Western Cosmopolitanism
The collapse of the liberal order as a path for American and European Vitalists
“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
– Fredrich Nietzsche
Western civilization is a story of eras of imperial unity punctuated by eras of vicious internecine conflict. The 20th century was among the darkest periods of the fratricidal tendency as a continental civil war ended three centuries of European supremacy and catalyzed the rise of the United States. But from Thermopylae through Poitiers to the gates of Vienna, Western civilization is the story of brothers answering a call to action in face of alien existential threats. Today, the West is hearing that call once again.
President Trump has initiated his new administration by using tariffs as a stick to back American geopolitical demands. Faced with the threat of crippling economic devastation, Colombia, Mexico, and Canada folded immediately. Action against the EU and the UK has not yet been announced, but is coming. These are not purely “trade wars”: Trump’s tariffs are also clearly intended to discipline the hostile governments of foreign nations, and remind them who’s boss. The reality of the power differential leaves no room from ambiguity. There won’t be and cannot be an anti-American trade alliance, but there will be consequences.
The shape of relations between the US and Europe will determine how the West confronts the two key strategic challenges of the next decade: first, China’s emergence as an industrial and technological rival to Western power; and second, the political and ideological collapse of the postwar liberal order. In its wake the West is now a zone of struggle between an ascendant national-vitalist Right and a deteriorating coalition of managerial elites allied with a radically anti-Western Left. The difference in the relative status of forces in the US and Europe is stark. As America has been fighting effectively to infuse itself with new energies, Europe remains drained of its spirit, suppressed and depressed.
America’s attitude has been ambivalent. Since at least the mid-2010s the tendency of the stronger America has been to insist on its own interests over those of its nominal allies: the most extreme recent example being the Nord Stream sabotage, but also Biden’s block of the acquisition of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel. Today, US policy shows a tension between an economic nationalism concerned with protecting American industries and a hawkish attitude towards China requiring international alliances. So long as the confrontation with China is more about economic competition than military conflict, denying Europe and Japan the possibility of productively contributing to a united Western trading zone will make this strategy unsustainable.
Ultimately economic competition with China can’t supply the ideological glue to hold together a post-liberal West. There are, of course, meaningful differences between the West and China, but the nature of the rivalry is mainly material in nature. Attempts to frame the struggle between China and America as a narrative of freedom versus authoritarianism rings hollow in light of the West’s collapse into openly repressive managerial bureaucracies, above all in the United Kingdom.
The real battle for freedom is being waged within the West’s own borders: across the whole space of the West. Notwithstanding its internal divisions, the contemporary West is more integrated and connected than ever before, and facing the same issues. The central topics of elections across the Western world are all the same: mass migration, economic dysfunction, political corruption and ideological suppression.
The 2024 US presidential election wasn’t just a national election. Many Europeans followed it with more passion and intensity than their own. It is not just that America is the land of political spectacle, but because Europeans realize that, given the dominant global position of the United States, it is ultimately in America where their own political futures will be decided.
The conflict at stake in the US election will continue to be fought between vitalist American and managerialist European factions under the new administration. Tensions between America and Europe under President Trump will be used by the Eurocrats to channel blame against America to conceal their own corruption. Some may even welcome a complete rupture between America and Europe, and sell a vision of the dissolution of the West in the name of resurgent pan-European. But this vision is a fantasy.
There are growing opposition voices in Europe and right-wing populist are on the rise among European youth, but they remain a minority. Boomer politics will dominate the continent for years to come. European elites will double down on the authoritarian bureaucratic systems that constitute the foundation of their power and cling to their positions through ideological suppression, replacement migration, and even political violence. Even if Europeans were to somehow magically achieve clarity about their situation, the institutional and cultural inertia is so strong that meaningful reform would take decades to implement. For this reason a young Europe needs the vitality coming from America. But the United States needs Europe too.
America and Europe have reacted in opposite ways to the collapse of the liberal order. America has recognized its decline, but refused to accept it, while Europe has accepted its decline but has yet to recognize it. Most Europeans are still clinging to the misguided belief that their social system is globally admired rather than recognizing their slide into impotence and ultimately poverty. Without a horizon of greatness or a civilizational mission – without zeal – Europe will continue to decline into an economic zone comparable to early twentieth century China – but in many ways worse. It will become increasingly dominated by Muslim countries like Turkey or the Gulf states using commodity cash, control over immigration flows, and established diasporas in European soil to wield increasing political and cultural influence, to the point of becoming a critical geopolitical problem.
Some Americans revel in European decline and bash Europoors, a sentiment that, to be fair, some Europeans mirror in their own attitudes toward Americans. Ultimately, however, the same forces and the same conflicts are present in both territories, and their fates are linked. Victory, in order to be permanent, must be won on both sides of the Atlantic.
Europe matters to America. Europe is America’s first destination for investment, surpassing North America and Asia. The US and the EU have the largest bilateral trading and investing relationship in the world: $1.3 trillion in goods and services, around 30% of global trade. The de-industrialization of Europe undermines America’s long-term interests. An impoverished vassal has no use to anyone – let alone one with no drive to fight. That important truth was recognized during the Cold War, when America helped rebuild Japan and Western Europe from the ashes of World War II, and it should be recognized again.
A dominant vitalist Right on both sides of the Atlantic can advance a shared vision in which both continents grow stronger without undermining each other, setting the West once again on the path to greatness. Europe should seize the opportunities presented by President Trump’s administration without any illusions of challenging Washington’s leadership in order to revitalize itself. Like Japan under Shinzo Abe, Europeans should embrace American demands of taking greater responsibilities for their own military affairs in order to strengthen the militarist aspect of its character, and rebuild its industrial capacities. DOGE’s successes offer momentum and vision to dismantle the managerial state and breathe new life into European society. The elimination of USAID will weaken liberal activist networks across the continent and create space for alternative autonomous nationalist policies.
The contemporary political battle will write the new chapter of Western civilization. There is no possibility of a return to a pre-American Europe, just as America cannot return to its pre-transoceanic past. Multiple generations have now been shaped by a shared Western cultural landscape, forging deeper bonds than any political union could achieve. Short of apocalyptic collapse, the flows of goods, people, and ideas that connect us will persist. Even as the ideological frameworks of 20th-century globalization are put in question, its underlying reality endures.
All of this is continuous with the history of the European spirit which was always sought expansion across seas, frontiers, or the stars. As liberalism fades, a vitalist Right on both sides of the Atlantic can seize the moment to forge a new Western cosmopolitanism. Tensions and rivalries will persist, but tensions can also be dynamic. The critical point is that the collapse of the liberal order opens a path for American and European vitalists to transcend both borderless globalism and isolationist nationalism in favor of an expansive civilizational horizon.