Glenn Diesen interviews economist and author Max Otte on Germany's political decline and the broader civilizational crisis of the West
Glenn Diesen speaks with Max Otte, a German economist, bestselling author, investment manager, and political activist who came second in the 2022 German presidential election.
Summary
Germany is accelerating toward political and economic collapse, with the AfD now the country's most popular party and Friedrich Merz having delivered no meaningful change since taking office. He argues that Germany has been on a self-destructive path since at least 2011, driven by energy policy failures, continued subservience to US strategic interests, and a political class that functions as a managerial layer of the American empire rather than as representatives of the German people. He contends that the partial US troop withdrawal from Germany is not a retreat but a burden-shifting exercise, with Europe now taking on the frontline role in a war against Russia that risks drawing strikes onto European soil. The conversation broadens into a Spenglerian analysis of civilizational decline, with Otte arguing that the West is in its terminal civilizational phase — marked by collapsing birth rates, the death of genuine democratic culture, the rise of raw power politics, and the replacement of internal cultural development with outward mechanisation and commerce. Otte also discusses the prospect of religious revival — evangelical Christianity, Catholicism under Pope Leo, and Islam's earlier return to faith — as potential expressions of Spengler's predicted 'second religiousness.' Both speakers express cautious pessimism about whether populist movements can reverse these trends, though Otte identifies the AfD as currently the only party genuinely enriching democratic debate in Germany.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Merz's Failure to Deliver Change
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Today we're joined by an excellent guest, Max Otte — an economist, former professor, bestselling author, investment manager, and a political activist who also came second in the 2022 German presidential election. Thank you. We haven't spoken for a few months. It's good to see you again.
Max Otte: Good to see you again, Professor Diesen. And I want to correct one thing — I'm not a politician. I'm a political activist at best. I ran for president, I got the second most votes, but that was my share. I'm not an active politician and I will not be.
Glenn Diesen: Fair enough. I can understand the sentiment. I also at one point was tempted to flirt a bit with politics, but for many reasons that's not happening again. The reason I really wanted to speak with you today — well, there are many things, and I actually want to discuss Spengler a bit with you as well. But first I wanted to discuss what is going on in Germany, because we see that the Alternative für Deutschland — the AfD, a political party only established in 2013, so very young — is now the most popular political party in the polls, and Merz seemingly has become the most unpopular leader in Europe. What is actually happening in Germany? How can we understand this development?
Max Otte: Actually, Merz seems to be the most unpopular leader in the whole world. That's how I read some of the surveys. Basically, Germany is continuing on its downward, self-destructive path as it has been since 2015 — or 2011, really, when we started to go green full scale and dismantle our own energy. The Merkel cabinets, then Scholz, and now Merz are basically doing all the same things.
You can see — and you're an international relations theorist — that the international system really determines a lot of the outcomes of policy in Germany, because the international factors are so strong there. There are very strong forces that want German industry dismantled or diminished, relocated to the US, and so on and so forth.
What happened with Merz is that the CDU got a solid — I think around 28 to 30% — in the last election, because people were still having hope that Merz, who had coined himself "Mr. Small Business" or "Mr. Mittelstand" for most of his career, would actually turn things around. I never had any such hope. I had very low expectations, which he managed to beat downward by a large amount. My very low expectations were severely underbid. But quite a few people thought, well, we get a conservative chancellor, things will turn around. Of course they didn't. He didn't do a thing about a change in energy policy. He didn't do a thing about a change in migration. And he didn't change foreign policy — we can cover that a little more deeply in a second.
The only thing he is trying to change is to put more burdens on pensioners and the working population. The pension level is being lowered to 48% of the last average wage. So that's what he's doing — and you see who he is. He's been a servant and a lobbyist all his life. He made very good money representing big companies. For a lengthy period he was also the chairman of BlackRock for Germany, which is basically a representative and sales position. He can go in and say "I'm the chairman of BlackRock" and help in the sale of German industry. He's not making any decisions there. If you follow his career, he's been a lobbyist. His grandfather was involved with the Nazis in his hometown. We come from the same region, by the way, so I've followed him for a long time. For a while he was my chairman in the Atlantic Bridge, a German-US friendship organisation.
So he's basically continuing everything that Red-Green, Red-Black, and Black-Green before him did. You can see that there's no change — there's only one alternative in Germany, and that's the Alternative für Deutschland. After that, there's only the AfD and all other parties, and that's why the AfD is gaining.
The US Troop Withdrawal and Germany's Strategic Position
Glenn Diesen: We already know that back in 2016, Obama said the US would pivot to Asia — and if you pivot to somewhere, you have to pivot away from somewhere, and everyone understood this would be Europe. We're now a decade into this, and now we see the US has changed its national security strategy, clearly de-prioritising Europe down to a distant third. And now we have the partial troop withdrawal from Germany. I think Germany has about 35,000 American troops, and 5,000 of those are being pulled out. What does this mean for Germany and its wider position in the transatlantic partnership?
Max Otte: Unfortunately, nothing much in the underlying structure. We did have about 200,000 US troops during the Cold War. Now it's 40,000, then 35,000, maybe 30,000. But the main operational and logistical hubs — like the Ramstein Air Base, without which the war in the Middle East would not really be possible, and maybe some Italian bases — those bases will of course continue, and the US presence will continue.
So when the US says it's de-emphasising Europe, it's basically putting the burden of the empire on the allies. This is what I predicted to some extent in my 2019 book, where I predicted a new Cold War with two blocs — basically a Chinese bloc and an American bloc, and some semi-sovereign centres like Turkey or Iran. Russia is sovereign but not a world power by every measure, or at least not by all measures.
So basically we see the total integration of Europe into the US sphere. We see a shifting of burdens onto Europe to continue a war that will harm Europe and is harming Europe in immeasurable ways. It's a smart move if you are a Mandarin of the empire, because Europe — if you think about Macron, Starmer, and Merz — they are bent on continuing this war with Russia. So Europe is moving closer to the target zone, to strikes within Europe from Russia, because we're now striking deep inside Russia. Pivoting away from Europe means Europe is still being exploited economically — be it the tech companies, be it weapons that are being produced in the US and being bought by Europeans, and in many other spheres. Europe is basically an economic colony, a data colony.
Among all things, the three key European leaders tried to position Europe as independent by continuing a US war and continuing the division of Europe — which is crazy, but it's very smart imperial strategy.
Glenn Diesen: Yes. Well, that's another way the US has to adjust to this new distribution of power — it doesn't occupy this hegemonic position anymore, and one gets the impression it's working hard to outsource its wars. The Ukrainians, and increasingly now the Europeans, will fight and will weaken Russia. In the Middle East, one gets the impression that it's being attempted to be outsourced partially to the Gulf states, and you can see a similar arrangement appearing in East Asia.
But with the war on Russia — this is where the Europeans are now playing a frontline position. It seems like we're moving into a very dangerous area. Germany as well as other European countries are now very openly stating their objective of mass-producing long-range drones and missiles. At the same time, as you said, a lot of the war planners are in Ramstein, the intelligence for what to target, how to circumvent the air defences in Russia — all of this comes out of the Western countries. So this has become very much our war. I was referring to this as a proxy war in a discussion with Professor Mearsheimer, and he was correcting me: "No, no, we passed that line a long time ago. We are now fighting the Russians directly."
But given that we've already announced to the Russians how we're going to escalate the war against them — where does this end? Because I can't imagine any other outcome than the Russians feeling compelled to restore their deterrent in some kind of way.
Max Otte: Of course, Russia started this war with a few mistakes — mistakenly thinking that Ukraine would be a piece of cake, which it would have been in 2014, but we armed Ukraine since at least 2015, and even the first Trump administration did. But then, after changing strategy, Russia went in for the long run. I guess what surprised all of us is how long it actually takes and how terrible this grinding ground operation is.
I think — and I'm not a military expert, I come from economics — that Russia is fighting this war to preserve manpower. Ukraine is not necessarily doing the same, but Ukraine also learned from a few counter-offensives. So we're in a war of production power, as was the Second World War from a certain stage on, where military strategy was the smaller part and sheer volume and production power was the other part. I think it was Stalin who said quantity is a quality by itself. So we're now in a race of quantity, and I can only hope this war gets resolved before it escalates further.
I read your posts, I follow you on this channel, and I completely concur that the danger of strikes on German and European territory has increased exponentially. Ramstein is the logistical base. The planning base is actually Stuttgart. And where I live in the mountains in the Eifel, I have Nörvenich — with nuclear bombers — 50 kilometres to the north, Büchel with the nuclear bombs 100 kilometres to the south, and Spangdahlem 50 kilometres to the south as well. I can hope that weapons are pretty much on target and that I'm elevated enough and the winds are favourable, so I can hope to get away — but it's not a good feeling. It's the feeling I grew up with as a kid during the Cold War, when nuclear war was a reality and when Starfighters were thundering through the skies. Now it's not Starfighters so much, but flight activity over the Eifel — which is one of the westernmost parts of Germany, where my country house is — has increased very markedly in the past two or three years.
I can only hope that we find a resolution to this war. It's amazing — Ukrainians are very brave and Russians are very brave. These are two armies that fight to the death, which we in the West would probably not do. I've seen all these terrible videos of forced recruitment of young Ukrainian men to the front, but still, you have to respect the staying power, even if it is for a corrupt and nationalist and almost fascist regime. But I don't dare make any predictions. I'm not a military expert. I'm an economist.
NATO Expansion, the Origins of the Conflict, and the Disappearance of Debate
Glenn Diesen: I often lay the blame at NATO — and I know there's more than one party here, of course — but the reason is that I can understand both the Ukrainian and the Russian position. The Russians had made it very clear they considered NATO's incursion into Ukraine to be an existential threat. So the way they see it, they fight for their survival. The Ukrainians, under very heavy Russian attack — not just losing manpower, infrastructure, and territory, but indeed also facing an existential threat — I can understand where the fighting spirit comes from as well.
But for NATO, this was very unnecessary, because the security competition that now exists didn't exist before 2014. At that time, the overwhelming majority in Ukraine was against NATO membership, and the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians didn't see Russia as a threat. The Russians didn't see Ukraine as a threat. Essentially, security competition was introduced with the toppling of the government in Kyiv for the purpose of pulling Ukraine into the Western orbit. That's what caused it, and that's what needs to be reversed in order to reduce the security competition.
But you mentioned the Cold War — we went through something similar before, but then we had discussions, there were debates, people said we have to deter but we also shouldn't provoke. There seems to be nothing of this in Europe today. It still baffles me, it still blows my mind that Europeans are so uniformly hawkish.
Max Otte: Let's go back for a second. I wrote my dissertation on three case studies of changing German foreign policy in the 1990s — one on military missions abroad, one on EU deepening, and the third one actually on NATO enlargement versus the OSCE. Even then I had the fear — the first round of NATO enlargement had happened — that this might happen. I analysed where Germany was positioned, and my conclusion was that Germany had not increased as much in power as some international observers ascribed to it, while the tasks upon Germany had increased immensely. So Germany would still try to mediate but, in doubt, would lean towards the US position. We see that extremely clearly now — we are basically taking over the US position entirely.
It's a very smart move on the side of the US, because Europe by now is totally dependent on the United States. In the Gulf region, I see some hopes — Iran has a very smart diplomacy, that coalition for war might break, it might even break between Japan and the US, who knows. But in Europe, Europeans have taken on the US role and are loving it.
The brainwashing, the influencing, is on a very granular societal level. It started with the so-called re-education after 1945 and 1948 in Germany. Many of the German press outlets were US-owned or had a US licence — you could say they were US-friendly. Springer, which runs Germany's largest tabloid, has in its employment contract the requirement of friendship to the US and Israel. Then there was re-education in the schools. I learned about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington in school. I didn't learn much about Frederick the Great or Bismarck — I had to do that myself.
In one of my books I have the example of the Inca Empire, where it took three generations to basically assimilate another people. You started with just a few bases, put up your own gods, had friendly relations in stage two, and in stage three you integrated the other people completely. In that sense, we are very, very brainwashed.
And in times like this — this is my psychological explanation — when things are really chaotic, there's an immense amount of insecurity, the world is changing rapidly, people need simple truths, people need enemies to identify. So the "Russia is the enemy" propaganda has unfortunately taken hold. Also the propaganda that "the AfD is the enemy."
I'm quite close to the AfD's leaders — I'm nonpartisan, I used to be a CDU member, the CDU expelled me when I ran for president, which is supposed to be a nonpartisan office, but they expelled me nonetheless. Even within the AfD, the leaders are clear: we want a sovereign Germany, we want peace in Europe, we want reconciliation. But quite a few people, even parliamentarians in the party, are openly campaigning for war, for sharp confrontation with Russia. So even this one hope we still have left is holding so far, but it's not assured that we will have even a single voice of sanity in the parliament forever.
Germany's Decline as Part of a Broader Western Pattern
Glenn Diesen: The situation in Germany — a lot of indicators are grim: deindustrialisation, economic stagnation, lack of energy security. But a lot of this isn't uniquely German. Having leaders almost exclusively focused on foreign policy and warmongering, plummeting in the polls, trying to criminalise the opposition — do you see this as a wider European trend?
Max Otte: It's not only a European trend. Think about the US — MAGA imploded. The original idea — no more foreign wars, focus on the domestic economy, focus on the American people — has completely imploded. Trump has gone full out on war and enriching himself and his family and his friends. So indeed, this looks a lot like the polarisation of societies we saw leading into the World Wars.
I guess you would agree — it's not an all-out war yet, but it's not the opening moves anymore either. It's already at the end of the opening moves of this process, and I don't know how it will be stopped. The hysteria seems to just increase. Leaders don't know what to do. They cry war. They cry control of the opposition.
Unfortunately, this is a cyclical phenomenon. Most of our colleagues in the social sciences don't believe in cyclical views of society because they say the future is free, we can determine it by ourselves — yes and no. There are patterns to human behaviour. As Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. There are patterns, and one can recognise those patterns.
I remember a very smart but depressing post by Elon Musk: "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it." We know that much. But then he added: "Those who do know history are doomed to watch while others repeat it." That is pretty depressing, but it seems to me like a bit of this is the case.
There's a great book by Strauss and Howe, written in 1996, called The Fourth Turning, where they predict — they have a generational theory of society and policy, very US-centred but still applicable — a total upheaval of the world system between 2005 and 2025. Well, it started in 2001 and it will probably reach its end point around there. And the new regime — not as a derogatory term, but as a political science term — the new regime will be quite authoritarian. Think about the new consensus after 1945 in the US, or what Roosevelt built. We're probably going to see something similar in the West and all over the world.
Glenn Diesen: I like that quote by Musk. I often feel frustrated as well because I can see where this is going. I remember giving a speech at my university back in 2013, at the end of the year, warning that if we're moving towards trying to topple Yanukovych it's going to be a disaster. But I was always pushed back with: "Well, that sounds like something Russia would say," or the assumption that toppling the government would be beneficial for us and beneficial for the Ukrainians. You can just point at the basic security competition — the other side will respond when their security is undermined. And for the past 13 years, you see where this is going, you see the escalation, you know that we're going to war if this continues down this path, but there's seemingly nothing you can do.
About Trump, though — this is one of the reasons I was optimistic about him during his election campaign. I thought the main problem for the United States was that its empire had been overextended, it had exhausted itself, and many of the other large powers were collectively balancing it. So I thought it would be a good idea for the US to essentially pull back — to save the republic by scaling back the empire and let the other Eurasian powers balance each other. This is what the offshore balancing strategy of the US was traditionally based around. I thought once the hegemonic moment is over, they have to find a way of making this shift. I thought that was good for America and good for the world. But I don't know how it derailed.
Spengler, Civilizational Decline, and the Patterns of History
Glenn Diesen: My next question builds on the patterns you mentioned. You can see the patterns in history — and this is why I also wanted to ask you about the thinker Oswald Spengler, because he also identified, much like other scholars on the rise and fall of civilisations, common patterns we can see. So while not just pulling the German experience to the world, but also as civilisations — what kind of historical patterns are you looking at at the moment?
Max Otte: Spengler is of limited help here in some ways, but he's the philosopher who has really inspired me since I was a teenager. He says that civilisations have a lifespan. He has an organic view — they have an early stage with knighthood and feudal times, the cities are rising, and he actually ascribes democracy to the rule of money. For him, democracy is a phase of about 200 years — something from 1815 maybe to 2015 — where the press basically tells voters what to say and voters then vote accordingly. It's a battle about public opinion, and that's what he calls democracy. It's already the very late stage of a civilisation. We could see something else in the Roman Republic.
After that comes a new religiousness, a new Caesarian era where raw power starts to dominate the commercial world. And we do see that. We see the return of the US to being a pirate state. There's a fantastic video on YouTube by a UN-accredited journalist called "The Rise of the Pirate State." If you look at Venezuela, Greenland, the attempt on Canada, Cuba — the US is basically using raw power. Trump is doing it unabashedly, is proud of it. The US has been using raw power for a long time, but often concealed it, cloaked it under terms of spreading democracy. This is not so much the case anymore.
So we might see the final stage of the West — which can last for a long time if it stabilises, as Rome lasted for a long time. We see that democracy is crumbling. One of my Spengler quotes: he said that decent citizens, even in Caesar's times, wouldn't go to vote because politics had become totally corrupt — you bought your votes. And we can see that in the US congressional races, where Thomas Massie — one of the sole dissenting voices in Congress, a true MAGA champion, America First, no forever wars — is running, I think, for his third or fourth term. He had always been voted in with a large majority. And now the lobby — mostly the Israel lobby, but also others — is spending 30 million so far, even more, on this one single race, which is the highest sum ever spent, because even one dissenter in Congress within the Republican Party is too much for them.
We saw democracy highly undermined during COVID. We see it in the Ukraine war. We see it in Ukraine itself, which is right now a military dictatorship. And I think we in the West are trying to emulate that military dictatorship — so we don't have those inconvenient elections anymore for the next few years, because of course the West is overindebted and huge sacrifices, huge changes, huge cancelling of debts have to be made. Those won't be made simply and exclusively by market forces — they will be made by government decree to some extent.
So I think the model of a military dictatorship, or a COVID dictatorship — which was somewhat of a military dictatorship, as COVID was a war, psychologically, against the virus, with curfews and everything — I don't have too many hopes for democracy right now. That's my conclusion from my reading of Spengler.
Culture Versus Civilisation — Weber, Spengler, and the Roots of Society
Glenn Diesen: I share your pessimistic view on this. What I find interesting, though, is that when you look at scholars throughout the ages studying the rise and fall of civilisations, they tend to make a distinction between culture and civilisation — civilisation often being like the plant and the culture being the roots. I know the word culture is often thrown around a lot, but people like Max Weber did interesting work on culture because he also predicted cultural decline and its consequences. The way he sees it, what is culture would be the glue that essentially binds us all together — what we all have in common, not just what ties us to each other, but what ties us to the generation that came before us and the one that will come after. What we create which is worth passing on to the next generation. From Weber's perspective, he argued that the excessiveness of reasoning and individualism often demystified culture, which would corrupt it. But from a more Spenglerian perspective — how do you see the main relationship between culture and civilisation when assessing the future of our civilisation?
Max Otte: You make that distinction — and I think Spengler was actually the first one to make it clearly, though I'm not sure. He certainly was very big on distinguishing culture and civilisation. Many people wouldn't do that — they would use the terms synonymously. But for Spengler, culture was something organic that grew and evolved, from early feudal times through the rise of the first cities through later times, in about four seasons — those were of course metaphors or pictures he painted. And civilisation is basically the final stage, which can last forever or for a long time. You just don't see any internal development. Civilisation is fully outward-oriented. There's no more internal development. The internal battles and thoughts have been fought. There is maybe a second religiousness which people adopt, and there is a mechanisation and standardisation of life, as you could see in Roman civilisation.
He said the Greeks had a culture. Rome, starting around 200 BC, started to develop into a civilisation. In the West, which is surely in a civilisation now, culture or art is dominated by fashions and fads and by commerce — it's not a coherent, consistent thing. As you said, there's a lot of individualism. And one very important thing is that the will to live dies — we don't have children anymore, reproductive population collapses. We saw that in late Rome. We see it throughout the West, and throughout the world actually now, which is a unique situation. Every continent is collapsing basically, with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa — even South America, even most of the Asian countries, even India. They're all going through rapid population declines. Iran of course a lot. So that is new as a global phenomenon.
Western culture and civilisation might have been so overbearing that it penetrates and pervades other cultures. Of course, Russian thinkers — and Spengler said that himself — there might be a Eurasian Russian culture blooming, which is about a thousand years behind us. But that culture has of course been overlaid by Western patterns to such an extent that it's probably very much covered. Russia is not that big — what, 120, 130 million people. So we're in a late stage of decadence: no more children, big cities. That is where the West is currently at.
Actually, we're going to award the next Spengler Prize to David Goldman. He is in the US State Department. He is of course an ardent supporter of Israel — I happen to disagree there — but that shouldn't distract from scholarly recognition, because he wrote a lot about civilisations and cultures, and I think we need that perspective, that broader perspective, also when looking at the West. That's why he's going to get that prize.
Glenn Diesen: This idea of cultural revival is quite important to sustaining civilisations, because if there's no revival or continuation of the culture, well, essentially every new generation becomes just a cheaper copy of the one before. I remember especially in the 2000s there was so much focus on the soft power of the US and its popular culture. But for a lot of American conservatives, they were drawing a distinction between popular culture and traditional culture, because popular culture is here and now. But if it becomes overwhelming, too successful, it kind of drowns out the traditional culture — where you actually have handing down from generation to generation something that ties society and civilisation together. You can only make so many remakes of Spider-Man before you have to ask whether there's actual cultural sustainability here.
But on that topic — do you see civilisations having an ability to reverse their decline? Because this is kind of where a lot of civilisational scholars disagree. Some argue it can go into excessive materialism and stay there. Some believe you can come back again. While others see it as essentially a set cycle — you'll have the spring, the summer, the autumn, and the winter, in which it dies, and then of course can be reborn. Do you see a possibility for a civilisational revival?
Max Otte: Well, human history is open — that's for sure. But I haven't seen it yet. So I'm tending towards the civilisational pattern view, that civilisations run their course. We've seen of course that China has had a strong comeback, but China has kept its language and its writing system, which is a very important part of the identity. That's one thing that binds it together. But there aren't many organisations on the level of civil society in China — it's a state and it's the family and the individual, because there's also a huge surveillance apparatus now. China has lasted for three or four thousand years and is doing remarkably well. So it's not sure it's a cultural revival, but the old civilisation has picked up Western techniques and is doing pretty well.
What Spengler would predict is a second religiousness. In the West we have two contending themes here. We have the evangelical Christians who believe in the Third Temple and who are always pro-Israel — most of them. I would call myself also an evangelical Christian, but more of a Mennonite, which is different and is actually the origin of evangelical Christians. But most of my brethren in faith would go all out in support for Israel. Those families are still functioning and they have children, and that's one thing.
The other one — I think — is a welcome resurgence in Catholicism, with Pope Leo being a positive surprise of the past few years, openly criticising war and openly spreading the gospel. I think people get tired of thinking and thinking about problems — that's also a very Spenglerian thought I'm uttering right now. People get tired of all these intellectual debates and want back to their roots and want back their faith. So that could be the next phase of Western civilisation.
In that sense, Spengler said Islam is a thousand years ahead of us, because they've gone all through this intellectual phase and they're back to a stage of faith. But these are very deep things. I didn't expect us to discuss them, but I think they bear some additional perspective on all of this.
Populism, Democratic Revival, and the Limits of Political Change
Glenn Diesen: Well, there are a lot of civilisational scholars one could discuss. But the general theme seems to be: if civilisation outgrows its own roots, it begins to die, just like a plant can't survive without its roots. This seems to be a key challenge in eras of globalisation as well — one often gets this civilisational exhaustion.
My last question is: how do you see the populist movements going across Europe and the United States? When we use the word "populist," it's often demeaned to a large extent, but populism simply means you have a political elite which has distanced itself from the public and the populist builds on this rhetoric. I remember even Obama and Bernie Sanders referred to themselves as populists in their days. But anyway, now it has a very negative connotation. Do you see the populist movements in Europe and the US as having a possibility of democratic revival? Because I tended to see it that way — and then of course we had people like Trump and Meloni, and I'm starting to become a bit more pessimistic. Is it just a symptom of civilisational fatigue?
Max Otte: Well, I would go as far as saying that the AfD right now is the only party enriching the democratic debate in Germany. They are democratically organised. The other parties are mostly machines with long-term career politicians starting at young ages and very low levels, having served their way up. The AfD had a lot of people coming in from normal jobs, basically. Now they of course already have their first wave of career politicians.
So I think the system is leaning towards autocracy, towards what you might call technocratic authoritarianism. The international system is pointing towards war. We saw that with Trump — but one shouldn't give up hope. Meloni in Italy and Merz in Germany still voted to ship more weapons to Israel and so on. Meloni sometimes positioned herself differently to the public, but what she did was another thing again.
There is widespread dissatisfaction — in the US, in Germany. We have to look at these cases bit by bit. In Spain, we have a prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, who is very outspokenly critical of the actions in Gaza and Lebanon. In the US, we have a highly unstable domestic situation because most of the Democrats are against the Iran war, and most of the Republicans are as well. There's still the rally-around-the-flag effect, but only within the Republican camp, which is new in the US — before, people rallied around the president whenever there was war, from whichever side. This is not happening now. So the US might have huge domestic ruptures ahead.
In Germany, we only have this one party, the AfD. There was the BSW — the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht — and I know her fairly well and have done quite a few things with her. She was on the left and also was arguing for peace with Russia. Unfortunately, they made pretty much every strategic, tactical, and organisational mistake you could make. Otherwise they would be in parliament, but they're not. So there's only the AfD, and they have a solid foundation — 28% of the vote, by far the biggest party. The CDU has 22%. Most of the German population doesn't want this war — like 60, 70, 80%, I don't have the latest figures.
The two co-leaders position themselves for diplomacy and so on, but you could also see a few politicians and parliamentarians actively campaigning for war. So it's an ongoing battle. I'm pessimistic, as you are, regarding the global picture and the picture in Europe. But there are always developments that might change it. Not all is lost, but we can keep some faint hope that some of those developments will turn out to be positive surprises.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, I haven't given up quite yet, but there are some concerning signs. It is worrying that it doesn't seem to matter who sits on the throne if the policies simply remain the same. And I couldn't help but notice the same pushback against Massie — the idea that even one peacemonger would be too much for them to handle. It's very depressing. But I know you're a busy man, so I want to thank you very much for taking the time to come on.
Max Otte: Thank you very much, Professor Diesen.