When the Center Fails: Trump’s Fossil Crusades and Europe’s Democratic Erosion

The American president has never made a secret of his contempt for the energy transition. Now Donald Trump is carrying his fossil campaign into the world with brute force – and is meeting a Europe trapped in its own political weakness. What is currently happening between Washington and Brussels is more than a trade policy tug-of-war. It is the symptom of a profound crisis of Western democracies, in which authoritarian forces mercilessly exploit the weakness of the center. Trump uses tariffs, threats and the sheer economic power of the United States to force other countries to abandon their climate goals. At a cabinet meeting he formulated his mission with shocking clarity: “I am trying to have people learn about wind real fast, and I think I have done a good job, but not good enough because some countries are still trying.” Countries would be “destroying themselves” with wind energy, he added, before revealing his dystopian vision: “I hope they get back to fossil fuels.”

The systematic way in which the Trump administration proceeds leaves nothing to chance. Two weeks ago Washington announced that it would punish countries with tariffs, visa restrictions and port fees if they voted for a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the shipping sector. Days later the United States allied with Saudi Arabia and other oil states in Geneva to block limits on the production of petroleum-based plastics - those materials that have now even been detected in the human brain.

The Failure of the Democratic Center

While Trump is plowing through international climate policy with a wrecking ball, Europe is revealing an even more disturbing phenomenon: the creeping self-abandonment of the political center. In Germany, the country that likes to see itself as the anchor of stability on the continent, this erosion is particularly dramatic. The latest Forsa poll of August 26, 2025, speaks a devastating language: the AfD stands at 26 percent, only one percentage point behind the Union, which is stagnating at 25 percent. The SPD has crashed to 13 percent, the Greens reach only 12 percent, the Left 11 percent. BSW and FDP are at 3 percent each on the edge of irrelevance.

Alice Weidel uses these numbers for her toxic propaganda. On X (formerly Twitter) she blows the horn of triumph: “The trend is solidifying: the AfD remains the strongest force ahead of the Union!” But what she sells as success is in truth the symptom of a dangerous disease of our democracy. The AfD has not become strong - the democratic parties have disempowered themselves. A party that flirts with closeness to Putin, wants to destroy the EU and denies climate change profits solely from the impotence of the political center.

The SPD lingers as the junior partner in the grand coalition like a shadow of itself, incapable of developing even a hint of an independent vision. The CDU/CSU under Chancellor Friedrich Merz stumbles aimlessly through the crises of our time, trapped between the desperate attempt to win back AfD voters and the fear of losing its own identity. The Greens, after Habeck’s withdrawal and Baerbock’s move to the United Nations, are in a phase of reorganization and reorientation. The FDP exists with 3 percent only on paper.

Weidel’s perfidious tweet of August 21 shows how skillfully right-wing populists exploit the weakness of the Democrats. About Ukraine she writes: “Testimony to European incompetence and lack of leadership. The European Union will be stuck with this war together with Zelensky while the United States pulls out.” It is the typical AfD trick: playing with people’s fears, fueling resentment against Europe and Ukraine, while at the same time clinging to Putin’s coattails. That a party with such transparent Kremlin propaganda has success shows the complete failure of the democratic parties to offer a credible alternative.

Weimar Warning Signals in the 21st Century

The parallels to the Weimar Republic are strikingly obvious. Back then too it was not the strength of the extremists but the weakness of the Democrats that paved the way to catastrophe. The hesitation, the vacillation, the fear of clear decisions - all this made a radical movement respectable, which eventually drove the country into the abyss. Today the pattern is repeating itself in new form, this time on a transatlantic scale.

Jennifer Morgan, former German special envoy for international climate policy, gets to the global dimension: “At this moment in time it is absolutely imperative that countries double down, triple down, on their collaboration in the face of the climate crisis to not allow the active efforts for a fossil fuel world by the Trump administration to succeed.” But instead of this tripling we are seeing a capitulation in stages: Europe only narrowly avoided a trade war with Trump by committing, among other things, to purchase crude oil, natural gas, other petroleum products and nuclear reactor fuel worth 750 billion dollars from the United States within three years. On an annual basis that would amount to more than three times what the bloc bought from the United States last year.

“You see a more systematic attempt to be a fossil fuel first strategy to everything that they do,” said Jake Schmidt, director of international programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization. The administration could slow other countries’ transition to clean energy but not stop it, Schmidt said. Most countries that signed the Paris Agreement would submit more ambitious targets for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations this year, although some might temper those plans because of the US position, he explained. Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the conservative Heritage Foundation, argued that the Trump administration was doing the right thing by pressuring countries to reject renewable energy.

“Europe comes to the United States and says: ‘Help defend us against Russia, help us with Ukraine,’” said Furchtgott-Roth. “And at the same time they are spending 350 billion dollars a year on green energy investments that are slowing their economies.” “That does not seem to make very much sense to the Trump administration,” she said, adding, “I think we are going to see more pressure.” The cognitive dissonance could not be greater. Resistance to Trump’s fossil imperialism does exist - in civil society, among scientists, in progressive US states. But it remains fragmented and powerless. When Ursula von der Leyen sits stone-faced next to Trump as he claims wind turbines drive birds “crazy,” that is not diplomatic restraint but a symbol of impotence.

Meanwhile practically all trade agreements of the Trump administration include the obligation of the trading partners to buy US oil and gas. South Korea committed to purchase liquefied natural gas worth 100 billion dollars over an unspecified period of time. Japan is also expected to invest 550 billion dollars in the United States, partly focused on “production of energy infrastructure.” A White House statement said that the money would include liquefied natural gas and advanced fuels. The US and Japanese governments also planned a “major expansion of US energy exports to Japan.” That is believed to be a 44 billion dollar project to ship gas to Asia from Alaska’s North Slope.

The year 2024 was the hottest since records began, the first calendar year in which the global average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level. While wildfires rage, droughts devastate entire regions and heat waves claim lives, Trump mocks established climate science and has a report written in which five handpicked researchers deny the scientific consensus on climate change. And the AfD? It applauds, also denies climate change and dreams of a return to coal. The real tragedy does not lie in Trump’s behavior - he is doing exactly what he announced. The tragedy lies in the reaction of Europe and the democratic forces worldwide. Instead of resisting together they ingratiate themselves, seek compromises where none can be made, and sacrifice long-term survival capability for short-term trade advantages. In doing so they confirm exactly the narrative of weakness and decadence that right-wing populists from Washington to Berlin have so successfully cultivated.

That a party like the AfD, which cooperates with right-wing extremists, despises democratic institutions and acts as an extended arm of Moscow, stands at 26 percent is a disgrace for Germany. But it is not a disgrace for which the people are responsible. It is the disgrace of a political elite that has forgotten what it should be fighting for. People are not turning to the AfD because they share its inhumane ideology - they are doing it out of despair over a politics that has no answers left. Those who lament the rise of the right should stop pointing fingers at the voters. The breeding ground for the authoritarian backlash is not in the people but in the center of politics - in the cowardice to face conflicts, in the lack of backbone to speak unpopular truths, in the refusal to finally provide clear answers to the pressing questions of our time. History does not repeat itself in detail, but it warns. And especially in Germany, where an anti-democratic party is on the verge of becoming the strongest force, this warning can no longer be ignored. The time for half-measures is over. What counts now is the courage for clarity - or the risk of waking up in a world where the fossil past triumphs over the future and democracy has given itself up.

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