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The West’s Three Options in a Multipolar World
Foreign Affairs
The West’s Three Options in a Multipolar World
The sunset of Western hegemony does not entail the disappearance of the West.
Credit: Drop of Light
According to the “global majority” (as the Russians call it), the sun is finally setting on the West. After 500 years of dominance, the West is showing signs of relative decline across almost every dimension. A protracted period of historical anomaly is passing, and the world is entering an age defined by a reassertion of sovereign interests and a resurgence of ancient civilizations.
At a certain remove, this image seems a reasonable enough representation of new realities. But as a roadmap for navigating international politics, it is far too rough a sketch.
First, “decline” does not mean “displacement.” The West may lose its power to rule by diktat. Its institutions, culture, and moral fashions may lose their charm. But we will continue to live in a profoundly modern and globalized world of Western origin. Our systems of education and science, our forms of government, our legal and financial mechanisms, and our built environment will continue to rest on a Western foundation. A weakening West is unlikely to find itself in a post-Western world.
Second, “the West” is a fluid concept. It has shifted shape before, and may reconfigure itself once more. Before considering what the West might become going forward, we need to figure out what sort of power is passing from the scene.
The history of Western hegemony can be split into two separate eras. Until 1945, the West may have ruled the world, but it did so as a collection of competing states rather than a single entity. In fact, it was precisely competition within a fractured West that provided a major impetus for outward expansion.
After 1945, the picture changed dramatically. For the first time, a politically united West emerged under the American aegis. But while American officials consolidated the West, they did not organize U.S. foreign policy around it. Instead, they claimed leadership of the “free world,” which they defined negatively as the entire “non-communist world.” The Western core of the postwar American order was thus doubly effaced: It was identified with a lowest-common-denominator global liberalism that depended, in turn, on the presumption of an existential external threat for any semblance of internal coherence.
The collapse of the Soviet Union did not change this underlying logic. The West began to refer to itself as “the international community,” and when liberal democracy failed to spread to the ends of the earth, it returned to the business of defending the “free world,” first against “radical Islam” and then against its familiar Cold War foes—Russia and China.
The Biden administration represented both the climax and culmination of this foreign policy approach. Biden entered the White House declaring a global divide between democracy and autocracy and sought to create linkages between Europe and Asia as part of a global alliance against Russia and China. But the result, especially after the start of the war in Ukraine, was not unity of a global “liberal order,” but a rapidly growing and increasingly obvious gap between the West’s universalist claims and its limited reach. Europe moved in lockstep; the rest of the world mostly went its own way. Ultimately, the “liberal order” was rejected not only by the non-West, but also by the American electorate, which last year voted for America First for a second time.
So where does this leave the West? I see three paths forward. The first is a limited liberal restoration. One can imagine European elites beating back domestic opposition, outlasting Trump, and finding a champion in the Democratic Party, which promises a partial return to the status quo ante. The Atlanticist infrastructure is strong, and inertia is a powerful force. But even in the case of a post-Trump restoration, popular antipathy to the liberal internationalist program will result in considerable counterpressure, and resource constraints will continue to limit Western reach.
Another possibility is a radical retrenchment, understood as an abandonment of empire in favor of the nation. Politically, such a move would be broadly popular. Promising to put the interests of American citizens first has obvious appeal to the American voter. Calls to reprioritize the nation also resonate across much of Europe. Nationalism naturally fits the frame of democratic politics. It also represents the seemingly self-evident alternative to the previously dominant frame of liberal universalism. A more nationalist policy is the basic premise of MAGA, and a growing number of right-wing “influencers” are actively pushing this agenda. The neutering of USAID, Radio Free Europe, and the National Endowment for Democracy represents a substantial step in this direction. A new national defense strategy that prioritizes homeland security may force a further shift away from a foreign policy dedicated to leadership of the “liberal order.”
But existing entanglements will be difficult to undo. Atlanticist elites remain entrenched in key positions inside and outside of government, and complex structures like NATO and the European Union may endure, even if populist parties gain power across the West. Just as importantly, nationalist leaders in the West seem to understand that the single-minded pursuit of national sovereignty will produce countries too weak to possess true autonomy on the international stage. If the United States withdraws to the Western Hemisphere, then the project of European integration will almost assuredly collapse. And in a world of massive great powers, individual European nations will no longer be able to punch above their weight (as they did before 1945). Although nationalist parties in Europe may oppose the transatlantic structures of the “liberal order,” they tend not to envision a total split from the United States. The United States, meanwhile, is large (and secure) enough to maintain a relatively strong position in the international system even if it abandons empire entirely. But most members of the MAGAverse do not envision a retreat so complete. At minimum, they tend to imagine maintaining U.S. dominance from Panama to Greenland.
At most, they would prefer to keep control of the entire West. The third and final option, then, is a new transatlantic consolidation that replaces a liberal universalist logic with a self-consciously civilizational frame, with the United States as the acknowledged metropole and Europe as a privileged periphery. If American leadership of the liberal order does represent a net resource drain (as Trump and his allies claim), then the new transatlantic arrangement would reverse the flow. At the same time, it would afford European nations membership in a club with sufficient population and resources to compete in the global arena. Finally, membership in the Western club would not require the sacrifice of national identity at the altar of global liberalism. In fact, it would require the reassertion of national identity within a pan-Western frame at the expense of policies favoring limitless immigration and never-ending expansion.
The construction of a self-consciously “collective West” would constitute an embrace of multipolarity and an attempt to create the most powerful pole in the system. It would also probably result in a reorientation—moving away from the tanks-and-troops logic created by the Cold War standoff with the Soviet Union, and toward a focus on tech and trade more suited to competition with China. Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the AI Summit in Paris, his broadside against the Atlanticists at the Munich Security Conference, and President Donald Trump’s recent speech at the United Nations have all pushed Europe to reorganize along these lines. Efforts to burden-shift in NATO, along with recent trade deals with Britain and the EU, represent practical steps in this direction.
The problem is that the West has spent decades dissolving itself within the liberal order and has little civilizational content to fall back on. The Western canon has been mostly destroyed in higher education, and religious practice has been on the wane throughout the West. Christianity is still a powerful force in American politics (as we saw at the revival-style memorial for Charlie Kirk), but the West can no longer claim to be Christendom. In the current moment, the idea of the West mainly appeals to a small number of influential New Right intellectuals, and to geopoliticians and tech titans who desire scale (but realize that the globe is too big to swallow).
There are obstacles on all three paths. And they are not, in fact, alternatives. The likeliest outcome is probably a combination of all three. Bureaucratic inertia favors the first option, limited liberal restoration; the logic of domestic politics favors the second, nationalist retrenchment; and geopolitical imperatives favor the third, the creation of a real “collective West.”
In any event, the United States is poised to maintain a favorable position in a multipolar world. The legacy institutions of international liberalism have largely lost their purpose, but retain residual power (which, ironically, the U.S. can leverage most effectively against other members of the “liberal order”). Going forward, the Trump administration should continue to push for a reconfiguration of the transatlantic relationship as a self-consciously Western coalition united by a common approach to trade, technology, and resource management. And if Europe fails to accept its new role, or play it well, then Washington can cut bait and retrench to prepared positions in the Western Hemisphere.
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