Can the US and Germany finally see eye to eye on China?

“Can you trust the American leadership? Isn’t China possibly more reliable than the United States?”

That’s not a line from a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, but rather a rhetorical question from Volker Perthes, director of Germany’s most important foreign policy think tank, the Institute for International and Security Affairs, which advises the federal government. Perthes went on to list the Trump administration’s many instances of global disengagement (withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty, and UNESCO) and implicitly answered his own question with a resounding yes.

Something seems rotten in the state of Germany. Having been a central battleground between democracy and communism during the Cold War, the country is embarrassingly quiet in the US-China hegemonic conflict. Under the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Germany has avoided picking sides. Berlin has shied away from taking a tough line on Chinese human rights abuses and opposes excluding Huawei from its 5G network, while continuing to enjoy the US security umbrella. Germany’s economic interests and political skepticism of the United States have stopped it from joining the fray, but the time could be coming where Berlin and…