The Chancellor's recent farewell visit to Washington concluded an era in foreign policy.

It was characterized by Angela Merkel's exclusive economic focus.

What was overlooked was the immense force with which China redefined the strategic centering of the American protective power.

It will be decisive whether Berlin will penetrate this dynamic of power after the Bundestag election in a realpolitical way or whether one insists on being able to exempt itself from geopolitics as a peace and trade power.

The “turning point” of international politics, which was endeavored to inflation in Berlin, must now be understood as what it actually is: not as the well-known solving of technical problems in different political areas, but as the explicit struggle for dominance in the world, both in terms of power politics and the Value character.

Does the West want to remain supremacy?

Make no mistake: this power struggle can also be lost.

Without a strong America there will be no free Europe 

Uncertainty in the strategic classification of the power factor China may cause supporters of equidistant rocking politics to overlook nothing less than that there will be no free Europe without a strong America for the foreseeable future. The next federal government must start here. America alone cannot oppose China in the next few years, because even with conservative economic growth, the People's Republic will soon be economically stronger. Together, however, Europe and America, not least with the members of the Quad (India, Japan, Australia), can put China in its place - provided the political will to do so is formed.

Berlin must therefore make it its top priority in autumn to make Germany so economically, technologically and militarily attractive in Europe by 2024 that the US president must find it extraordinarily difficult to question the value of the alliance itself. The three short years until then will give the next federal government the important opportunity to sustainably strengthen the internal cohesion of the West.

The first step in this direction is to see security policy and economic policy, unlike in the past, not as unconnected, as it were autonomous entities, but as interlocking core elements of German strategy.

It should therefore no longer be considered an undisputed part of German economic policy and its (past) globalization ideals that China prospered unchecked due to international interdependencies.

Rather, it should be asked how strong China should actually become through global trade.

It is obvious that Germany’s trade with China serves a purpose that cannot be in the German interest.

Every percent growth consolidates the rule of the Communist Party and legitimizes its acceptance by the Chinese people.

Year for year.

He already gives an idea of ​​how serious the US president is about the issue.

Joe Biden knows too well that the high Chinese arms spending is tying up the globally distributed American capacities more and more in East Asia every year and thus, conversely, weakening the credibility of American deterrent capacities in Europe against Russia.

Last but not least, Germany's trade also contributes proportionally to the fact that the People's Republic can continuously record an increase in its military budget that corresponds to the size of the Bundeswehr every year.

A “spiritual-strategic turn” is needed in Germany

It is to be hoped that the new federal government will recognize and operationalize these vital connections at an early stage by giving Germany's strategic security priority over economic interests. Behind all this, the US President should by no means be romanticized after the latest Nord Stream 2 concession, the crucial transatlantic question peeps out, which Biden will be addressing to Berlin with increasingly less make-up from autumn: How can it be that Germany wants to be protected by the American nuclear safety guarantee, but at the same time wants to earn a lot of money with America's strategic rival?

The impassable path to unity in the West at the turn of the ages calls for a "spiritual and strategic turn" on the German side. Three years is not a long time. Trump, Putin and Xi know that.