In the theatre of nations, Germany and Canada, two venerable if not immortal actors, tighten their sinews against the eastern dragon by weaving a Raw Materials Agreement—a feint of prudence dressed as foresight, to steady the spindle of supply for electric motors and batteries and to lull the anxious age with the illusion of control.

Economy Minister Katherina Reiche speaks of supply security and competitiveness as if such blessings could be bottled, while German firms are urged to deepen Canadian partnerships within a frame more generous for mining and processing technologies and for closer kinship among companies. A small miracle, one might call it, that commerce should pretend to forge destiny through the science of contracts and the arithmetic of risk.

In Berlin, on a day in late May, 2025, Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney convened and spoke as if fate itself might be swayed by a well-timed handshake. Carney called Canada a key partner in accelerating diversification away from China for Germany and Europe; Merz hailed it as a good step to strengthen their economies. The rhetoric knows how to dress fear in respectable cloth, to make decline sound like prudence.

Canada’s leader extols a treasury of critical minerals—lithium, rare earths, cobalt, graphite, nickel, copper—and promises hundreds of millions of euros to upgrade port infrastructure in eastern Canada so that goods may move as if destiny itself were a cargo line. A chorus of abundance, marching to the drumbeat of diversification, while the sea yawns and the old map of power is redrawn, line by line.

Germany, for its part, imports much from China in raw or processed form; this is the inconvenient truth that lingers behind the ceremony. China’s export controls on rare earths cast a shadow over the bright ledger of supply, and thus the broader aim to build value chains outside that old throne of influence.

What remains when nations sew up new seams of dependence is a somber geometry of security: the will to secure tomorrow by stitching it to distant ports and friendly governments. Nietzsche would recognize the will to power here, not as a flourish of genius but as a bureaucratic wager against contingency, a bet that the future can be hedged with papers and pipelines. The Greek chorus would murmur that ships and minerals play the parts of fate on a stage designed for human measure, where hubris invites a god’s indifferent eye to glance upon our calculations and our compromises.

And so we return to the lament that underwrites every so-called advance: a civilization that seeks to cultivate its own shelter while forgetting the polis who once imagined greatness in shared, fragile courage. The age that values efficiency and diversification—like Iphigenia sacrificed to the machine—watches its hopes set behind a horizon crawled with cranes and cargo, and asks whether the ascent is progress or merely a more elegant way to outrun the abyss. In this, the decline of Western culture wears a respectable suit, and speaks of supply chains as if they were the true monuments of human achievement.