U.S., EUROPE AND CHINA COLD WAR

Allies need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder to face huge China challenge, warns top German official

EUROPE and the United States need to face up to a “new Cold War with China” together, regardless of who wins the White House in November, Germany’s point man on transatlantic ties said.

With just five weeks until the US election, the German government’s coordinator for relations with the US and Canada, Peter Beyer, insisted there were more shared interests than differences.

“Europe has got to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the US to face the huge challenge of China,” he said.

“The new Cold War between the

US and China has already begun and will shape this century.”

After four years of frequent friction between Donald Trump and Angela Merkel on issues including Iran, trade, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the climate, Beyer said it was no secret that Germany would find it easier to work with Joe Biden.

“I’m the last person who’s so naive to say ‘If Biden wins, everything will be super, it’s the beginning of a golden age’,” he said.

“The controversial issues won’t go away overnight but with Biden, the transatlantic friendship would become more reasonable, calculable and reliable again.”

On China and Iran, Americans and Europeans had “similar, sometimes identical interests”, Beyer said.

“That’s why I’m frustrated that we can’t find a common denominator right now on issues including support for the World Health Organisation amid the coronavirus pandemic, ways to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions and tackling climate change.”

But he insisted that despite the high stakes of the race, Trump’s re-election would not bring the implosion of the West, citing enduring close cooperation with Congress and many US states.

“It won’t all be grim if Trump two comes. But it also won’t be better,” he said.

“Who is sitting in the White House is essential. But it can’t dominate the transatlantic friendship. Washington and especially the US aren’t just the Oval Office.”

Beyer said decades of post-war cooperation between the allies had built a foundation of “supposedly old-fashioned values” like “freedom and democracy, peace and prosperity”.

That stood in contrast to a Chinese system marked by “dictatorship, a lack of press freedom and human rights, digital surveillance, (abuse of ) the Uighurs, Hong Kong, the environment...”

Beyer is one of the few top members of the Christian Democrats (CDU), Merkel’s party, at a Foreign Ministry run by the Social Democrats, junior partners in her ruling coalition.

He said the CDU would have to think of those crucial factors when picking a new leader in December ahead of a general election next year at the end of Merkel’s 16-year tenure.

He said security was just one area in which Germany would have to up its game, particularly given Trump’s plans to slash the number of US troops stationed in Germany by 9,500 to 25,000.

He said a younger generation of Germans was less interested in American pop culture or study abroad programmes than he had been growing up in Cold War-era West Germany, noting that Australia, Canada and parts of Asia were now more likely to capture hearts and minds.

And he admitted that Germany had occasionally neglected US ties over the past decade and bore part of the blame for any estrangement.

“Polls show Germany and Germans are very popular among many Americans,” Beyer said, with an eye to rekindling the relationship.

“It’s a place to start.”