The president’s turn to imperial civilizationalism is destroying what it claims to defend.
Foreign Policy
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Something unusual has entered the grammar of U.S. foreign policy. Under President Donald Trump’s second term, the language of strategy has given way to a heightened language of civilization: warnings of “civilizational erasure” in Europe, invocations of a “Judeo-Christian” heritage under siege, and threats to Iran destroy the Iranian civilization. This is not incidental rhetoric. It signals a deliberate turn toward what may be called imperial civilizationalism—the use of civilizational identity as an instrument of aggressive populist foreign policy.
The civilization-state concept has become one of the defining rhetorical tools of our era’s populist leaders. In the past decade, leaders in China, India, Russia, Turkey and elsewhere have turned to civilizational identity to construct national cohesion, assert cultural distinctiveness, and justify both domestic authority and foreign-policy ambition.
Something unusual has entered the grammar of U.S. foreign policy. Under President Donald Trump’s second term, the language of strategy has given way to a heightened language of civilization: warnings of “civilizational erasure” in Europe, invocations of a “Judeo-Christian” heritage under siege, and threats to Iran destroy the Iranian civilization. This is not incidental rhetoric. It signals a deliberate turn toward what may be called imperial civilizationalism—the use of civilizational identity as an instrument of aggressive populist foreign policy.
The civilization-state concept has become one of the defining rhetorical tools of our era’s populist leaders. In the past decade, leaders in China, India, Russia, Turkey and elsewhere have turned to civilizational identity to construct national cohesion, assert cultural distinctiveness, and justify both domestic authority and foreign-policy ambition.
President Xi Jinping invokes the idea of China as the world’s oldest continuous civilization. During a visit the Forbidden City in 2017, Xi told Trump that although “Egypt is a bit more ancient,” China was “the only continuous civilization” of that age. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi draws on Hindu civilizational revival. President Vladimir Putin promotes a distinct Eurasian-Russian identity rooted in Orthodox Christianity. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reaches back to Ottoman and Islamic heritage. Each leader cherry-picks from a selective and internally contradictory historical archive to produce a usable, politically mobilizing myth of civilizational continuity.
Now Trump has joined them full scale. But Trump’s version differs in important respects. Where the others assert distinctiveness from the West, Trump claims to defend it. His 2017 speech in Warsaw, Poland, posed what he called the “fundamental question of our time,” which was “whether the West has the will to survive.” His administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy warned of “civilizational erasure” in Europe due to migration and the erosion of national identities, predicting that Europe risked becoming “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”
Vice President J.D. Vance delivered the sharpest version of this argument at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, warning that the greatest threat to the Western civilization came “from within”—from European tolerance of immigration, retreat from religious orthodoxy, and restrictions on free speech. He later spoke explicitly of European “civilizational suicide.”
Some might argue that the United States under Trump does not fully qualify as a civilization-state in the sense that China, India, and Russia fit the designation. Those cases rest on claims of ancient, premodern civilizational continuity—a civilizational depth that predates and exceeds the nation-state itself. U.S. identity, by contrast, has historically been constructed around the nation-state exceptionalism, liberal universalism, civic rather than ethnic or civilizational foundations, with a record of absorbing immigrants more openly than most other Western settler states.
Yet Trump’s civilizationalism is more consequential, not least because it is backed by military, economic, and technological power that is yet to be surpassed by any other nation. It is not merely a defensive nationalism dressed in civilizational language.
A wide shot of an ancient stone temple with large columns standing on a grassy hill under a blue sky with scattered clouds. In the foreground on the dry ground lies a large, weathered green bronze statue of a winged male figure, missing its lower legs and arms.
A bronze statue of Icarus by Igor Mitoraj in the valley of temples near Agrigento, Italy, on Dec. 24, 2025.iStock photo
In some respects, it is reminiscent of ancient Rome. Rome in its imperial phase was indeed a “civilization-state” of sorts: a political entity that understood itself as the carrier of a superior civilization and whose expansion was justified in civilizational terms. Modern comparisons between the United States and Rome have long circulated in both popular and academic discourse. Trump’s rhetoric maps onto the late Roman pattern more than the early one—a civilization asserting its exceptionalism defensively, from a position of perceived decline rather than confident ascent.
The parallel is both revealing and disquieting: Some of the loudest assertions of civilizational legitimacy, in both republican and imperial Rome, occurred during a period of strife and decline, when the ruling elite resorted to populist civilizational rhetoric to hold onto power. In 284 A.D., for example, Emperor Diocletian assumed the position of a divinely sanctioned dictator, even requiring prostration by officials before him. The glorification of civilization with its pomp and rituals became necessary for the glorification of the ruler.
But the deeper point is that all civilization-state claims—U.S., Chinese, Indian, Russian—are myths in the analytical sense: politically constructed, historically selective, and internally contradictory. Civilizations are inherently diverse, hybrid, and contested. No living civilization has been ethnically or culturally pure. Chinese civilization absorbed Buddhist, Mongol, and Manchu influences. Indian civilization blended Austroasiatic, Harappan (Indus Valley), Jain, Buddhist, Indo-European, Persian, and Islamic elements, creating layers that sometimes sit uneasily beneath any unifying Hindu narrative. Russian civilization draws on Tatar, Byzantine, and European threads. The claim to a singular, defensible civilizational identity is, in each case, an instrument of power rather than a description of reality.
Trump, wearing a dark suit and bright pink tie, stands behind a podium, gesturing with his right hand. Directly behind him hangs a large, vertically oriented portrait of George Washington in a ornate gold frame, his hand outstretched in a similar gesture. To Trump's left stands an American flag, and on the right stands a green, white, and red tricolor flag.
Trump speaks beneath a portrait of former President George Washington at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on March 12, 2025. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
What Trump, Modi, Xi, Putin, and Erdogan share is not some real civilizational heritage, but a common political logic: the mobilization of cultural identity to deflect attention from institutional shortcomings, to consolidate domestic authority, and to assert distinctiveness in a multipolar world where the old ideological certainties of the Cold War no longer organize international competition.
The deeper paradox at the heart of Trump’s civilizationalism is that in claiming to defend Western civilization, he has done more to fracture the Western alliance than any external adversary. What has driven this rupture is not simply policy disagreement but also civilizational provocation. When Vance told European leaders that their greatest threat was internal—their own cultural permissiveness and humanitarian commitments—he was not negotiating with allies but lecturing them about their civilizational deficiency.
This is the inverted face of Trump’s civilizationalism: It claims to champion “the West” but defines it so narrowly and so aggressively that most actual Western nations fail to qualify.
“The West” as Trump and Vance deploy it is not the trans-Atlantic community of liberal democracies but a specific populist-nationalist cultural formation—Christian, ethnically defined, suspicious of pluralism—that excludes precisely the institutions and values—NATO’s mutual defense commitments, the European Union’s multilateral architecture, universal human rights—that gave the postwar West its operational content.
No episode has concentrated Trump’s civilizationalism more vividly than the military assault on Iran. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth framed the operation in explicitly theological terms, invoking “a direct through line from the Old and New Testament Christian gospels to the development of Western civilization.” Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization,” and return Iran to the “Stone Ages.” This is the most extreme expression of civilizational rhetoric in U.S. foreign-policy history.
The response from Europe was striking. France blocked Israeli planes from flying weapons through its airspace during the Iran war. Italy refused to give last-minute permission for U.S. bombers to land in Sicily. Spain denied the United States use of its bases and airspace. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s January state visit to Beijing—after years of frozen Sino-Canadian relations—signaled that traditional U.S. allies will no longer subordinate their interests to Washington’s demands.
There is a further irony in the Trump administration’s civilizational framing of its attack on Iran. The administration violates every requirement of the Christian “just war” doctrine, as Pope Leo himself has clearly stated. The war did not have a “just cause”; there was no imminent Iranian threat to U.S. forces; and the conflict did not meet the “last resort” principle since negotiations were ongoing. What’s more, the declared goal of regime change and civilizational destruction cannot be reconciled with “proportionality” or the aim of restoring peace.
By Hegseth’s own theological standard, the assault on Iran fails the test of civilization that it claims to uphold. The civilizational language serves not as a moral framework but as a substitute for one—a way of elevating a war of choice into a crusade and concealing its absence of legitimate justification beneath the grandeur of millennial conflict.
Tourists stand before massive stone ruins of under a partly cloudy sky. The ancient structure features large stone pillars carved with the bodies of winged bulls with human heads, alongside tall, fluted columns on the right.
A woman poses for a picture before an ancient gate while touring the ruins of Persepolis, the capital of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550 B.C.-330 B.C.), in southern Iran on May 13, 2024. Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images
The most important consequence of Trump’s imperial civilizationalism is the growing multiplexity in world order: not a simple multipolarity among a handful of great powers, but a more complex configuration in which middle powers, regional organizations, nonstate actors, and overlapping institutions each exercise meaningful agency in different domains.
If there is a silver lining in all this, it could be the end of the “West-versus-the rest” divide. Our ideas of the “West” and the “rest” are recently invented, reflecting an artificial divide that has caused much mistrust and conflict. Ending this divide would mean cooperation that cuts across the divide.
This is already materializing. The EU-India trade agreement—described as the “mother” of all trade deals by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen—cuts across the West-rest divide. India is also rapidly expanding trade ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The EU-Mercosur agreement created a 700 million-person market without U.S. participation. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in the Asia-Pacific includes U.S. allies—Australia, Japan, and South Korea—without the United States. The yuan is gaining traction as an energy settlement currency, with Deutsche Bank describing the Iran conflict as a potential “catalyst for erosion in petrodollar dominance.”
These are not anti-American formations born out of a visceral dislike of the United States as a nation. They represent what I have previously called “world-minus-one” cooperation: consequential multilateral action that proceeds despite one power’s absence, with the door left open for future U.S. participation.
