The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) was released in early December. It generated an unusual amount of commentary. Many responded with a reflexively anti-Trump reading of the document. Others have been more astute, noting that the NSS adapts long-held American priorities to changing circumstances, not the least of which is the emergence of China as America’s peer competitor. Writing for UnHerd (“America’s new doctrine of Empire: Can Trump save Europe from itself?”), Aris Roussinos falls into the astute category.
Roussinos’s key insight is that the Trump administration views global conflict in civilizational terms. The present global order is being challenged by “two overt civilizational states—China and Russia.” American foreign policy must be organized to meet these threats.
The Trump administration envisions a two-pronged approach. The first concerns “the world without,” Roussinos says. He quotes the NSS, which speaks of America’s seeking “good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours.” The days of global democracy promotion are over. There will be no more hectoring about human rights. Deals can be made with India, alliances forged with Arab potentates. A new coalition of the willing is needed, one made up of those who don’t wish to be overwhelmed by China’s commercial onslaught or Russia’s military aggression.
But amoral pragmatism and alliances of mutual convenience are not sufficient. The West, “the world within,” is not a free-trade zone or an alliance motivated solely by shared enemies. It is a civilizational project in which the United States has a fundamental stake. The threatening “civilizational states” must be countered by a prosperous, confident, and united West.
Here, the Trump administration sees serious problems. The Western hemisphere, culturally defined by European colonization, has been neglected by American leaders for decades. It needs to be reunified under American leadership. More importantly, Europe, the cradle of Western civilization, is sick. Its political, economic, and migration policies are causing “civilizational erasure” (as the NSS starkly puts it). Roussinos quotes the most succinct statement of the Trump administration’s goals for the old continent: “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.”
Anyone who has spent an afternoon on a university campus knows that calls for the restoration of “Western identity” are fighting words. In 1996, Samuel Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations. It was the most important and influential dissent from the one-world hopes of the post–Cold War era. According to Huntington, civilizational distinctions and tensions are perennial. They will shape global politics, no matter how technologically and economically interconnected the world becomes.
Huntington’s book was respectfully debated in the late 1990s. That was not the case for his final book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004). Huntington questioned many of the pieties of multiculturalism, and he warned that they were undermining America’s civilizational coherence. Some accused him of undue pessimism. The United States could successfully reinvent itself as a multicultural nation, they insisted, and in so doing, lead the way to a new and universal world culture that would transcend the clash of civilizations. Others dismissed Huntington’s concerns as manifesting a gauzy nostalgia for white Protestant America, which was—fortunately, they presumed—a thing of the past.
Some European reactions to the NSS follow this pattern of morally superior dismissal. Roussinos cites a tweet by The Economist defense editor Shashank Joshi: “Trump national security strategy: Make Europe White Again.” Roussinos quotes former EU official Josep Borrell Fontelles, who said that Trump “wants white Europe divided into nations, subordinate to his demands and voting preferences.”
In my estimation, these snarky comments function as rhetorical sallies in a battle to defend one-world universalism. For those loyal to this vision, any clash of civilizations—whether in Birmingham, England, or in geopolitics—stems from racism, xenophobia, or some other form of irrational nativism. Their argument goes something like this: If everyone believes in multiculturalism, then it will work well. The only impediments are atavistic and backward-looking sentiments.
Although in theory Muslims in Birmingham can sin against the multicultural ideal, in practice only children of the West come in for censure. Something similar obtains in postcolonial studies. In its early centuries, Islam underwrote the spread of Arab expansion and conquest. Asia saw the rise and fall of many empires. But the emphasis falls on Western colonialism. Those in the West who seek a one-world universalism see the most dangerous resistance as arising, paradoxically, in the West, which is the very source of their universalism. It’s more important to tear down statues of Cecil Rhodes than to mitigate the dangers posed by insular Muslim communities.
Huntington was aware that clashes can occur within civilizations, not just among them. It is evident that the West is enduring an agony of internal strife. The hostile reception of Who Are We? foreshadowed the now open conflict between a post-civilizational universalism and a rising populism, which demands the restoration of native peoples and distinct cultures.
Perhaps this intra-civilizational conflict is inevitable. Christopher Dawson often observed that religion provides the DNA for civilizations. Christianity animates the West. It preaches the God-man, Jesus Christ, in whom the universal and particular are united. In view of this paradox, perhaps the conflict between an embattled liberal and globalist universalism and a rising tide of populist particularity will bear good fruit rather than civilizational collapse.
I side with the populists. In recent decades, the West has lost sight of the local, the rooted, the blessedly immobile and given—the particular. Unrestrained migration and transgender ideology epitomize this blindness. Both vest hopes in limitless mobility and borderless opportunity. The populist reaction offers a useful corrective. It is a reminder that just as God is incarnate not everywhere but rather in a Jewish man who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, so also the brotherhood of man is not found in the “world community” but rather in particular places and among discrete peoples who are bound together by shared loves. Those who are able to read the signs of the times will endorse this corrective. And the wise? They know that there will come a time when the corrective needs correcting, a time when love of the particular must be reminded of its universal vocation.
