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In the Trump Era, Europe’s Liberal Establishment Flounders
Foreign Affairs
In the Trump Era, Europe’s Liberal Establishment Flounders
The Alternative for Germany party can navigate the post-liberal, multipolar world.
The German debate surrounding the Alternative for Germany (AfD)—the national-populist party for which I serve as an advisor—has settled into a familiar, increasingly ritualized pattern. It is shaped less by genuine inquiry than by gestures of exclusion, references to politicized intelligence reports, constitutional alarms, and a steady cadence of moral self-reassurance. The party is discussed primarily as a deviation to be contained rather than as a political phenomenon that demands interpretation. Foreign policy enters the discussion only at the margins, reduced to shorthand labels such as pro-Russia, anti-Europe, or internationally isolated.
What this framing consistently avoids is the more demanding question of what kind of international and European order the party is responding to, and why its worldview resonates well beyond Germany’s borders. The persistence of this avoidance suggests that the rise of the AfD may reveal less about an aberrant political actor than about the structural exhaustion of the liberal order that seeks to marginalize it. In the wake of the AfD’s strong showing in the 2025 federal election polls, consistently polling above 20 percent nationwide and leading in eastern Germany, the ritualized exclusion has only intensified.
But events in America make it increasingly difficult in Europe to marginalize post-liberal parties like AfD. The United States itself has grown ambivalent toward the liberal order it once championed and underwrote. The return of Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025, as well as the release last month of his administration’s National Security Strategy, formalize this shift. That document praises “patriotic European parties” and warns of Europe’s “civilizational erasure.” It also declares that the post-Cold War pursuit of permanent American domination of the entire world was misguided, rejects the illusion of unipolar primacy, and prioritizes a focused definition of national interest, strategic restraint, burden-shifting to allies, and deal-driven realism—precisely the posture the AfD has long advocated for Germany.
Moreover, in American strategic debates, questions of border control and social cohesion are increasingly treated as interconnected security concerns rather than isolated domestic issues. For the German liberal establishment, this represents a crisis. For the AfD, it is vindication.
Underneath these developments is a deeper crisis of liberalism itself. Liberalism no longer functions as a coherent global project. What remains is a fragmented inheritance whose universal claims increasingly collide with geopolitical multipolarity, global economic divergence, and cultural pluralism. Liberal rhetoric continues to dominate Western discourse, yet liberal practice has become selective, instrumental, and internally inconsistent. The cumulative effect has been a steady erosion of liberalism’s credibility, both externally and within the societies that once sustained it. What appeared for decades as a stable order now increasingly resembles an ideology struggling to reconcile moral ambition with declining capacity.
This gap between moral claim and real power is the defining asymmetry of the contemporary liberal order. Allies are expected to comply with standards that can no longer be enforced, while non-Western powers openly defy norms that appear performative. Moral authority without enforcement irritates rather than persuades. It is this condition that renders liberal universalism brittle. The AfD is often portrayed as a deviation from a stable liberal consensus. This framing is reassuring but misleading. Many ideas articulated by the AfD correspond to what has become the default position in much of the world: the rejection of values-based foreign policy in favor of interest-driven statecraft.
In global terms, states organize their behavior around power, security, sovereignty, and strategic advantage rather than abstract moral claims. The AfD’s bluntness, speaking the language of interests rather than obligations, resonates because it aligns with perceived reality. This dynamic is most visible in debates over multipolarity. The AfD treats multipolarity not as a problem to be solved through renewed Western coordination, but as an irreversible reality to be accepted. The party positions Germany as a potential European pole in a plural order, rather than as an extension of American power.
Multipolarity, in this view, is no longer synonymous with instability. It describes a geopolitical order in which multiple centers of power coexist without a single moral authority. Conflict and competition are enduring features of international life. The AfD’s foreign policy outlook is thus framed as realistic rather than nostalgic, aligned with the emerging global reality rather than with a declining ideal.
This outlook is inseparable from a reassessment of American leadership. From a realist perspective, the renewed American emphasis on restraint and national interest also reflects an often-neglected insight: that external power projection ultimately depends on social cohesion, political legitimacy, and a credible sense of collective purpose. The U.S. is no longer seen as a liberal hegemon capable of underwriting global order through military dominance and moral authority. Strategic overstretch and domestic polarization have weakened its foundations.
This reassessment places Germany before a strategic choice it has long avoided.
The traditional alignment with a liberal Atlantic order appears increasingly fragile because that order itself is fractured. Developments in Washington have intensified the dilemma. The AfD’s long-standing fascination with Russia has come under strain due to geopolitical conflict and economic dependency. The party has recalibrated: Russia remains a symbolic challenger to Western dominance, but no longer a coherent model. Instead, the AfD looks to Central Europe (Hungary) as examples of durable resistance to liberal orthodoxy, and to eastern Germany itself as a laboratory where the promises of liberal modernization have faltered.
Contrary to common assumptions, the AfD does not reject Europe as such. It rejects the current technocratic configuration of the European Union, which centralizes authority while diffusing responsibility. The alternative is a Europe of sovereign nations: cooperation preserved, but uniformity rejected. Integration subordinated to sovereignty. Europe as a strategic actor among others in a multipolar world—not as a moral tutor or extension of American power, but as a coordinated constellation of sovereign states. This vision is, I believe, perfectly compatible with the view of Europe expounded in Trump’s NSS.
The decisive question is not how Germany should deal with the AfD, but how it understands itself in a multipolar world that no longer rewards moral absolutism or institutional inertia. In a world reshaped by Trump’s second term and the accelerating multipolar order, Germany can no longer afford to ignore this question. The AfD does not create this condition. It reflects it, often crudely and inconsistently. In that sense, the party is not merely a symptom of structural exhaustion, but a serious attempt to translate postliberal realities into statecraft.
From an American perspective, the AfD’s worldview is no longer fringe. It aligns with the administration’s own diagnosis of liberal exhaustion and its pivot to multipolar pragmatism. If Washington under Trump can embrace restraint and sovereignty, why should Berlin cling to a fractured Atlantic consensus?
The post In the Trump Era, Europe’s Liberal Establishment Flounders appeared first on The American Conservative.
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