Few documents have captured the attention of foreign policy elites like the 2025 US National Security Strategy (NSS). Released quietly in early December, it quickly prompted praise in Moscow and Beijing, while provoking dismay and even anger among America’s allies in Western Europe and beyond.
At its core, the NSS lays out a civilizational view of world politics. The world should be seen as a series of civilizational complexes centered around great powers that anchor their civilizations and exercise hegemony in their regions. The West is not just a geographic location: it is a distinct historical and cultural sphere. Crucially, this civilization is threatened less by external military threats than it is from dangers within — the corrosive culture and politics of liberalism and the economic and social dislocations and depredations of market globalism. This is a strikingly divergent and, in many ways, troubling vision of world politics. The universalism underpinning liberal globalism and human rights is explicitly rejected. Developing ties between sovereign states united by a common civilization and exclusionary cultures is its priority.
Despite the NSS’s notoriety, the ideas put forward in it are not new. They were declared by Donald Trump in 2016 and proclaimed by J. D. Vance in his widely noted speech at the Munich Security Conference, eleven months before the NSS saw the light of day. Nor are they uniquely American. Civilizationalism is the dominant geopolitical discourse of radical conservatives across Europe. To understand the power and popularity of civilizationalism, we need to see it as a political strategy as well as a set of ideas. Empowering radical conservative actors at home, and supporting novel strategies abroad, civilizationalism is part of a broader attempt to fundamentally restructure the international order.
Civilizationalism represents a form of transnational politics operating in different but mutually reinforcing ways in domestic and…
Auteur: Michael C. Williams
