Over the course of President Donald Trump’s second term, many in his coalition have been disappointed by his decidedly interventionist approach to international affairs. Once he leaves office, one distinguished security expert warns, those in the “New Right” with a stricter ideological agenda will redouble their efforts to “upend America’s role in the world” even more than Trump has.

That view comes from Leonard Schuette, an international security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, who wrote in Foreign Affairs — the journal published by the Council on Foreign Relations — on Wednesday that “the intellectual movement that provided the ideological fuel for U.S. President Donald Trump’s rise to power, the New Right, is forging a new contender” to traditional American grand strategy. Schuette calls that framework “civilizationism.”

As Schuette explains, “References to Western civilization permeate strategy documents and speeches by key members of the administration. Vice President JD Vance set the tone in his February 2025 speech at the Munich Security Conference, stressing the ‘threat from within’ to the fundamental values that characterize ‘our shared civilization.’ The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy warned of ‘civilizational erasure.’ This January, at Davos, Trump emphasized ‘the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization’; the next month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on the United States’ transatlantic partners to ‘renew the greatest civilization in human history.’” Vance’s Munich address, delivered at the annual gathering of world leaders and security officials that has long served as a barometer of transatlantic ties, drew wide attention at the time for directing its sharpest criticism at European governments’ domestic policies rather than at external threats.

Schuette argues that this view differs from the concept of Western civilization long held by many in the United States, which he says is “rooted in a shared set of principles that anyone, regardless of origin, can espouse, such as constitutional democracy, liberty, and equality.” For thinkers on the New Right, he writes, “the West is defined by a specific geographic territory, a shared ancestry, and Christianity.” He adds that “rather than aspiring to global leadership,” they “reject the universal ambitions of primacy and the constraints imposed on U.S. sovereignty by liberal internationalism.”

He also says civilizationism is not the same as Trump’s own approach to foreign policy. “Although the Trump administration often speaks the language of civilizationism,” Schuette writes, “Trump’s behavior is primarily motivated by personal grievance, transactional impulses, and a private interest in maximizing the wealth of his kin and clique.” He says the clearest divide between the administration’s foreign policy and civilizationism is in the Middle East. “Contrary to his campaign promises, Trump did not retrench from the region, instead launching what he initially billed as a regime-change war against Iran. His attitude toward Israel — mostly treating it as a privileged ally — resembles that of neoconservative hawks such as the late U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.”

Schuette says civilizationists reject those neoconservative positions. He writes that if Washington adopted a consistent civilizational grand strategy, it would “completely upend U.S. foreign policy” and could lead to “previously unthinkable concessions” to American rivals. He says it would pose “a historic challenge to the already battered transatlantic relationship” by granting Russia de facto control over eastern Europe or treating Moscow as part of a common Western civilization while “agitating more openly against sitting governments in Europe.” He adds that other alliances would also suffer: “Tolerating Chinese regional hegemony would throw East Asian allies under the bus, and disengaging from the Middle East would leave Israel to fend for itself.” Transatlantic ties have already been strained during Trump’s second term by disputes over European defense spending, trade, and Washington’s posture toward Russia.

He further warns that civilizationism could be contradictory and violent. “Civilizational claims could overlap and become a recipe for regional wars,” Schuette writes. “By defining other civilizations as alien cultures, a civilizationist grand strategy might fuel antagonism rather than tolerate differences. Even European far-right parties seem increasingly uninterested in being so overtly backed by their U.S. counterparts. And even if great-power conflict could be avoided, intracivilizational violence would abound. Japan, Pakistan, and Poland would be unlikely to accept regional hegemony by China, India, or Russia, respectively.”

Those divides have already surfaced in intra-Republican disputes over Ukraine aid, NATO burden-sharing, and tariffs on European allies — flashpoints that show how contested the party’s foreign policy direction has become. With Trump’s reign soon to end, Schuette concludes that “the American right wing’s ideological future, and the future of U.S. grand strategy, is wide open. The Trump administration has broken with the bipartisan post–Cold War consensus on liberal hegemony but has failed to offer a coherent alternative. In the coming contest to define Washington’s foreign policy, civilizationism is poised to be a central contender.”