A Battle for the Soul of the West

The Atlantic

19-03-2025

For President Donald Trump, last month's spat at the White House with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky was 'great television.' To the rest of us, it was a horrifying realization of our worst fears: a real-time crumbling of the Euro-American alliance, which has been the bedrock of the international order since 1945.
Europeans have recently been discovering a new resolve for standing on their own. Perhaps the most candid response came from the European Union's foreign-policy chief, Kaja Kallas, who said that 'the free world needs a new leader.'
There is plenty of good sense in the EU taking a resolute stand. The need for 'strategic autonomy' is not only the preoccupation of French President Emmanuel Macron; it has been part of the bloc's codified global strategy since 2016 as well. Now Trump is fulminating against the EU, claiming that it was 'formed in order to screw the United States,' and European autonomy has become an urgent priority.
But to reduce this moment to a Euro-American clash, let alone to resort to clichés about the supposedly essential qualities of Europe and the United States, would be a fundamental mistake. The current rift is part of a broader battle for the soul of the West. On one side are those who believe that Western countries should continue to be characterized by open societies, Enlightenment values, pluralism, and liberal democracy, as they mostly have been for the past few decades. The most notable opposition to this status quo comes from ultranationalists who believe that the West has gone too far in its espousal of progress and liberalism, and that it must revert to a civilizational ethos centered around Christianity—one that is more traditional and less libertine, less feminist, and less internationalist (or 'globalist,' as they like to call it). As a shorthand, I call them anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries.
Both sides have long had partisans in both America and Europe. For about a decade, the standard-bearer for the nationalist right has been Viktor Orbán, the self-styled 'illiberal' prime minister of Hungary. Orbán's fellow anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries have grown in political relevance and popularity across the EU, though they are still relatively marginal. For inspiration, they look to the Russia of Vladimir Putin, whose national chauvinism, banning of 'gender ideology' and 'gay propaganda,' and revisionism against the world order fit well with their agenda.
Michael McFaul: The tragic success of global Putinism
The European far right traditionally fulminated against Atlanticism, decrying the United States as the fulcrum of a global liberal order from which Europeans must de-link. But the immense influence of anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries over Trump, especially evident in his second administration, has turned the tables. The world's mightiest country is now an ally for Europe's far right. Trump's first term also encouraged these elements, but its direction wasn't always stable or clear.
This time around, some of the most influential figures in Trump's court have commitments to the anti-liberal counterrevolution: Vice President J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., and Tucker Carlson, to name a few. One common theme among these men is their championing of Orbán's Hungary. In 2022, Carlson made a documentary about the country, portraying Orbán as leading 'the fight for civilization' against the liberal philanthropist George Soros. Don Jr. made a well-publicized trip to Budapest last year and spared no words in praising Orbán's Hungary as 'one of the last beacons of hope in Europe.'
Zack Beauchamp: Make America Hungary again
American proponents of Orbán often praise his hard-line policies on migration and refugees, but this is a red herring. Politicians across the political spectrum in Europe have taken anti-migration positions of various kinds. The admiration for Orbán comes from his unapologetic assault on the liberal values that have defined the West for generations. In a now-famous speech in Romania in 2014, Orbán espoused his anti-liberalism in detail and attacked the United States in terms that have become familiar on the American right: 'The strength of American soft power is in decline, and liberal values today embody corruption, sex, and violence and, as such, discredit America and American modernization.'
Orbán's critique is not of any one policy but of something fundamental about the soul of the West. And it reflects a view that has found fuller expression in the words of the Russian far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, a treasured guest on Carlson's show last year. Dugin sees a dichotomy between liberalism and its enemies that goes back to antiquity. For him, Putin's Russia represents the 'eternal Rome,' a land-based empire of conservative virtue, set against the liberal West's 'eternal Carthage,' a maritime empire of circulation and exchange. Dugin rails against the European Enlightenment, the intellectual root of modern rationalism and liberalism, and defines himself in the lineage of Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
The American right has another major critic of the Enlightenment much closer to home. The billionaire Peter Thiel has been compared to Dugin by the latter's biographer. As early as 2007, Thiel offered a sweeping critique of Western enlightened thought, inveighing against both Karl Marx and Adam Smith for giving primacy to earthly human needs. Instead, he advocated for 'an older Western tradition' that wasn't afraid to 'seek glory in the name of God or country.' Thiel argued that the Enlightenment was a 'very long intellectual slumber and amnesia,' from which the West should reawaken into something more like the medieval age. He criticized George W. Bush's administration for fighting the War on Terror in the name of democratic values and suggested instead an explicitly anti-Islamic campaign in the tradition of the Crusades. Thiel evinced an affinity for the German jurist Carl Schmitt—one of the Nazi luminaries, along with Heidegger, of the anti-liberal counterrevolution.
Since 2019, Thiel has been a major supporter of the national conservative movement that has helped give an intellectual identity to Trumpism. Vice President Vance is a prominent figure in that movement. As early as 2021, Vance warned about a 'civilizational crisis' in the West and claimed that 'every single major cultural institution' in the U.S. had been 'lost.' Earlier this month, when asked about European-American ties, he praised Europe as the 'cradle of the Western civilization,' with which the United States has 'religious bonds' and 'cultural bonds,' before stating that Europe was 'at risk of civilizational suicide.'
Vance's answer is notable not just for what it states but for what it omits. The actually existing transatlantic relationship has long been based on a common espousal of liberal democracy, built on the legacy of defeating fascism in World War II. But for Vance, the proper foundation for Euro-Atlantic ties should instead be Christian faith.
The postwar order we have known was the product of a broad alliance that brought together socialists and liberals against fascism. This order dismantled colonial empires; it conceived of new institutions, such as the United Nations, to foster international dialogue in place of aggression, and new covenants, such as the International Bill of Human Rights, to codify both the civil rights advocated by liberals and socioeconomic rights advocated by socialists.
Unsurprisingly, the anti-liberal counterrevolutionaries of today have no sympathy for this legacy. In fact, historical revisionism about World War II is an important feature of their movement. For years, the European far right has engaged in various forms of Holocaust relativization or outright denial. Last year, Carlson hosted the Holocaust-denying podcaster Darryl Cooper and introduced him as America's 'best' historian. Not only did Cooper make denialist claims about the Holocaust—he criticized the post-1945 order as making it 'effectively illegal in the West to be genuinely right-wing.'
Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right
These are not isolated ideas but a political campaign, with proponents on both sides of the Atlantic, against the post-1945 order and the broader Enlightenment tradition. Its proponents reject the full spectrum of European and American liberal thought, from left to right, and hark back to a West defined by their reading of Christianity and traditional values.
The anti-liberals are a growing force in European politics. Last year, Orbán's Fidesz party helped establish Patriots for Europe (PfE), the third-largest grouping in the European Parliament, with which 86 of 720 MEPs identify. Its most notable member is France's National Rally, a once-marginal party that is now the main opposition force in the EU's second-largest economy. The bloc's other member parties are currently parts of governments in the Netherlands and Italy. The Trump administration has given these far-right entities new momentum. Elon Musk openly supports not just Orbán's sister parties, such as Spain's Vox, but even Germany's AfD (Alternative for Germany), which was deemed too extremist for PfE and instead joined the more extreme Europe of Sovereign Nations, whose member parties are even more explicitly pro-Putin, anti-NATO, and anti-American.
Such extreme parties are still relatively marginal in European politics. Of the 27 member states of the European Union, at least 20 are currently led by mainstream liberals, centrist conservatives, or Socialists. For now, thinkers spanning a wide spectrum—the American center-right political theorist Francis Fukuyama, say, and the Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Žižek—can still share in the view of Europe as a bastion of Enlightenment values worth preserving.
To uphold the best of this European tradition now will require more from liberals than just a defense of the old continent against the new. Much as their anti-liberal rivals have done, Western liberals will have to forge transatlantic links and demonstrate their willingness to fight for their values. Broad fronts and global alliances made the post-1945 order. To keep it will require nothing less.