Why is the Trump administration talking about ‘Western civilization’?

“Make America Great Again” is President Donald Trump’s famous slogan, but his administration has its eye on a much bigger prize: saving and uniting a “Western civilization” bonded by race and religion.

Europe and the U.S. are “part of one civilization: Western civilization,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at this month’s Munich Security Conference. The societies straddling the North Atlantic are bonded by “centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry.” But that civilization is in crisis, made vulnerable by “mass migration” that is “transforming and destabilizing societies” and putting the West at risk of “civilizational erasure.” Rubio’s speech received a standing ovation from the European leaders at the conference.

Critics saw the speech as a bald declaration of chauvinism. Rubio defined “the West” as a “Christian religious alliance,” said Noa Landau at Haaretz. That “narrow” view is the “last refuge of the racist who rewrites history to kick anyone who doesn’t fit his narrative out of Europe.”

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Race, religion, bloodlines

“Normal citizens” in modern democracies “lack a clear idea of what the West stands for,” said Bret Stephens at The New York Times. The West is “responsible for an outsize share of the blessings of modern society” including science, human rights and democracy. That indicates Western civilization “offers a superior way of life,” especially compared to societies that “respond to mass demonstrations with mass murder.” Those values make the West the “only civilization worth defending not just for the sake of those already in it but for everyone.” That is why Rubio’s speech “deserved a standing ovation.”

There is “grave danger” in casting Europe and its former colonies as the “sole producers of liberty, dignity, morality and accountable government,” said Doug Saunders at The Globe and Mail. Besides, what we call “the West” has “never been a closed and pure bloodline.” Democratic values are the “entire world’s better values.”

Sidestepping tradition

Rubio’s speech was “logically contradictory,” said Daniel W. Drezner at his Drezner’s World Substack. The secretary of state’s definition of “civilization” was based “exclusively in Christianity and white European heritage.” Meanwhile, it sidestepped the “classical liberal tradition” at the core of “civic nationalism” in the West. That tradition has given Western societies the ability to absorb people and ideas “from across the globe.” Rubio was thus asserting civilizational superiority “while denying the very elements of the civilization that make it dynamic.”

Today’s Europe is different “from the one the Trump administration says it wants to be friends with,” said The New York Times. “New arrivals and rising secularization” are transforming the continent’s racial and religious makeup. Christianity is declining across Europe, while a “decade-long influx of migrants from the Middle East” has increased the number of Muslims. Despite the ovation at Munich, there is little appetite for Trumpist mass deportations. The MAGA culture war is “not ours,” said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the conference.