The debate about American grand strategy has long been shaped by familiar schools of thought: restraint, liberal internationalism, and primacy. But the intellectual movement that provided the ideological fuel for U.S. President Donald Trump’s rise to power, the New Right, is forging a new contender: call it “civilizationism.” References to Western civilization permeate strategy documents and speeches by key members of the administration. Vice President JD Vance set the tone in his February 2025 speech at the Munich Security Conference, stressing the “threat from within” to the fundamental values that characterize “our shared civilization.” The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy warned of “civilizational erasure.” This January, at Davos, Trump emphasized “the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization”; the next month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on the United States’ transatlantic partners to “renew the greatest civilization in human history.”
The notion that there is a Western civilization and that it is superior is, of course, not new. But the concept of the West espoused by the New Right—and how that concept ought to guide U.S. grand strategy—is fundamentally different from how most had previously understood it. It is not based on a creedal understanding of Western identity as rooted in a shared set of principles that anyone, regardless of origin, can espouse, such as constitutional democracy, liberty, and equality. Instead, for thinkers on the New Right, the West is defined by a specific geographic territory, a shared ancestry, and Christianity.
Extended to the realm of foreign policy, this reimagination of the foundations of Western civilization demands a new and distinct grand strategy. Civilizationism is still a work in progress. Writings on foreign policy by New Right thinkers are limited, and the camp is internally divided. But by examining those texts and following the movement’s domestic ideas to their logical conclusion, it is possible to discern a distinct worldview. Civilizationists would aim to structure the world along bounded civilizational spaces, each dominated by a hegemon. They believe the United States is rightfully the hegemon of the West, dedicated to defending the civilization’s borders, urging Europe to uphold purported Western values, and pursuing coexistence with other civilizations, such as the Chinese, rather than aspiring to global leadership. They reject the universal ambitions of primacy and the constraints imposed on U.S. sovereignty by liberal internationalism. Civilizationism also differs from restraint, requiring dominance over the Western Hemisphere, by military intervention if necessary. And unlike realist visions that justify a great power’s control over its backyard by pointing to its legitimate security interests, civilizationism offers an ideological justification for spheres of influence and their boundaries.
Despite the Trump administration’s embrace of civilizational rhetoric, in practice its foreign policy diverges from what civilizationism would advocate and many of Trump’s own backers hoped he would pursue. Even if Republicans win the White House again in 2028, that would not mean civilizationism will become U.S. grand strategy; the New Right would also have to prevail over the party’s establishment faction. But at least two factors seem to favor the New Right in the intraparty battle. One is demographic: most polling shows a generational divide among Republicans, with younger voters more supportive of positions such as scaling back the U.S. role in the Middle East and retreating from viewing China as a major threat. The other is Trump’s war on Iran. As the consequences of this strategically catastrophic campaign become ever more apparent, the New Right’s clout is set to grow, having opposed the war from the start.
A NEW BLOB IN TOWN
For decades, Washington’s foreign policy establishment advocated for different varieties of liberal hegemony. Even during Trump’s first term, traditional foreign policy elites exercised great influence and maintained relative policy continuity abroad. But Trump’s second term has fundamentally disrupted the intellectual consensus that long governed foreign policy debates, bringing the New Right into the discussions that shape U.S. strategy. This movement is composed of various factions, as Laura Field has distilled in her authoritative work Furious Minds. The postliberals want to enforce a Catholic conception of the common good and morality. Idolizing the American founding, the Claremonters propose radical, counterrevolutionary action to restore government by consent, shatter the administrative state, and cultivate civic virtue. The national conservatives embrace Christian nationalism and seek to bulwark the homogeneous nation-state from threats from liberalism.
What unites these disparate camps is a rejection of core tenets of traditional conservatism, such as limited government, neoliberal economics, and hawkish foreign policy, and a shared opposition to the creedal concept of American identity. Instead, the New Right views American identity in ethnoreligious and collective terms and considers the United States to be a fundamentally white, Christian, homogeneous country whose origins lie in European civilization. Its adherents believe that the relentless pursuit of maximizing individual freedom and rights has come at the cost of community, religion, and traditional norms. In other words, the movement sees liberalism not as the foundation but as the cancer of Western civilization.
The New Right has now drawn unprecedentedly close to power, having perceived the ascent of a self-advertised disruptor president—Trump—as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and seized it. In Vance, the movement has a prominent and influential figurehead, flanked by leaders such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, and the media personality Tucker Carlson. It is institutionalizing its influence in the conservative intellectual ecosystem. Formerly peripheral institutions such as the Claremont Institute; the once establishment, now Trumpist Heritage Foundation; and new entrants such as the America First Policy Institute, the Center for Renewing America, and American Moment currently drive debates on the right on issues as varied as trade and foreign policy. These organizations have trained swaths of Trump political appointees: by one count, at least 70 alumni of Claremont fellowships, including the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and the deputy national security adviser, serve in the current administration.
THE CRADLES OF CIVILIZATIONISM
The New Right’s vision of the United States translates into a distinctive foreign policy that seeks to strengthen the illiberal foundation of American society and protect its version of Western civilizational heritage. Civilizations, at least in the crude understanding popularized by the late political scientist Samuel Huntington, are homogeneous cultural entities defined by inherited traits such as religion, history, and language. Huntington maintained that the distinctions between civilizations were more fundamental and immutable than mere differences in political ideologies: they were “the product of centuries.” He predicted that as power dispersed among civilizations, their cultural differences would become irresolvable and generate conflict, especially as the West’s dominance and universalist ambitions became ever more contested.
The New Right’s logic of civilizationism, however, is more Schmittian than Huntingtonian. Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist known for his work on the friend-enemy distinction, is widely read among New Right thinkers; he also developed an argument on how to structure the international order. Schmitt proposed that the world would be properly organized by spatial blocs, or Grossräume, dominated by regional hegemons. Schmitt believed that the respective hegemons of the Grossräume should dominate coercively if necessary. But he also expected that such an order would be stable because, unlike universalist ideologies, it accepted the coexistence of different political systems.
The Schmittian focus on stability and coexistence resonates with the New Right’s opposition to forever wars and rejection of universalist schemes. The relative restraint of civilizationism also distinguishes the New Right from both the crusading neoconservativism that often invoked the defense of Western civilization to justify military interventions and the Huntingtonian prediction that civilizations will clash. Civilizationism is thus best defined as a hierarchical and antiuniversalist grand strategy that views regional imperialism as the most legitimate and most promising way to order the world. In practice, the strategy asserts that the United States ought to seek dominance over the Western Hemisphere, interfere in Europe’s affairs to support far-right forces that share a civilizationist worldview, and both disengage from and respect other civilizations’ spheres of influence.
Civilizationism differs markedly from Trump’s approach to the world. Although the Trump administration often speaks the language of civilizationism, Trump’s behavior is primarily motivated by personal grievance, transactional impulses, and a private interest in maximizing the wealth of his kin and clique. The biggest rupture between the administration’s foreign policy and civilizationism lies in Middle East policy. Contrary to his campaign promises, Trump did not retrench from the region, instead launching what he initially billed as a regime-change war against Iran. His attitude toward Israel—mostly treating it as a privileged ally—resembles that of neoconservative hawks such as the late U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.
Civilizationism asserts that the United States ought to interfere in Europe’s affairs.
The American New Right is much less interested in championing Israel. The spread of a conspiratorial form of anti-Semitism in right-wing ranks is one driving factor, as is the decreasing popularity among American conservatives of a Christian Zionism that sees Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies and, thus, the essential civilizational ally. But another explanation is strategic: many in the New Right believe the United States’ alliance with Israel traps Washington in a region where it has fought unnecessary and colossally costly wars. The scale of violence that Israel’s campaign in Gaza has inflicted has also contributed to a retreat from support, especially among younger conservatives.
Civilizationism also prescribes a different approach to China from the one Trump has taken. The second Trump administration has oscillated ambivalently between belligerently treating China as a dangerous rival and retrenching from East Asia. Supporters of the administration view this back and forth as a cunning ploy to buy time for the United States to position itself more advantageously for a confrontation. For others, the pivot to Asia is effectively dead. Either way, civilizationism would prescribe a more consistent strategy of military withdrawal from the region, a tack tantamount to tolerating Chinese hegemony in its sphere. In a coauthored 2022 New York Times essay, the prominent New Right commentators Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Gladden Pappin, for example, have described China as a “civilizational equal” and called for pragmatic cooperation rather than “mindless China hawkism.” The New Right’s leading foreign policy thinker, Michael Anton, has explicitly stated that Taiwan is not worth fighting over.
Civilizationism has already had a strong influence on Trump’s foreign policy toward the Western Hemisphere and Europe. In a civilizationist understanding, a regional hegemon should assert its dominance over its backyard to provide order and exclude external powers. Controlling the Western Hemisphere is a particularly acute concern for the New Right, because migration from allegedly alien cultures and the inflow of drugs undermine the desired societal homogeneity and stability. Civilizationists see Europe as both the historic cradle of Western civilization and the key source of its greatest threat, liberalism. Aggressive interference in European affairs to prevent what Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation’s president, has called “civilizational suicide” is thus justified almost as a form of domestic politics. Civilizationism would, however, intensify the Trump administration’s often haphazard and symbolic approach to undermining liberal EU governments and ultimately culturally vassalize Europe.
A civilizational grand strategy would not treat Russia as a threat and, thus, not sustain the U.S. security commitment to Europe. Some in the New Right stress civilizational affinities with Russia and argue for deeper bilateral relations, given that the country is anti-woke—or, according to Carlson, a “Christian country” that the United States has “a lot in common with.” Others advocate a pragmatic accommodation with Moscow that would grant it a sphere of influence over eastern Europe.
NEW RIGHT, NEW WORLD
If Washington were to adopt a consistent civilizational grand strategy, it would completely upend U.S. foreign policy. It would allow for previously unthinkable concessions to the United States’ geopolitical rivals. Civilizationism would pose a historic challenge to the already battered transatlantic relationship by granting Russia de facto control over eastern Europe or treating Moscow as part of a common Western civilization and agitating more openly against sitting governments in Europe. Other historical U.S. alliances would suffer, too. Tolerating Chinese regional hegemony would throw East Asian allies under the bus, and disengaging from the Middle East would leave Israel to fend for itself.
But civilizationism is riddled with contradictions that would quickly become apparent if it ever did become Washington’s guiding policy. As the scholar Amitav Acharya has written, civilizations are “myths in the analytical sense.” Over time, no existing civilization has remained ethnically or culturally pure or set in the same borders. Indeed, civilizations are not so easily delineated: Where would a Russian civilization end? Should it include Georgia, the Baltic states, or Finland? How far does the United States’ civilizational sphere reach into Latin America?
It is also unlikely that a civilizational order would be peaceful. Civilizational claims could overlap and become a recipe for regional wars. By defining other civilizations as alien cultures, a civilizationist grand strategy might fuel antagonism rather than tolerate differences. Even European far-right parties seem increasingly uninterested in being so overtly backed by their U.S. counterparts. And even if great-power conflict could be avoided, intracivilizational violence would abound. Japan, Pakistan, and Poland would be unlikely to accept regional hegemony by China, India, or Russia, respectively.
The New Right is also not a unitary camp. National conservatives, for instance, oppose loosening the United States’ ties with Israel and tolerating Chinese and Russian imperialism. Others are still in favor of a crusade against the civilizational enemies China and Iran. Moreover, the New Right’s overriding focus has remained on domestic policy, with foreign policy often an afterthought.
But the American right wing’s ideological future, and the future of U.S. grand strategy, is wide open. The Trump administration has broken with the bipartisan post–Cold War consensus on liberal hegemony but has failed to offer a coherent alternative. In the coming contest to define Washington’s foreign policy, civilizationism is poised to be a central contender.
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