Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy peddles the fear of Europe’s “civilizational erasure” as if it were a sober assessment of global realities; in truth, it is a symptom of a neo‑nationalist project that fuses historical amnesia with identitarian alarmism. Read through the lens of contemporary research on nationalism and civilizational politics, this document – and the performances surrounding it – are less an analysis of the international order than an attempt to re‑inscribe a very particular, exclusionary vision of “the West” into that order.
The language of “civilizational erasure” explicitly echoes the Huntingtonian imaginary of the world as a mosaic of coherent, bounded civilizations, locked in quasi‑natural competition. Yet the scholarly consensus around Huntington is, by now, deeply critical: his civilizational blocks are shown to be historically constructed, internally heterogeneous, and politically instrumental – a way of naturalising contingent conflicts as destiny. What we see in the Trump administration’s strategy is not a naïve recycling of Huntington, but a “weaponised” version of civilizationalism: civilization is no longer a descriptive macro‑category, but a normatively charged boundary marker used to hierarchise allies and legitimise intervention in their domestic politics.
This is precisely the pattern identified in the emerging literature on “civilizational politics”, which argues that civilizational talk today functions less as a grand theory of world order than as a flexible repertoire for recoding familiar struggles – over migration, gender, secularism, sovereignty – in existential terms. When the NSS casts Europe as a space on the brink of becoming “unrecognisable” unless it corrects its course on migration, identity, and sovereignty, it is performing what scholars describe as civilizational boundary‑making: drawing a thick line between a supposedly authentic “Europe” and its internal others, and positioning the United States as arbiter of that boundary.
The political dramatisation of this move was on full display at the Munich Security Conference. In 2025, Vice President J.D. Vance offered what one might call a paradigmatic speech of neo‑nationalist civilizationalism. Rather than focusing on Russia or China, Vance declared Europe’s “threat from within” – mass immigration, liberal speech regimes, and an allegedly self‑hating elite – to be the central security problem, suggesting that a continent unwilling to defend its “civilizational inheritance” could not be a reliable partner. Linking the conference rhetorically to an attack by an Afghan immigrant on the eve of the meeting, he framed migration not as a policy challenge but as a civilizational toxin, and intimated that those who criticise such language are themselves complicit in Europe’s decline.
From the perspective of nationalism studies, Vance’s performance sits squarely in what scholars describe as twenty‑first‑century neo‑nationalism: a politics that claims to rescue an endangered ethnically coded “people” against cosmopolitan elites, minorities, and global institutions. It is “neo‑tribal” in the sense that it foregrounds cultural sameness, historical grievance, and affective loyalty over institutional commitments and civic principles, but it is also transnational – appealing, in Munich, to an imagined community of “real Europeans” over the heads of elected European governments. His highly publicised meeting with the German radical right was not a diplomatic accident; it was a practical demonstration of what civilizational politics looks like when it is allowed to direct alliance management.
A year later, Marco Rubio’s address to the same conference seemed, at first glance, to offer a corrective: the tone was smoother, the vocabulary more familiar to liberal ears. Rubio invoked a “great civilization” with shared legacies of liberty and constitutionalism, insisted that America wanted a “robust” Europe rather than “polite caretakers of managed decline”, and spoke of intertwined destinies rather than imminent collapse. Yet the underlying structure of his argument remained firmly within the civilizational frame: he repeated the lexicon of “erasure”, demographic danger, and a West that must rediscover its cultural confidence to resist authoritarian challengers and uncontrolled migration. In sociological terms, Rubio’s speech exemplifies how civilizational discourse can be “normalized” and mainstreamed: stripped of its more openly apocalyptic imagery, but still working to narrow the range of legitimate futures for Europe to those that conform to a particular, conservative reading of Western identity.
Set against empirical research on national identity, this rhetoric is strikingly at odds with what we know about how identities actually change. Studies in political psychology and comparative politics show that national attachments – the sense of belonging, the emotional salience of national symbols – are relatively stable over time, but that the content of national identity (ethnic vs. civic, exclusive vs. inclusive) is historically malleable and politically contested. European states, in particular, have undergone significant shifts toward more civic and plural conceptions of nationhood in the post‑war period, driven by decolonisation, labour migration, European integration, and rights‑based constitutionalism; these shifts are incomplete and uneven, but they are empirically demonstrable. Neo‑nationalist actors like Vance and Rubio are thus not defending a timeless civilizational core; they are trying to reverse decades of gradual re‑interpretation by re‑ethnicising the meaning of “Europe” and “the West”.
The concept of “identity entrepreneurs” is useful here: political leaders, parties, and media that actively reinterpret national and civilizational narratives to mobilise support. Munich, in this framework, becomes a stage for elite identity entrepreneurship: American officials using the language of civilization to tell Europeans who they “really” are – and should be – while empowering domestic actors who share that reading. This aligns with a broader pattern identified in the literature on the “neo‑nationalist order”: governing coalitions that seek to hollow out liberal‑democratic institutions from within are increasingly networked across borders, sharing frames, strategies, and legitimation scripts.
The civilizational framing also obscures the extent to which “the West” itself has always been internally plural and conflictual. Critical engagements with Huntington, and with more recent right‑wing civilizationalism, insist that what is presented as a unified civilizational story is in fact the result of selective memory: empire without anti‑colonial struggle, Christianity without heresy and dissent, Enlightenment without its own exclusions. To speak of “civilizational erasure” because European societies are becoming more religiously and ethnically diverse is to treat these exclusions as essential, rather than contingent and contestable, components of Western identity – and to declare projects of inclusion and pluralisation as, by definition, civilizationally suspect.
From an academic standpoint, then, the problem with the Trump administration’s strategy, and with the Vance‑Rubio axis of rhetoric, is not only normative but analytical. Their discourse collapses complex, multi‑layered processes – demographic change, policy failures, socio‑economic inequality, institutional fatigue – into a single, civilizational narrative of decline, in which diversity stands in for decadence and contestation stands in for collapse. It forecloses the possibility, highlighted in more optimistic strands of nationalism research, that national and even civilizational identities can be pluralised rather than simply defended or lost, and that democratic polities can renegotiate the terms of belonging without dissolving into chaos.
Seen in this light, the invocation of “civilizational erasure” is less an empirical warning than a strategic choice. It is a way of denying the legitimacy of alternative identity projects – multicultural, post‑national, cosmopolitan – by declaring them incompatible with civilization itself. It generates a permanent state of emergency that justifies the shrinking of rights, the policing of borders and speech, and the re‑hierarchisation of allies according to their conformity to a particular civilizational ideal.
Anyone who takes the current debate seriously is therefore compelled to a double clarification. On the one hand, national identities and civilizational self‑descriptions are historically deep‑rooted and cannot be engineered away by technocratic fiat; they will continue to structure perceptions of threat and solidarity in international politics. On the other hand, they are malleable interpretive frameworks, subject to contestation and capable of accommodating pluralism without disintegrating. The task of scholarship – and of responsible politics – is not to endorse the myth of a fragile, monolithic civilization under siege, but to analyse and defend the democratic capacity of societies to renegotiate who “we” are without turning that renegotiation into a pretext for permanent cultural war. In that sense, the real danger today is not Europe’s civilizational erasure, but the erosion of its ability to imagine a civilization that does not depend on exclusion to know itself.
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