National Interest

by Holger Friedrich

    The West’s political system is losing contact with reality—at home and beyond its borders. Russia and China, at least, know what they want.

    Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from one that originally appeared in The Berliner Zeitung. It has been edited for style and clarity.

    Biological, cultural and institutional systems that operate as closed systems lose momentum first, then resilience. Sooner or later, structures better adapted to new demands absorb them, survive and thrive. Evolution has run this mechanism for millions of years, cultural history for a few thousand and the research on it fills libraries. Day-to-day politics still misreads the findings—and the consequences are hard to bound.

    In the months before this year’s state elections in eastern Germany and in Berlin, the old argument about eastern and western German perspectives flared up again—36 years after reunification and with remarkable venom. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s paper of record on the center-right, ran Reinhard Bingener; Der Spiegel, the country’s largest newsweekly, ran Nikolaus Blome. Both went after easterners of every description: the ordinary voter in a small town in Saxony-Anhalt or Western Pomerania and the politicians and journalists who articulate eastern German perspectives.

    The emotion was familiar. The intensity was not. Nor was the visible effort, once sharp objections came in, to contain the swelling argument by drawing a few hand-picked eastern voices into it. This was prompted by mounting defiance in the east—in the voting booth and in how people now treat the powerful in public.

• What’s New Is the Refusal to Reconcile

    The political flanks, left and right, stood to win a great many votes and the traditional big-tent parties to lose them. That is what happened and nobody should have been surprised. What stands out in this round is the refusal to reconcile. Rising dissent in the east makes decision-makers and media players nervous and that nervousness produces high-volume coverage.

    The defining trait of that coverage is that nobody conducts it openly or with any interest in an outcome. It simulates a debate to avoid what a real debate delivers: an external stimulus that forces new insight and compels action.

• A Simulation of Debate

So the eastern perspective gets represented by people whose careers and incomes depend on institutions shaped in western Germany. That sets up a textbook conflict of interest. How hard will anyone push against the interests and the axioms of the structures that pay them

    The simulation holds and with it the western assumptions and norms that have framed this conversation for 35 years. The east’s actual problems receive little attention, again and again: young, ambitious people are leaving; local businesses are stretched past their limits; the bills for the war and the welfare state are coming due; and trust in the Federal Republic’s political institutions is collapsing, driven not least by campaign promises broken on schedule.

    A closed circuit of this kind produces measurement errors in political and media debate. Wrong decisions follow bad measurements. The system destabilizes on the back of the wrong decisions.

    As long as the stakes are talk shows and editorials, one can live with it and their audiences are shrinking anyway. Once real political decisions are derived from the faulty readings, the errors reach critical scale. That chain of error became visible when the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)—the party of Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel—was voted out of a German state parliament altogether for the first time, in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. A few years ago nobody in Berlin would have thought such a break with convention possible.

    This is why I wanted to know whether the same phenomenon afflicts American politics. The opportunity presented itself. To our own surprise, we (The Berliner Zeitung) keep getting invited into international boardrooms as the only eastern German outlet with real reach that is also, in fact, independent. Not in Germany. In China and Central Asia, in Russia, in Israel and in the United States.

    So another trip to Washington. After our most recent meetings in Russia and China, the appetite for firsthand information there ran high and the invitations came from people who shape American policy thinking.

• Two Patterns of Reaction

    It was instructive to watch the price the media and political institutions pay for putting their independence at risk or giving it up. We answered a great many questions and found ourselves in lively arguments more than once. In the meeting rooms around the White House, two patterns of reaction emerged. First came the polite but forceful rejection of our eastern German angle, especially when we set our impressions from recent conversations in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Beijing and Shanghai against what our American counterparts were telling us.

    Our answers often fell outside the range they were prepared for. Take the question of how to negotiate with Russia. That was the loud part of the conversation. A quieter, more inquisitive part sometimes followed, once the discussion turned specific.

    The past few months have shown how far some political assumptions have drifted from what the battlefield and the international markets actually register. Russia warns foreigners about strikes on Kyiv; Chancellor Friedrich Merz travels anyway; the Russians strike.

• The Echo Chamber of Exiled Russians

    That episode, like the CDU’s expulsion from the state parliament in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, marks a break with European political convention that would have been unimaginable not long ago. Another indication of how large the measurement error may have grown  At a minimum, a contradiction that needs resolving before anyone makes an informed decision.

    Even with the German habits as a reference point, Washington’s current lack of interest in resolving that contradiction surprised me. This made it all the more interesting to see which groups argue which way.

    The first cohort—call them “the Emotionals”—carries substantial influence right now. Some of them have Russian or Russian-Ukrainian backgrounds and have had no direct access to Russia for years. Losing immediate contacts and immediate information pushes an analyst and his arguments toward emotion and moralizing. What fills the gap comes from the intelligence community, from rival think tanks, or from the echo chamber of exiled Russians.

    Within that first cohort sits a subgroup whose impact nobody should underrate: Westerners who lived and worked in Russia during the Soviet Union’s collapse and the chaotic years that followed. Many of them invested emotionally as well as professionally in the new Russia. Today, they hold senior positions in the West—in companies, research institutes, think tanks and tech—and have watched their old dreams of Russia’s future come to nothing.

    In her 2026 book, Die Träume, die wir hatten (The Dreams We Had), Christiane Hoffmann describes the failure of a hope that looked anything but absurd after 1989: that Russia and the West might become parts of a shared European peace order once the Cold War ended.

• Russian Responsibility

    Hoffman leaves no doubt about Russian responsibility for the assault on Ukraine and condemns it sharply. What stands out lies elsewhere. She refuses to narrate history backward, as if the road from 1989 to the 2022 war ran in only one direction. She asks about the missed chances of the 1990s, Western decisions, NATO’s eastward expansion and whether a historical window existed for a different European security architecture.

    A former senior official of government communications thus supplies the control experiment for the closed thinking that governs much of the Russia debate in the United States and in Germany alike. Naming Russia’s responsibility for the war and asking whether the West measured the run-up to it correctly are two separate issues and neither cancels the other. Unfortunately, admitting failure does not rank among the strong suits of German political culture.

• Can Russia Be Beaten Militarily

    In my view, the participants in the closed rule set tend to confirm one another’s views. And the further those views threaten to diverge from reality, the more forcefully they get defended:

    Russia can be beaten militarily. The oligarchs can be squeezed. Money must not be allowed to matter. What drops out of view entirely is that European and German capacity is stretched past its limits as promised welfare reforms never arrive and efficiency gains from new technology never materialize. Out of view, too, is the geostrategic turn of major economies away from Germany and away from a European continent sinking into its internal conflicts.

    Here, the two experiments touch. The CDU loses structurally in the east because it no longer measures social reality correctly; the American-led West can commit strategic errors in Ukraine when its instruments register only what confirms its premises. Same logic, same measurement error—with an incomparably more tragic result.

    A second cohort—call them “the Rationals”—confirms this logic readily enough in conversation. They see the measurement errors and acknowledge the consequences. Their access to the administration has narrowed under Trump 2.0. In the short run, the midterms set the horizon. Over the medium and long run, thinkers and decision-makers orient themselves toward economic and potentially military conflict with China.

    From that vantage point, the war in Ukraine figures as one proxy conflict among several. As long as Europe pays, it can continue. Winning is out of reach; meanwhile, it yields valuable insights for developing future weapons systems and the scenarios in which they would be used. Korea worked that way. So did Vietnam, so did Afghanistan. This is the cold rationality of geopolitical pragmatists.

    As a staffer on the National Security Council put it in an earlier conversation: we are building the platform for the next round. Russian President Vladimir Putin has done no favors for Russia’s current generation or the next one.

    I repeatedly asked what an overarching political scenario for Europe might look like once this murderous conflict ends—in the best case and the worst. Nobody gave me a convincing answer. That may have been the trip’s most interesting finding.

• The Established Parties Are Losing

    In Moscow and Beijing, the answers at least came out clearer. Moscow signaled readiness to see the war through at whatever cost and in the same breath an interest in a comprehensive, guaranteed European security architecture. Beijing concentrates on trade, economic development and prosperity—while keeping every military option open.

    In Washington, as in Berlin, the picture stays murky. People busy themselves interpreting why the instruments deliver readings that fail to match the observed reality. Not only in Germany—in Ukraine and Iran as well.

    The cause may not sit in the reality. It may sit in the measurements. That would make for a double error. In Germany it costs the established parties whole regions and whole segments of the population, while the political and media class reassures itself that its assessment holds.

    Between the United States, the West and Russia, the consequences run along the same lines and weigh far more. Seats in a legislature are not what is at stake there. Instead, whole generations face the risk of losing the prospect of a peaceful life in freedom and prosperity.