What Happened to “the West”?

As America Drifts Away From Its Allies, a Less Peaceful World Awaits

It has become commonplace to speak of living in a “post-Western world.” Commentators typically invoke the phrase to herald the emergence of non-Western powers—most obviously China, but also Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey, and the Gulf states, among others. But alongside the “rise of the rest,” something equally profound is occurring: the demise of “the West” itself as a coherent and meaningful geopolitical entity. The West, as understood as a unified political, economic, and security community, has been on the ropes for some time. Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president could deliver the knockout blow.

Since the end of World War II, a tight-knit club of economically advanced democracies has anchored the liberal, rules-based international system. The group’s solidarity was rooted not only in shared threat perceptions but also in a common commitment to an open world based on free societies and liberal commerce—and the collective willingness to defend that order. The core members of this cohort included the United States and Canada, the United Kingdom, the members of the European Union, and several allies in the Asia-Pacific, such as the former British dominions of Australia and New Zealand, as well as Japan and South Korea, which became integrated into the postwar U.S. alliance system and adopted the liberal principles of democratic governance and market economics. The West formed the core of the so-called free world during the Cold War. But the West outlasted that bipolar conflict and even expanded its boundaries to include a number of former Soviet bloc countries and some former Soviet republics through the expansion of NATO and the European Union.

Over the past 80 years, Western countries have created numerous institutions to advance their common purposes, most prominently NATO, the G-7, the EU, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Equally important, these countries have coordinated policy stances within more encompassing multilateral frameworks, such as the United Nations and its agencies, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization, and the G-20.

To be sure, periodic divisions and tensions have stressed Western solidarity. Prominent examples include the Suez crisis of 1956, French President Charles de Gaulle’s challenge to NATO’s integrated command structure in the 1960s, U.S. President Richard Nixon’s abrupt suspension of dollar-gold convertibility in 1971, the Euromissile crisis of the 1980s, and transatlantic acrimony over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

But none of these episodes have tested the West’s cohesion nearly as much as Trump’s return to the White House. Since January, the president has adopted a full-throated “America first” orientation in foreign, economic, and national security policy. His vision for the U.S. role in the world is hypernationalist, sovereigntist, unilateralist, protectionist, and transactional. In contrast to his presidential predecessors, he rarely speaks about American global leadership, much less responsibility. He disdains alliances, multilateralism, and international law. He cares little about democracy, human rights, and development—and he has dismantled the U.S. capacity to promote them abroad. He repudiates his country’s role in contributing to global public goods, including open trade, financial stability, climate change mitigation, global health security, and nuclear nonproliferation. And he is the most prominent champion of the ascendant right-wing, nationalist political forces in Europe and North America, appealing to a vaguer, civilizational notion of the West and casting doubt on the abiding importance of the geopolitical West.

Trump’s shifts have stunned the closest U.S. partners. “The West as we knew it no longer exists,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, declared mournfully in April. Western leaders have sought to paper over these inconvenient truths, including at their June G-7 and NATO summits, with obsequious efforts to flatter, humor, and cajole Trump.

But von der Leyen’s observation continues to echo because it resonates with what other leaders believe and say, if often sotto voce: this time it really is different. The passing of the West as a meaningful entity will come with great loss. It will leave the open, rules-bound international order adrift, without its historical anchor and main motor for progress. The liberal notions that underpinned the geopolitical West were fundamentally universal; the nationalist ones that raise up the civilizational West are instead fixated on the defense of borders and fear of others. Beyond endangering liberal principles domestically, these trends are likely to accelerate the rise of illiberal multilateralism, a bare bones international order shaped and even dominated by authoritarian great powers. To be sure, the fading of the West does provide an opening for constructive middle powers to build new networks of international cooperation tailored to the twenty-first century. But it also augurs a less peaceful, less cooperative world than the one the West helped make.
Empire By Invitation

During the Cold War, the West emerged as a coherent and unitary geopolitical actor, comprising a bloc of (mostly) democratic countries opposed to the Soviet Union and its satellites—the “East,” in common parlance—and distinct from the countries of the “global South”—a postcolonial terrain where much of the East-West global competition unfolded in bloody fashion.

This bipolar arrangement was not the international system the United States had envisioned during World War II, when American postwar planners drafted blueprints for an open international order based on universal membership, multilateral principles, and great-power comity and cooperation, especially as embodied by the newly minted United Nations. The confrontation with the Soviet Union foiled these best-laid plans and led the United States to adopt a policy of containment. If there were indeed “two worlds instead of one,” as the U.S. diplomat Charles Bohlen concluded in 1947, when Moscow imposed total control in Eastern Europe, the United States had little choice but to unite the “non-Soviet world . . . politically, economically, and in the last analysis militarily.”

The doctrine of the containment of communism thus gave birth to a more concretely geopolitical—as opposed to nebulously civilizational—West, soon embodied in new institutions such as NATO, an integrating Europe, and the OECD. The West became an order within an order, a club of market democracies nested within a more encompassing global system populated by large membership organizations such as the UN, the World Bank and the IMF, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Over time, this inner order came to include a more diverse array of market democracies, most notably Japan, which were not Western in any traditional cultural sense but embraced liberal political and economic principles. When some analysts today refer to the “global North,” they are speaking of that inner order.

A shared attachment to democracy, as well as capitalism, underpinned Western solidarity. The preamble to the Treaty of Washington (1949), which established NATO, pledges members of the alliance to “safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” Cynics may dismiss such language as sentimental window-dressing, but they are wrong. These commitments tangibly affected allied behavior, shaping how Western countries understood their national interests, communicated with one another, and settled occasional disputes, so that, for instance, the notion of war among members of the inner order became inconceivable. To be sure, this cohort often valued democracy more among fellow members of the West than they did among the countries of the developing and postcolonial world, particularly those whose publics were tilting leftward.

Beyond shared ideals, Western allies could take comfort in Washington’s consensual leadership style, which softened the reality of U.S. dominance. President Dwight Eisenhower endorsed this orientation in his first inaugural address, in January 1953, in language that today appears to be from a bygone era: “To meet the challenge of our time, destiny has laid upon our country the responsibility of the free world’s leadership. So it is proper that we assure our friends once again that, in the discharge of this responsibility, we Americans know and we observe the difference between world leadership and imperialism; between firmness and truculence; between a thoughtfully calculated goal and spasmodic reaction to the stimulus of emergencies.” To the degree that the United States enjoyed an imperium within the West, it was, in the historian Geir Lundestad’s words, an “empire by invitation.”

The West is now splitting apart.

The West persisted as a meaningful geopolitical concept and entity even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its concomitant East. It would have been natural for a club that formed in opposition to the Soviet Union to lose definition after that rival disappeared. But at least during the 1990s, the cohort did not fragment into competing blocs and rivalries or produce efforts to undercut American unipolarity. Indeed, there was a widespread if naive expectation that the world’s community of market democracies—the West, in other words—would inexorably expand to encompass more of the world, as other countries embraced liberal, universal values and the normative architecture of the open, rules-based international order.

These hopes would not be borne out. Instead of the universalization of the West, the world saw the rise of the rest, a diverse array of major and regional powers bent not only on raising their voices in international institutions but also, in some cases, on challenging the organizing principles of those institutions. More gradually and subtly, the West began to take on a more civilizational dimension, a process accelerated by the September 11 attacks and the ensuing “war on terror” and the crises of mass migration and subsequent nativist outrage in the 2010s.

Despite these challenges, Western solidarity itself held firm, even after Trump’s tumultuous first term. The community of advanced market democracies revived during the administration of President Joe Biden, confident not only in U.S. security guarantees but in Washington’s broader commitment to liberal principles and the vision of an open, rules-based international order. By and large, Western governments continued to follow Washington’s lead, because they regarded the United States as a stable investment and were confident that if the going got tough, the United States would have their backs and would bail them out. It was an arrangement built on trust, underpinned by a commitment to common values, shared rules, and mutual obligations.
A House Divided

Eight months into Trump’s second term, that trust has now been shattered. At their G-7 and NATO summits in June, U.S. partners gamely tried to paper over growing frictions, including about Trump’s imposition of heavy tariffs, browbeating of allies to ramp up defense expenditures, and unilateral strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Bowing and scraping, the assembled leaders praised the president for his boldness, glossing over the reality that his relentless bullying is a profound departure from the consultative style that has long set relations among Western countries apart from run-of-the-mill diplomacy.

The closest U.S. allies can no longer take Washington’s security guarantees for granted. The president’s bombast and capriciousness have led many European countries to increase their defense spending—a positive outcome, to be sure, and not inherently at odds with the notion of a unified, geopolitical West. But Trump has also alienated allies and revitalized long-floundering EU efforts to pursue strategic autonomy, which would allow the bloc to not only punch at its weight militarily but also pursue an independent geopolitical path. In the Asia-Pacific, too, allies worry about the United States suddenly canceling their insurance coverage. As Trump assaults the rules-based multilateral trading system with sweeping tariffs, U.S. allies are likewise moving to diversify their commercial options and engage with more reliable partners, remodeling the global trading system in the process.

Such hedging behavior is consistent with public sentiment. Opinion polls in Europe reveal cratering approval for the United States and dwindling confidence in the transatlantic alliance. In the spring of 2025, only 28 percent of respondents deemed the United States to be a “somewhat reliable ally”—down from more than 75 percent a year before.

One institutional casualty of Trump’s disengagement from the West is the G-7. From its origins in the 1970s, the G-7 has been a symbol of Western solidarity and a pillar of global economic governance, uniting the most important advanced market democracies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as the EU. Although many wrote its obituary during the global financial crisis, when it risked being eclipsed by the G-20, it came roaring back to life in 2014, when the Western members of the then G-8 ejected Russia for supporting secession in eastern Ukraine and annexing Crimea. Trump, however, has repeatedly criticized Russia’s expulsion and made no secret of his disdain for the G-7—even quitting its 2018 summit in a huff. Many observers now refer to the body as the “G-6 plus one.” This U.S. estrangement from the G-7 risks depriving its members of something that the more heterogeneous G-20 can never provide: a like-minded club in which the world’s leading market democracies can harmonize policy stances consistent with their commitment to an open, rules-bound world based on shared liberal principles.

Caught between Trump’s unilateralism and misgivings about China, Western middle powers are beginning to explore new, flexible partnerships with rising middle powers in the developing world, part of a broader trend toward an international system defined by “multi-alignment,” in which countries pursue maximum flexibility in their diplomatic, economic, and security relationships rather than align consistently with particular great powers or blocs. Indeed, this is precisely what is happening, with the EU and its individual members trying to craft tighter commercial ties and closer diplomatic links with countries such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa.
The Fading Of The West

During his first term, when he was constrained by institutionalists, Trump occasionally invoked the concept of the West. Speaking in Warsaw in July 2017, the president declared that “the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Given his actual conduct in office, which has involved cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and other autocrats, it is clear that Trump understands the West not as a Cold War–era geopolitical entity undergirded by common threat assessments and a commitment to liberal values but rather in its older, ethnonationalist, and more amorphous connotation as a common civilization based not on liberal political principles but shared geographical and historical roots.

The West is now splitting apart, as its meaning drifts from one of geopolitical and ideological solidarity toward a more civilizational concept, particularly in the United States, and confidence in the transatlantic and other alliances erodes. As its internal divisions come to the fore, it seems fair to question the coherence and utility of the category itself. There is irony in this predicament. For years, critics in the United States and Europe have been skeptical of the catchall concept of the global South, dismissing it as an impossibly broad label to apply to a diverse collection of more than 100 postcolonial and developing countries. What explanatory purchase could the term possibly afford, given the varied histories, cultural inheritances, political institutions, economic circumstances, strategic orientations, and regional ambitions of the cohort it purports to encompass?

The question today is whether the geopolitical West as a category merits similar skepticism. The once taken-for-granted strategic and ideological solidarity among the United States and other major market democracies has frayed. The unmaking of the West has not been Trump’s doing alone. Nor is it a case of simple bifurcation, with the United States heading off in one direction as its erstwhile partners head in another. Across most advanced democracies, electorates are increasingly polarized, resulting in dwindling support for the political center and the delegitimization of moderate parties and governments. Cosmopolitan progressives and conservative nationalists are at each other’s throats, including over the very meaning of the West.

These tensions came to a head publicly and prominently at the Munich Security Conference in February. There, U.S. Vice President JD Vance outraged his largely European audience by depicting “woke” restrictions on the free speech of the continent’s far-right political parties as a greater threat to Western freedom and security than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the heart of his critique was a blood-and-soil conception of the West, one rooted—like Vance’s concept of the American nation itself—not in a devotion to the shared political principles of the Enlightenment but in a civilizational identity and an organic sense of place.

Instead of the universalization of the West, the world saw the rise of the rest.

For decades, the world’s advanced market democracies have stood together in crises, defended human rights and other liberal values, and generally sought to harmonize and coordinate their policies within both minilateral clubs and more encompassing international organizations, including the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions. The demise of the West as a reliable geopolitical unit will increasingly see the United States and its former partners acting at cross-purposes and finding themselves on the opposite sides of debates. This is not simply an inevitable function of declining U.S. hegemony in the international system. One could imagine a gradual renegotiation of leadership and burden sharing within the West, with, for instance, greater allied responsibility for collective defense. Washington’s abandonment of internationalism and any concern for liberal norms and agenda setting is leading to a divergence of values and threat perceptions among Western countries that will fundamentally break the solidarity of the geopolitical West.

This rupture is profound because it is taking place in the inner core of the world order that has existed since the 1940s. It also creates a choice for the world’s middle powers, not only in the West but also among emerging economies that have no desire to replace U.S. with Chinese hegemony. Emerging powers have long complained that they have been excluded from the global high table. The current fluid moment provides an opportunity for the likes of Brazil, India, Indonesia, and South Africa to collaborate with advanced market democracy counterparts, such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, which may be looking for new partners in the post-Western world.

But the welter of arrangements that may arise to replace the vanished certainties of the old order will not be able to replicate that order’s greatest outcome. The West, the inner order that emerged in the crucible of the Cold War, was a zone of peace. Its members would never war with one another. In its absence, the West leaves behind a world that will be more prone to suspicion, hostility, and conflict.