Opinion C Raja Mohan writes: Has Trumpism broken the Collective West?

Even as it talked of the “Collective West”, Russia never stopped seeking to divide Europe from America. China, too, repeatedly probes the daylight between the US and its Asian allies. An American retrenchment from Europe and Asia and the breakdown of its post-War alliances has until now been the stuff of dreams in Moscow and Beijing. It is tempting to believe that the current crisis in the West has made that dream more realistic. After all, Trump wants to reduce America’s security commitments to Europe and is eager to “get along well” with China’s Xi Jinping.

Before we get carried away with the idea that the “Collective West” is collapsing, it is important to note what the West is and how it came to the current crisis. The West represents a political geography that shares common liberal values — capitalism, democracy and individual rights. Initially limited to a small region in the far western corner of the Eurasian landmass, it gained ground over several centuries.

Although the West shared common values, the interests of different sovereignties within it were always at odds with each other, except for the last 80 years since World War II. The idea of a “warring West” sounds incredible today, but arguments and civil wars have been very much part of history. Many of the world’s advances were driven by internal battles within the West — the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the separation of church and state, for example.

These wars have also produced massive violence outside the West as European empires competed with each other for resources, markets, and political influence. The Western powers nearly destroyed each other in the First and Second World Wars. Although the US and allied powers had to collaborate with the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, that alliance fell apart quickly after the war. The fear of communism — Soviet Russia’s geographic expansion as well as the threat to the old order within European societies — saw America and Europe unite under US leadership.

That’s when the idea of the modern West established itself as a geopolitical and economic entity under the American aegis. This involved many international institutions — multilateral ones like the United Nations, alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the Five Eyes intelligence sharing among Anglo-Saxon powers, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

If President John F Kennedy said America must pay any price or bear any burden to lead the world, Trump and his followers are saying that the cost and consequences of American leadership are no longer acceptable. This is an argument that few took seriously when articulated by Trump in his first term. But he has come back empowered this time and is having his way. He has turned conventional wisdom on its head by demanding an end to the war in Ukraine, initiating direct peace negotiations with Russia over the heads of Kyiv and Brussels, and signalling the intent to bring Moscow back to “Western” institutions like the Group of Seven (G7).

Trump also argues that the trading order created at America’s initiative no longer benefits American working people and must be replaced by a new framework for bilateral trade deals. To complete the trinity, Trump’s America challenges the liberal hegemony that has taken extreme forms in the 21st century and imposes a set of new values — from open borders to gender identity, controlling hate speech and mitigating climate change — on Western societies.

Trump won that argument at home, at least for now, and Vance has taken that battle to Europe with his speech at the Munich Security Conference last week. He accused European mainstream parties of trying to keep the right wing out of power despite their success in elections, and censoring their views in the name of controlling hate speech. Meanwhile, Trump ally and tech titan Elon Musk has been campaigning in favour of right-wing parties in Europe.

The argument in the West is only partly about America and Europe disputing policies on trade, tariffs, defence, and even territory (Greenland). But it is more than that. It is about conservative forces from across national borders within the West coming together to challenge liberal orthodoxy on various issues. There are signs of a “conservative international” or (Con-intern), much like the “communist international” (Comintern) in the first half of the 20th century, or “liberal internationalism” in the second half of the 20th century. Like its predecessors, the “Con-intern” is likely to leave an important policy legacy for the world on European security, global trade.

It is not clear if the current contest within the West will take America and Europe to the “natural state” of divergence that has always existed or a reworking of the security, trade, and social ties that bound them together all these years. Although both Moscow and Beijing denounce the “Collective West” led by the US in their propaganda wars, both are eager to strike deals with Washington. Unlike in the past, when India seemed ready to lap up the anti-Western propaganda from Moscow and Beijing, Delhi today is wiser and sees through this Russian and Chinese rhetoric. Like Moscow and Beijing, Delhi seeks a grand bargain with the Western powers and is prepared to engage with the emerging contradictions within the West to secure India’s national interests.

The writer is contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express