There are images that never disappear from a country’s retina, from its political and popular memory. One of them is that of Joschka Fischer (Gerabronn, Germany, 78 years old) in sneakers taking the oath of office as minister in the federal state of Hesse, in 1985. For the first time, The Greens, an assembly-based movement born a few years earlier, entered a regional government. It was a change of era. Thirteen years later, Fischer would become vice-chancellor and foreign minister of the first federal government with The Greens, allied with the Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
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All this is far away now. Joschka Fischer is now a venerable grandfather who often visits Andalusia, where his grandchildren live, a keen observer of the world and author of political essays (the most recent, Die Kriege der Gegenwart und der Beginn einer neuen Weltordnung, the wars of the present and the beginning of a new world order, not translated into Spanish), but he has not lost the passion for arguing and convincing. In the room where the conversation takes place, in offices in the center of old West Berlin, he has a photo of a G-7 foreign ministers meeting in Canada, with a dedication from the host, alluding to his youthful battles: “Joschka, a true anarchist, never a Trotskyist.”
Question. In your latest book, you write: “The decisive geopolitical question in the coming years is: ‘What does the United States want?’” I ask you now. What does the United States want? Do we know?
Answer. I think it is clear what it does not want. It does not want to take responsibility for Europe, and for this reason it questions NATO. How far [U.S. President] Donald Trump is willing to go in domestic policy we will see in the fall, if there are free and fair elections. The transatlantic alliance still formally exists, but not in substance anymore.
Q. What consequences does this have?
A. Europe is alone for the first time since the end of World War II. We are alone with a threat on the eastern flank of Europe and NATO. It is a completely new historical situation.
Q. Is Europe prepared?
A. No
Q. What to do?
A. We must prepare for the end of American military protection. We will see if NATO survives. We Europeans would do well not to give up NATO and to keep the European part united and invest massively in security. We have no other choice.
Q. Should Europeans try to convince Trump by flattering him as Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, does?
A. I cannot reproach Rutte, but I also cannot criticize Pedro Sánchez [the Spanish president who, unlike Rutte, confronts Trump]. Both are right.
Q. They follow opposite strategies.
A. And this shows the difficulty of the situation. Europe needs to adopt a clear stance and, at the same time, must try to take advantage of all possibilities to maintain the relationship [with Trump] as long as possible.
Q. In 2003, on the eve of the Iraq invasion, you told then U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, “I’m not convinced.” What would you do today if you were foreign minister?
A. I don’t know. As foreign minister, you have to try to make use of the available margins of influence. On the other hand, I am glad I don’t have to do it. I know myself…
Q. Would you act more like Sánchez or like Rutte?
A. I couldn’t act like Rutte. But that is no criticism of him.
Q. In 2003, there was already talk of a transatlantic crisis because of the Iraq war. Could you have imagined that things would come to what they are today?
A. That was the beginning. The Iraq war played a significant role in Trump’s rise. Trump thought this would be a Venezuela 2 – although instead of capturing the regime leader [as happened in January with Nicolás Maduro], they killed [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] – and that the regime would fall, but it remains firmly in power and the promised destruction of the nuclear program has not occurred. The regime has managed to close the Strait of Hormuz, which was foreseeable. The war’s objectives have not been achieved. If the regime remains in power, and radicalized, the big loser will be the Iranian people.
“With China’s rise as a leading power, the Eurocentric view of the world has definitively come to an end”
Q. At first, it was believed that the intervention could be good for the Iranian people, after the massacres in the January protests.
A. I would not regret the fall of this regime, on the contrary. It is a murderous regime that has not hesitated to shoot tens of thousands of protesters in the streets. They shot people at close range. It is terrible. But, if we analyze the facts, [the military intervention] was not well thought out.
Q. Was Sánchez right with his “no to war”?
A. Participating in that war would have been irresponsible. Spain’s stance is worthy of support, although I would have wished for greater commitment to Ukraine, especially considering Spanish history. It reminded me a lot of General Franco’s coup and the Civil War.
Q. Do you think Spain should spend more on defense?
A. The issue of rearmament is, above all, a matter for the large member states, not Luxembourg.
Q. Are you referring to the 5% of GDP NATO targets, which Spain does not want to meet?
A. Yes, but what I mean is that Europeans must think in European terms regarding security, because we are alone. It is not just about Ukraine: behind it is Europe.
Q. Regarding Iran, in Germany, Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz disagreed with Sánchez. He said at the start of the war that he wanted to avoid lecturing the U.S. and Israel, and relativized the argument of defending international law to oppose the intervention.
A. I would be careful with international law. Is it in accordance with international law to massacre your own population? I think we need international law, but it is not acceptable for a government to massacre its own population and, in that sense, it is a difficult situation from the point of view of international law. That also happened with [Serbian leader Slobodan] Milosevic.
Q. Are you comparing it to Kosovo in 1999?
A. In Kosovo, what happened was that the Security Council was blocked by the Russian veto. It was unacceptable that the murders, expulsions, and rapes were protected by international law.
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Q. And you said then: “Never again war,” yes, but also “never again Auschwitz.” That is, never again indiscriminate massacres of civilian populations. Could it be argued that this also applies to Iran and that the Iranian people, the opposition, the young people being massacred, should be helped, even by means of war?
A. If for Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu [Israeli prime minister] it were only about this, I would say yes, but, of course, there are also broader political objectives. I understand Israel to some extent. I have been to Iran several times and there I have always told them that Israel will never accept an Iranian nuclear weapon. It is not just Netanyahu, it is Israel, also the Israeli left. But what we are experiencing in the Middle East is an Israeli hegemonic ambition. I understand very well the anger after October 7. But what has happened in Gaza cannot be ignored and I fear that Israel has done itself a lot of harm. Because Israel always relied on three pillars: the pillar of its own strength, the pillar of the close relationship with the U.S., the pillar of humanitarian and political legitimacy, as the only democracy in the Middle East and the only safe place for Jews, for the Jewish diaspora, so that something like the Shoah never happens again. And this last pillar has disappeared. In the long run, this will mean a very serious loss for Israel.
Q. You mentioned Ukraine and Russia earlier. If Trump really withdraws, can Europe stop Russia alone?
A. If we cannot, we have a huge problem. That is why we must do everything possible to support Ukraine. As long as Ukraine keeps fighting and can do so, it acts as a security guarantee for us, because [Russian President] Vladimir Putin will not stop, he will keep advancing westward.
“I don’t want to talk about Schröder. I worked with him for seven years. I do not share at all his opinion about Russia or Putin”
Q. If we talk about the prehistory of the current situation, we have to talk about Gerhard Schröder, chancellor in the years of coalition with you, and close to Putin. Did you already notice that closeness in those years?
A. I don’t want to say anything about Schröder.
Q. Why?
A. I worked closely with him for seven years, I worked well with him. I do not share at all his opinion about Russia or Putin.
Q. In the book you write that you see a duopoly between China and the United States in the world’s future.
A. A new world order is being forged, determined by the great global powers, with China and the U.S. at the head. As the U.S. behaves with Trump, it plays into the hands of the Chinese every day. It weakens the U.S. and strengthens China.
Q. So are we heading not towards a duopoly, but towards a monopoly?
A. Allow me to remind you that 1492, the famous voyage of Christopher Columbus, marked the beginning of a Eurocentric world. With China’s rise as a leading power, this Eurocentrism, this Eurocentric view of the world, has definitively come to an end.
Q. And what does this mean for Europeans?
A. If we stay as we are, decline is assured. Europe must become a power.
Q. You talk about Europe, not the West.
A. In my opinion, the West has come to an end. The West was the transatlantic West. North America and Europe. That was the West, and Trump has destroyed it.
Q. We talk about Trump and the United States, but in Europe there are many “little Trumps.” The far right is strong, also in Germany.
A. It is a challenge for everyone, but especially for Germany, because we have a particular history. Right-wing extremism between 1933 and 1945 not only committed the genocide of European Jews, but devastated all of Europe. We must learn from it. Right-wing extremism wants to return to the nation-state, and that would mean the ruin of Europe.
Q. Do you have the impression that the ideas you fought for, like Europe, the Enlightenment, or liberalism in a broad sense, have lost?
A. No.
Q. The situation is not good.
A. It is not good because of our own mistakes. The politics of the democratic center is not enough to retain voters. It is about building a strong Europe. The European idea is the alternative to the far right.
Q. You held positions of responsibility. Could you cite any mistake that you or your government made, something or some trend you did not anticipate?
A. I think we all forgot about the question of power.
Q. The question of power?
A. We have all trusted the U.S. too much. It is a difficult question, the question of power, especially from the German perspective.
Q. European history has taught Germany that the politics of power is not good.
A. But it is there, it is there. And a country as large in the center of Europe as Germany, with a very dubious history, cannot get rid of it. I understand very well why the German reaction to two lost world wars and a dictatorship and genocide was pacifist. But that was only possible thanks to the presence of the U.S., and many good things arose from that. But there was a big deficit in the question of power. As Europeans, we must now respond to this, not only in Germany, but in Europe, under the pressure of Putin in the East and Trump in the West, as Europeans.
Q. Who is more dangerous for Europe, Trump or Putin?
A. Trump has more power and it seems to me that he acts very irrationally. But I would not underestimate Putin. Both the war in the Middle East and the one in Ukraine are fought at our doorstep. The Middle East is our closest neighborhood.