Over the course of President Donald Trump’s second term, many in his coalition have been disappointed by his decidedly interventionist approach to international affairs. Once he leaves office, warns one distinguished security expert, those in the “New Right” with a stricter ideological agenda will redouble their efforts to “upend America’s role in the world” even more than Trump has.
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This is according to Leonard Schuette, an international security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, who wrote in Foreign Affairs on Wednesday, “The intellectual movement that provided the ideological fuel for U.S. President Donald Trump’s rise to power, the New Right, is forging a new contender” to the traditional American grand strategy. Schuette calls it “civilizationism.”
As Schuette explains, “References to Western civilization permeate strategy documents and speeches by key members of the administration. Vice President JD Vance set the tone in his February 2025 speech at the Munich Security Conference, stressing the ‘threat from within’ to the fundamental values that characterize ‘our shared civilization.’ The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy warned of ‘civilizational erasure.’ This January, at Davos, Trump emphasized ‘the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization’; the next month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on the United States’ transatlantic partners to ‘renew the greatest civilization in human history.’”
Rather than the concept of Western Civilization long held by many in the U.S., which is “rooted in a shared set of principles that anyone, regardless of origin, can espouse, such as constitutional democracy, liberty, and equality,” according to Schuette, “for thinkers on the New Right, the West is defined by a specific geographic territory, a shared ancestry, and Christianity.” And “rather than aspiring to global leadership,” “they reject the universal ambitions of primacy and the constraints imposed on U.S. sovereignty by liberal internationalism.”
As Schuette explains, “Civilizationism differs markedly from Trump’s approach to the world. Although the Trump administration often speaks the language of civilizationism, Trump’s behavior is primarily motivated by personal grievance, transactional impulses, and a private interest in maximizing the wealth of his kin and clique. The biggest rupture between the administration’s foreign policy and civilizationism lies in Middle East policy. Contrary to his campaign promises, Trump did not retrench from the region, instead launching what he initially billed as a regime-change war against Iran. His attitude toward Israel — mostly treating it as a privileged ally — resembles that of neoconservative hawks such as the late U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.”
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But civilizationists reject neoconservative positions like this. According to Schuette, “If Washington were to adopt a consistent civilizational grand strategy, it would completely upend U.S. foreign policy. It would allow for previously unthinkable concessions to the United States’ geopolitical rivals. Civilizationism would pose a historic challenge to the already battered transatlantic relationship by granting Russia de facto control over eastern Europe or treating Moscow as part of a common Western civilization and agitating more openly against sitting governments in Europe. Other historical U.S. alliances would suffer, too. Tolerating Chinese regional hegemony would throw East Asian allies under the bus, and disengaging from the Middle East would leave Israel to fend for itself.”
He warns that civilizationism would end up being both contradictory and violent, writing, “Civilizational claims could overlap and become a recipe for regional wars. By defining other civilizations as alien cultures, a civilizationist grand strategy might fuel antagonism rather than tolerate differences. Even European far-right parties seem increasingly uninterested in being so overtly backed by their U.S. counterparts. And even if great-power conflict could be avoided, intracivilizational violence would abound. Japan, Pakistan, and Poland would be unlikely to accept regional hegemony by China, India, or Russia, respectively.”
With Trump’s reign soon to end, concludes Schuette, “the American right wing’s ideological future, and the future of U.S. grand strategy, is wide open. The Trump administration has broken with the bipartisan post–Cold War consensus on liberal hegemony but has failed to offer a coherent alternative. In the coming contest to define Washington’s foreign policy, civilizationism is poised to be a central contender.”
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