The Transatlantic Splits

I. The Profession

There are sentences that reveal their speaker more than he would wish. “I am an American” is one of them. Under this heading, the German Minister of State for Culture, Wolfram Weimer, answered a provocation by Björn Höcke in The Pioneer. Höcke had called West Germans “German-speaking Americans” — meant as an insult, a charge of lost identity. Weimer turns the charge around: what Höcke means as an insult is in truth a compliment. Whoever stands for liberal democracy, human rights and freedom is a Westerner — and therefore also an American.

One hears the echo. “Ich bin ein Berliner,” said Kennedy in 1963, and it was an act of solidarity by a protecting power with the protected. Weimer’s inversion reverses the direction of the sentence: it is not the mighty one professing himself to the weak, but the minister of a dependent middle power professing himself to the hegemon. This is the act we want to dissect here — soberly, without joining Höcke’s game. For a Minister of State for Culture, whose office stands for German culture, expressly relocates his identity into a foreign power and calls it a distinction. What sounds so self-assured is the most precise self-exposure of the German elite one could imagine. They deliver it free of charge.

II. The Two Americas

The trick of the sentence is that “America” denotes two different things, which it fuses into one.

The one America is a monstrance: liberal democracy, human rights, freedom. The thing to be held aloft, the incontestable, the value-heaven of the West. One can profess oneself to this America at no risk — it is the halo.

The other America is a system: the concentration of wealth, the financialization of the economy, the apparatus that husbands the many for the good of the few. We have described this machine in detail in earlier texts — in the financial architecture of the great public offerings, in the tariff treaties, in the way American interests are enforced, hard and relentless. To this America no one would profess himself willingly.

Weimer’s feat consists in professing himself loudly to the first America — and, under its halo, importing identification with the second. Whoever says “I am an American” and means only the values has acknowledged the power along with them. The profession of the monstrance becomes a licence for the system. And here the blindness begins.

III. A Blindness with System

For the straddlers, German-American friendship is not a relationship one examines, but an article of faith one professes. And an article of faith immunizes against experience.

That is why they still see Trump as a passing phenomenon — a malfunction to be sat out until “normal” friendship returns. They overlook the obvious: that the hardness is the normal, and the rhetoric of friendship was the exception. A great power pursues its interests, and pursues them relentlessly; Europe is for it not a partner on equal footing but a forecourt to be husbanded. Trump is not the rupture of this structure. He is its revelation. He says aloud what previously held in silence.

Why do they not see it? Because the identification forbids the perception. Whoever makes “I am an American” his identity cannot any longer recognize the United States as the power that treats Europe like a colony — for that would mean recognizing himself as the colonized, and precisely this the profession excludes. The blindness is neither stupidity nor hypocrisy. It has system. Some never learn it, because the learning would dismantle their own identity; and the others learn it only late, when the career is over and the identity no longer has to bear anything.

IV. The Second Safeguard

There is a second safeguard that protects the splits against any correction, and it is subtler than the first.

The question of European sovereignty — the legitimate, overdue question of whether a continent of 450 million people must remain a vassal forever — is contaminated. For the loudest, most visible critic of American hegemony is, of all people, the man whose “German-speaking Americans” can be traced back to Margarita Simonyan of the Russian state broadcaster. Whoever today raises the vassal question falls under suspicion of singing in Höcke’s choir, of being pro-Russian, of betraying the West.

So the monstrance “the free world” takes care of the silence by itself. It makes the sovereignty question unsayable for decent people. The uncomfortable question is not answered; it is rendered unaskable. And an apparatus that can no longer ask its central question has ceased to think.

V. The Viceroys

For the word colony to stand not as a slur but as a finding, we must earn it — at the persons and at the events.

At the head of the German state stands, since 2025, a man who from 2016 to 2020 was chairman of the supervisory board of the German BlackRock subsidiary, the largest asset manager in the world, and before that, for a decade, chairman of the Atlantic Bridge. When Friedrich Merz returned to politics, he was the BlackRock goat who would one day be made the gardener. Now he is. A research platform puts it drily: the world’s largest asset manager need only call its long-time supervisory-board chairman and lands directly with the Federal Chancellor. This is the economic half of the splits — husbandry personified, at the head of the state.

The cultural half is named Weimer and professes himself to America. The two are, as it happens, neighbours not only in the figurative sense: the one has for years hosted an economic summit under Ludwig Erhard’s name by the Tegernsee, the other lives in the same area. The same elite, the same transatlantic-financial faith, the same address. The one embodies the system, the other professes the values — and neither of them sees the colony in which he is a viceroy.

And the events? They lie in the open. In the night of 20 May 2026 the EU ratified a treaty that sets European tariffs on US industrial goods to zero, while the United States levies up to fifteen per cent — an asymmetry, called a compromise, that is none. The great American public offerings of this year are constructed so that European pension and index-fund capital must help finance them through mandates, without deciding to. On 8 June 2026, FCAS died, the joint European air-combat project — while the armaments empire of the twenty-first century goes public, private and American. In ASML, Europe possesses the one lever of the world’s chip industry and does not use it. This is the body of facts from which the word colony grows — not as abuse, but as the sober description of a relationship of dependence.

VI. The Onlooker

Here a line must be drawn, cleanly and expressly, or the finding topples into falsehood. The United States is not a dictatorship. Its husbandry carries no death camps, no wall, no order to shoot. Whoever equates America with the totalitarian systems that Germany brought forth commits precisely Höcke’s error in the opposite direction — he levels the other in order to launder his own. From this we keep our distance. It is not about a moral equation of the systems. It is about a structure and a posture.

The structure is dependence. Its price has a name: Europe remains an insignificant onlooker of world politics, reacting to the moves of others and never itself acting. It reacts to tariffs, it reacts to sanctions, it reacts to export controls, it reacts to wars on its border — and it never acts, because acting would presuppose a sovereignty that its viceroys do not even want. One cannot at once want to be an American and contradict American policy. The splits is not a strategy. It is the self-binding that presents itself as a profession of faith.

VII. The Ever-Same

In the end it comes down, as always, to the same thing: to the husbanding of the many for the good of the few. That is the core these events share, and the American form of this husbandry is the shining model for the petty German straddlers — not although, but because it dresses the husbandry most elegantly in the language of freedom. It sells the husk as a value, dependence as partnership, subordination as a profession of faith.

Here, and only here, the circle closes to an earlier text. We once wrote about the friends of the totalitarian, and coined a sentence that belongs here: reckoning on behalf of others is no reckoning; it serves not insight but distinction — I am not like them. I stand on the right side. That is exactly “I am an American.” It is the gesture of distinction in pure form: I am the good Westerner, not the dark Höcke. The one who professes does not reckon with his own dependence; he positions himself against the other. We do not equate America with the totalitarian — the crimes are categorically different, and it would be a lie to throw them into one pot. What is the same is not the system. What is the same is the figure: the fellow-traveller who admires whatever model is most powerful and never asks the one question that would cost him something — who here is being husbanded for whose benefit.

Some never learn it, others only late. The straddlers do not learn it because they admire the model to which they are subjected — and whoever admires the model admires the machine, not the values. He mistakes the halo for that which it illuminates. As long as the German elite takes “I am an American” for a profession of freedom, and does not hear it for what it is — the sound of a colony mistaking its status for a distinction — Europe remains what it is: a continent that reacts and never acts. The question is not whether we belong to America. The question is why it comes easier to us to profess ourselves to a foreign power than to become our own.