Amitav Acharya

Professor at American University, Washington DC, and author of The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West (Basic Books 2025)

Soon after taking office in his first term, Donald Trump declared, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Now, early into his second term, it is clear that the biggest threat to the West and the world order led by it, is actually from Trump himself.

In recent decades, the main threat to the West came from Russia and China, but even so in a more slow motion and uncertain way. But in a few months, Trump has inflicted greater and more decisive blow.

While America’s rise to global power rode on the back of European or Western dominance, Trump’s policy to ‘make America great again’ comes at the expense of the West.

Trump is doing this in multiple ways, but the most important is his assault institutions and alliances on which the idea of the West has rested, starting with NATO, the signature militant platform of the West. Before his re-election, Trump had threatened to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want to” to NATO members who don’t meet the defense spending targets set by NATO. It has now become all-encompassing. His Vice President JD Vance has attacked Europe’s values, degraded by intolerance of “free speech”, by which he meant right wing positions that attack immigration and respect for cultural diversity. The Trump administration has so far refused to give Europe a seat at the table to negotiate over Ukraine’s future.

Add to this, Trump’s taunt to incorporate Canada as America’s fifty-first province, and his threat to take over Greenland from Denmark in “one way or other,” are further blows to Western unity, as both countries are founding NATO members.

Europe is responding to Trump by increasing defense spending and offering more assistance to Ukraine. But some East European countries, like Hungary may not join Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy and pursue separate security ties with the US and even Russia. Moreover, Trump’s attack on European liberalism will embolden the European and Western far right and further divide the West internally.

The crisis in transatlantic relations will reverberate around the world and weaken the West as a global force. Even if its self-reliance project does not go too far, building a substantially enhanced military capacity will stretch Europe’s resources, and end the EU’s role as the largest provider of international humanitarian aid in the world. Combined with Trump’s massive roll back of US foreign aid, the West’s position and prestige as the leader in development and humanitarian assistance, a major source of its global influence, will be compromised.  

In pursuing his stated aim to “rule the world,” Trump has adopted a divide and rule strategy, a classic instrument of many Western imperial powers, especially Britain. Using both economic and military coercion, he could separate nations between those who are making deals with the US like India and those who won’t such as China. And in cultivating right wing populists from El Salvador to Italy, he is sharpening a global ideological divide as well.

Trump is also empowering hitherto challengers to West, China and Russia. He is deflecting attention from China’s own controversial policies such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which pales in comparison with Trump’s demand for critical minerals from Ukraine and his covetous eye on Greenland – motivated by territorial size, strategic location and natural resources, pretty much the dams reasons that are used to explain China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. He is making China’s own divide and rule approach in Southeast Asia appear mild.

Trump is also letting Russia off the hook following its invasion of Ukraine and helping to strengthen Moscow’s global position. He has rejected Ukraine’s demand to gain NATO membership and wants to invite Russia back to the G7 from which it had been ousted since 2014 over its annexation of Crimea. He is most likely to ease sanctions on Russia as part a deal that allows Russia to keep territories it grabbed from Ukraine. If such a deal materializes, it will not only irreversibly legitimize Putin’s geopolitical ambitions but would be a fatal blow to Europe.

Some might hope that Trump’s policies against Western allies can be reversed under a democratic or republican president. Trump’s tariff war continues to play out, and whether he carries it to the fullest extent or not, the damage to the idea of the West is done. Indeed, as the President the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen, put it, “the west as we knew it no longer exists.” The victory of the Liberal Party campaigning on an anti-Trump platform in the Canadian national election shows that the country’s revulsion against the US is for a long haul, and will not be easily healed.

However, it is worth asking if, while weakening the West, will Trump’s policies strengthen the US? Not necessarily. Not only would America’s friends and partners worldwide have less faith in US reliability as a security partner; they may also wonder what resources and other benefits the US might coerce out of them in return for past or continuing security assistance. Such concerns will weaken the US alliance system, one area in which the US and the West enjoy a significant edge over its competitors, Russia and China.

While countries such as Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, India or Singapore are not going to cut security ties with the US, they and other countries would be tempted to reduce dependence on the US and improve ties with America’s rivals. Trump’s foreign policy could also fuel policies of hedging or non-alignment, as alternatives to relying on either the US or its rivals, China and Russia. Faced with doubts over US leadership and support, the EU could expand partnerships with others leading non-Western nations such as Turkey, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, while Americas ties with them regress.

Moreover, Trump’s policies could strengthen momentum for cooperation without the US such as the expanded BRICS grouping. It will enhance the appeal of regional arrangements like Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in Asia-Pacific that excludes the US, but where its allies, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, are actively engaged, as well as that of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) which brings together China with India, Britain, Germany and Italy, but which the US has boycotted. Such “world-minus-the US” cooperation, already seen in the Law of the Sea, International Criminal Court, and the Paris Climate Treaty, would gain more traction in the Trumpian world.

In short, Trump’s foreign policy undercuts not only Western dominance, but also America’s own global influence. It might encourage different combinations of rising powers, middle powers, regional influencers, and arrangements across the West-Rest divide. This framework, which I call a global multiplex, hastens the arrival of both a post-American as well as a post-Western world.

A version of this essay appeared in Project Syndicate Quarterly, June 15, 2025, https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/trump-foreign-policy-damage-to-west-opens-door-for-the-rest-by-amitav-acharya-2025-06

https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/trump-foreign-policy-damage-to-west-opens-door-for-the-rest-by-amitav-acharya-2025-06