The former Federal Minister, former Vice-Chancellor and former SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel has been holding top positions in the supervisory boards of various major corporations, including Siemens Energy, Deutsche Bank and Rheinmetall, for years. Since 2019, the ex-politician has also been the head of the elite association Atlantik-Brücke. In recent weeks, Gabriel has again become a sought-after media figure. On Thursday, he attended a Pioneer conference and an interview with him was published in Focus.
In the interview, Gabriel made several proposals for how the European Union can counter the EU’s division caused by the actions of the new US President, Donald Trump. Since Trump is undermining the liberal democracy and a rule-based international order, the EU must take the initiative and, for example, invite Canada to become a member of the European Union.
“‘They are more European than some European member states,’ Gabriel said. ‘They are just not geographically in Europe. But we can create rules for that.'”
This is not unthinkable. Canada is an extremely important country, Gabriel said. It is a strategically located Arctic neighbor. “We must gather alliance partners – it is up to us how the future of Europe will look.”With these ideas, which, however, contain a contradiction in themselves, Trump can do nothing, as the USA are giving up their role as a global order power. The USA are “imperially overstretched”and are focusing on strengthening bilateral ties in the EU, which will strengthen the “centrifugal tendencies”within the alliance. Unfortunately, Trump has “accomplices”everywhere. These include Viktor Orbán, Alice Weidel, Robert Fico, Andrej Babiš, Herbert Kickl and Marine Le Pen.
Gabriel also stated that the Pacific is no longer the periphery, but the center of the world. “Two-thirds of the world’s social product are produced there, two-thirds of humanity live there and there are already five nuclear powers.”The shifts are “tectonic”and the crisis is “existential”for Europeans.
Gabriel acknowledged that Europeans had dominated the world with the discovery of the global sea routes for 600 years. However, those times are over. He compared the state of the world to the lawlessness of a small town in the “wild west”:
“‘Where the sheriff leaves the main street, the gangsters come. Where America goes, authoritarian states like China, Russia, Iran, or smaller regional players are trying to fill the space. The only ones who stand helplessly by and look at this changed world are us in Europe. We will be seen as the last vegetarians in the world of the meat-eaters.'”
The proposals of the long-time political heavyweight and current lobbyist for the arms industry, Gabriel, seem not to be just thought experiments of a “former”politician. The CDU leader and most likely candidate for chancellor, Friedrich Merz, sees the world in a similar light. In a keynote speech at the Körber Foundation, he outlined a series of security policy measures that appear to aim to extend military arms to other regions of the world for the first time. According to a report by the Federal Armed Forces Association, Merz wants to build a “European marine base”in the Indo-Pacific region instead of occasionally sending a German frigate through the Taiwan Strait.
Merz, however, does not see the future of relations with the USA under Donald Trump as negative. There is no second partnership like that between Europe and the USA, he said. The presidency of Donald Trump also offers an opportunity.