensitivity around the subject of a German nuclear deterrent, I think, to be able to speak about it openly. And yet the logic of the situation seems fairly clear.
Jan Techau: The pure strategic logic, in a Europe without America — and potentially without the American security guarantee, the backbone of which is nuclear — the pure strategic argument dictates that more European powers, including Germany, might want to seek nuclear arms at some point. If the American protector goes away, they’re open. Nuclear blackmail is possible. Russia is a massive nuclear power. Germany is not. Only Britain and France are, in the European context. So how are the others going to protect themselves from nuclear blackmail if the Americans go? So the classic strategic answer would be: Get your own nukes.
And this is one of the predictions that I have and many others have: that the moment Article Five and the American nuclear deterrent become doubtful, some Europeans will try to do that, including the Turks, possibly the Poles — and we all know what that would trigger on the Russian side. So a nuclear arms race in Europe is basically not really in anybody’s interest, which is another reason for America to stay.
In the German case, you would say Germany definitely has the economic and scientific capacity to also build a nuke. But in Germany it’s more complicated, not just because of historic grievances and a sense of that stuff for us, but also because Germany is legally bound to not having them. It agreed in the Two Plus Four Treaty, which established German unity after the end of the Cold War, that it would relinquish the right to have nuclear arms. So it would have to be in violation of international treaties. And you could say those are pieces of paper and their meaning of fullness kind of passes away. But Germany violating those would almost certainly trigger a response from the Russians, and it would get the entire order out of balance.
So there’s more than just a strategic argument, the pure security politics logic to this. There’s also an underlying logic of trust, of confidence. And these kinds of things, the soft factors in politics, are often overlooked.
And so the ultimate logic of this is: How can we prepare for the day that the American deterrent goes away and we only have two small nuclear powers in Europe? How can you then organize nuclear deterrence in Europe that keeps the continent free from Russian pressure? Again, that question has not been answered. I think that once that situation arose, almost uncontrollable forces would break out in Europe and we would see nuclear activity in all kinds of ways, in very unpleasant ways, probably including Russia being forced to act quite swiftly on its own nuclear strength before some of the other Europeans had their own nukes. And so we would see an opening of this “strategic market of Europe,” as I always call it. This is why taking the Americans out of Europe is tinkering with very, very big forces that are beyond your control. There are strategic, geopolitical, and historic forces that would be unleashed which would be quite uncontrollable.
Geoff Kabaservice: And talking about this essentially structural role of Germany and the European security architecture, I’m reminded of a great October 2019 essay you wrote for The American Interest entitled “No Trust in Self, No Money for Defense.” You wrote that Germany’s failure to play a military role commensurate with its size and importance was not due to any inherent pacifism or fiscal conservatism, or some alleged desire to be a perpetual free rider. You did think that some role was played by lingering guilt and shame from Germany’s role as a perpetrator of World War II and the Holocaust, as we’ve discussed.
But what was really holding back the country from becoming a true global strategic player was what you called Germans’ “profound lack of trust” in their own good intentions. Most other Western societies, including obviously the Americans but also the British and the French and so on, believe that they’ve made some mistakes in the course of their histories, but they’ve been the good guys, fundamentally on the right side of history. “Such confidence,” you wrote, “is entirely absent from the German collective mindset.” No German feels sure that the monstrous moral failures in the 1930s cannot happen again.
And you wrote that the various neuroses about the German predicament all in practice add up to “the pervasive reluctance that has become emblematic of German security and defense policy. Real-life policymaking does not lend itself to the binary choices required by Germany’s collective psychological needs. Instead it demands the very things Germans find so threatening: painful decisions involving moral compromise.” Does that still strike you as an accurate depiction of the present situation or are we moving beyond that?
Jan Techau: We talked in the beginning of this conversation about that strange emptiness in the middle of the German strategic debate that still holds the country back. And now you’ve basically described where that’s coming from.
This article in The American Interest at the time was my attempt, after about twenty years of dealing with foreign policy questions and Germany’s predicament, to come up with kind of a net sum of what I was thinking about the whole thing. And I had a very strong feeling in the run-up to this article that Germany’s predicament was not just a political question, but that there was a very strong psychological element in it, that you couldn’t resolve “the German question” just based on policy and that the patterns to explain German non-behavior, if you will, were falling short of getting to the core of the problem.
Because as you’ve said, Germany is not particularly pacifistic. It is not a free-rider by nature. It is none of these things. When you look post-war German history, that’s not what Germany is. So something else must be in play. And I believe it’s this fundamental of lack of trust in your own good intentions. That’s really the problem here.
The historic experience is we failed big time. The conclusion is we can fail again. That means you want to limit that risk of repeated failure by exposing yourself less in the international security market, by trying to abstain, by becoming a passive player. That’s not free-riding. That is a psychological predicament that holds you back because you ultimately have no confidence that you might not fail again. And so that is much less of a policy issue than it is a psychological issue. And what’s the answer to this? The answer, of course, is you have to build trust in yourself. How do you do this? Piece by piece. You take one little baby step after the next to learn that you can actually take these risks that you try to avoid, that you can expose yourself, that you can go to war and it doesn’t have to be 1945 again.
And the Germans have taken quite a number of steps since the early ’90s, from the Yugoslav wars and also even, after the publication of this article, doing things that were previously unthinkable. But baby steps: Providing the Peshmerga with weapons. Our participation in the Kosovo War of 1992, which was a very important moment for German development. And then obviously Afghanistan, where we were for twenty years. There were quite a number of things where the Germans engaged — did not fully engage, still with restraint built in, but exposure at a much, much higher level than previously thought.
And so Germany took baby steps. But now baby steps are no longer enough. Now we’re facing a situation where our security guarantee might go away, where war is going on in Europe that affects all of us. And all of a sudden, within a very short period of time, Germany needs to make a massive monster step instead of just a small baby step.
And this is the problem of the day. You can’t just slowly and incrementally feel yourselves into a new situation. You now have to commit. Everybody’s watching. Everybody wants a commitment. Everybody wants you to come around. And that is slightly too quickly for the Germans struggling with their own psychological afflictions. And this is what causes that empty spot in the debate. It’s too much in too short a time.
And this is, for every American who comes here into town, this is the weird kind of dilemma or contradiction that they find when they come to Germany. They come to a country which has bent over backwards to do it differently over the last ten years or so, is massively stressed out also fiscally because it spends a whole lot more, does a whole lot more, buys a lot more arms, and all at the upper limit of what’s politically possible in Germany. And yet, at the same time, it’s not nearly enough.
So the political system is stressed out, reform pressure is massive, and Germany does actually deliver at the upper end of its possibilities. And yet, given the external developments in Europe and in the world, it’s not nearly enough. This is what stresses people out. You will meet people in this town who look at you and say, “But look at all of the stuff we’ve done: all of the fantastic things we’ve done, all of the pain we’ve endured, all of the unusual things that we were able to sell to our voters now that we weren’t able to sell previously. And yet it’s not enough?”
And then you look at them and say, “Yeah, it’s still not enough.” And this is what creates the kind of reform stress that you encounter here in this town whenever you get into these discussions, and which were also very much visible I think in the discussions we had last week on that study trip.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. So your quote from that 2019 article still holds today: “Germany is moving, but the strategic situation in Europe is moving much faster. And so, even as Germany does more, it is still falling behind. Germany’s supply side develops slower than the world’s demand side.”
Jan Techau: There you are.
Geoff Kabaservice: Still very true. However, although Americans should be very hesitant when they quote Goethe to the Germans, he did say that “As soon as you trust yourself, you will learn how to live.” Maybe that’s the answer.
Jan Techau: Yes, yes. And not just to live, but also at a much more basic level to survive. That’s how dire the situation is. It’s no longer just about the good life, it’s actually about survival of the stuff that we hold dearly.
Geoff Kabaservice: So as a last question, we had discussed earlier that many European countries are experiencing some of the same problems that America is also experiencing. And it seems to me that you have been prophetic in this, as in many other things. Because in April 2016 you wrote an article in the Financial Times entitled “Sophisticated States Are Failing.”
And basically the definition of “sophisticated state failure” is to have a highly functioning state in which still nothing gets done. Yes, the basic systems of justice and the law operate. But at the level at which people live, the trains don’t run on time, housing costs too much because it’s too difficult to build new housing, it’s almost impossible to get an infrastructure project constructed in time or under budget. Maybe even your scientific apparatus falls behind because the demands of bureaucracy are too high. And in turn, the demands of interest groups in society grow up to choke the government’s or the private sector’s ability to get things done.
You wrote that “The sheer difficulty of governing complex, highly diverse societies should not be underestimated.” Lord knows we deal with that nowadays. But you pointed out that “As long as this dilemma remains unsolved, the result is paralysis.” And furthermore, as this situation of a society being unable to do things that it was able to do in the past keeps developing, then you get the rise of populism. Because voters see that the system isn’t working for them, they get frustrated, and they become vulnerable to the claims of populists, who at the time were Donald Trump (not yet the President) and Marine Le Pen. You pointed out that populists are very good at pointing out when things are broken, but they’re almost invariably wrong in how to fix them. And you concluded that “The only lasting way out of sophisticated state failure is for responsible politicians to worry less about getting re-elected and start risking their political careers for things that need to be done.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is essentially the thesis of so many books that have been written on the Abundance movement, the problems of state capacity that we’re dealing with in the United States — books like Marc Dunkelman’s with the title Why Nothing Works. And you did see it all coming, back at a time when Europe and especially Germany seemed to be riding high.
Jan Techau: Yes, this was 2016 at a panel in London… I was invited to speak on a panel, and already then we were quite worried about some of the political developments in Europe. And on this panel, while discussing this topic, this idea of “sophisticated state failure” came to me. “State failure” is something you associate with Somalia, a nation where institutions are weak or non-existent, where you have the law of the jungle, and everything that makes a state is only there in name but not in reality. And this is not our state of affairs. We have functioning states, our police forces work, our tax authorities work, our courts do work, and many, many other core functions of the state are intact — and yet nothing progresses. And so I called it “sophisticated state failure,” because we are quite sophisticated societies with very, very sophisticated political systems, and yet we can’t get anything done.
And so, it struck me that now it’s a totally popular kind of thing. And of course, I eat my shoes that I didn’t write those books myself. I never did. I didn’t follow up on the idea that I had. But it was quite obvious to me that this paralysis was already prevalent at the time. You couldn’t do proper tax reform in Germany. Britain can’t reform its health services. Germany reformed its armed forces to the extent that it can’t be used any longer. In education, the standards of education perennially go down instead of up. There are twenty-five more examples if we had the time.
So it seemed quite obvious to me. And the answer to this is more risk by politicians. We have to quote, of course, Mr. Juncker, who was the head of the European Commission, who said, “We all know” — we, as the politicians and leaders — “we all know what we have to do. We just have no idea how to get re-elected afterwards.” And skip that second part of the sentence from your arsenal. Just do what’s important. And get re-elected or do not get re-elected, but get it done. Of course, that’s very easy to say for somebody who’s not an elected official and whose life and livelihood depends on being an elected official. But I think ultimately this is where the crux is.
There are other factors, of course. It’s not just the lack of leadership. There’s also a complexity these days that is higher than it used to be in the past. Issues are more complex. Reforming the welfare state is not just about cutting unemployment entitlements, it’s a very intricate web and system of things that need to reform. And so you look at this horrible web of things that are all interconnected and you decide, “Ah, let’s not touch it.” That’s a very normal instinct. Complexity — you shy away from it, you don’t want to touch it. It might be too unpredictable.
There’s also a saturatedness. Even these non-functioning sophisticated states still function enough for people to not really feel an awful lot of pain, and the good life continues for many — not for all, but for many. And saturatedness is a problem as well. Are we hungry enough still to do these big things? There’s a normal factor at play in open societies. Open societies have a tendency to fragment further as they become more affluent. Groups and subgroups and sub-subgroups spring up and want their part of a say in the public sphere and in decision-making. And with every group that articulates itself, decision-making gets more complicated and less decisive.
We don’t even have to talk about social media and how it fragments society. Path dependencies on budgets, one of my favorite subjects. In all Western societies, except the United States, you have very similar patterns in public spending. You have a ratio between welfare spending and defense spending of between 3:1 to 4:1. That’s the kind of stuff that we’ve been doing for seventy years. Generations of politicians have been socialized with this pattern, that this is the healthy ratio. Now all of a sudden you have to unlearn this and maybe make it 2:1 or 1:1. That’s a very, very difficult decision to make. And juggling around budget entitlements is one of the most difficult things to do for politicians. So these path dependencies, patterns that you have written into your political behavior for generations — trying to abandon them is hard to do, so politicians don’t do it.
And then, of course, you also have the problem that many of these tricky problems from hell that we’re dealing with — whether that’s migration or climate change, to a certain extent trade — are multinational, international issues, where single constituencies like the German body politic or Britain or Portugal don’t mean much, where you have to come together and forge a compromise between twenty-seven (in the European context) or maybe 150 (in the global context) nations. Everybody who’s been remotely involved in that kind of exercise knows how tedious that is. So politicians get tired after a while. They don’t do it. And as long as power and responsibility is administered at the national level, finding solutions at the international level is very, very tricky and difficult.
And so you have a number of reasons for sophisticated state failure. And I don’t want to stay here and leave everybody with just admiring the problem. But I think being aware of it is perhaps a first step towards the solution, apart from fighting bureaucracy and having political leadership. There are many, many other partial solutions to the problem. But if we don’t get a grip on it, we can neither reform and modernize, nor will we stem the flood of the populists who feed on dysfunctionality in the political system. So we have to solve sophisticated state failure, both from a performance perspective, but also from a perspective of political freedoms that we want to retain and defend.
Geoff Kabaservice: The concept of sophisticated state failure seems to fit very well with the analysis of your employer, the Eurasia Group, which for at least a decade has been warning about the dangers of a “G-Zero world” — that is to say an era when no one power or group of powers is both willing and able to drive a global agenda and maintain international order. And they’re really talking about a global leadership deficit that’s growing increasingly dangerous. How do we get out of this, then? What, besides telling leaders that they should have more vision and willingness to take risks, can we the people do to make it likelier that a world of order reemerges?
Jan Techau: Yes, this is a great question. The theoretical 30,000-foot answer, of course, is that responsible countries, responsible societies that are interested in certain outcomes — let’s say defending liberal democracy, freedom, open markets — come together, congregate, and replace that one power that used to dominate it all. They create G in a G world that is no longer there, which is why it’s a G-Zero world. They come together and do this in a united way. That’s the 30,000-foot answer — always smart, always correct, but very, very hard to bring about when the prevailing logic at the moment is not only is there no longer a big one, single power that calls the shots, but that the instinct of many governments, even in the smaller countries, is the nation comes first. Renationalization is happening.
I think what we the people can do at the grassroots level of politics is not to give our votes to these tempting siren voices that want to lure us into the direction of national isolation, and put up the walls and let the others stay outside. That is not a possibility in a globalized world. That is not a way to generate wealth. That is not a way to deal with migration or climate change. These are false solutions that sound appealing, and sound appealing compared to sophisticated state failure, but will only make the problem bigger.
And I know that’s very, very hard. And it’s an appeal to rational thinking when all inside you, your emotions scream, “No, no, no. I want to do it differently.” But I think the brain needs to prevail over the stomach. And that’s the only answer I can give. There’s no single one answer to the problem of G-Zero. But the old world will not come back. The West will be relatively weaker, that’s quite clear, even though the Western model is what we like. We like open societies, we like open markets, we like the affluence that comes with that, the freedom of speech, the general confidence of that kind of life. We want to preserve that. But it will be harder in a world where the West counts for relatively less.
And so how can we strengthen our societies? How can we make ourselves, even in that relatively smaller position, still guarantors of that kind of life? That is one of the biggest questions around. And ultimately it depends on everybody’s single voting decision, behavioral decision, perhaps also consumer decision. Do you buy Chinese digital services or don’t you buy them? Or your good old phone, where does it come from? These decisions, ultimately all of them are a little bit of a vote on a daily basis on whom to support and whom not to support. I think we the people at that level need to be aware that our small choices can make a big difference if accumulated in that bigger scheme of the G-Zero world.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s a bracing analysis, Jan Techau, but it’s always a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you very much for talking with me today.
Jan Techau: Thank you very much.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating, or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington D.C.
