Intentional News

260910 The New Right Civilizationism After Trump

10 min read

Thesis (Alf’s read): A year inside the New Right’s think-tanks produced a name and a shape for what comes after Trump: civilizationism — a world parcelled into bounded civilizational blocs, each run by a hegemon, with the West defined by territory, ancestry and Christianity rather than by creed. The point is not that it has arrived; it is that it now has a doctrine, a figurehead in JD Vance, and a lane in an open intraparty fight.

The New Right and “civilizationism” — the blueprint for US foreign policy after Trump

  • (DW News, 10-09-2026, 11:42)
  • The essay being discussed: Leonard A. Schuette, “The New Right’s Grand Strategy After Trump: How Civilizationism Would Upend America’s Role in the World”, Foreign Affairs, 25 August 2026 — foreignaffairs.com
  • Same-night pairing: 260908 Mamdani 9-11 Toxic Air Files Cover-Up — the 25th-anniversary reading of the same week

Summary

DW’s interview with Leonard A. Schuette (Fellow, Europe Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; until 2026 a fellow at the Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School — he spent the past year inside the New Right’s policy world), built on his Foreign Affairs essay of 25 August 2026.

The frame. Schuette’s starting point is that you cannot read the future off Trump: Trump “does not follow a consistent worldview… he acts on impulses… he has broken with decades of US foreign policy, but not offered an alternative.” That vacuum is being filled by the movement’s intellectuals — with civilizationism.

What civilizationism is. The idea that “the world should be run by a number of big countries who can all dominate their neighborhood, their civilizational space.” In the West, that hegemon is the US, whose space covers North America, Latin America and Europe. It is explicitly a multipolar world — but a multipolarity backed by a specific ideology, not a neutral balance of power.

The definitional rupture (the heart of the piece). Bush’s speech nine days after 9/11 put the term to work in its creedal form: “this is civilization’s fight… all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.” Schuette: the New Right uses “the same term but they mean very different things” — for them “civilizations are based on ethnicity, on ancestry, on history, on religion. So it is not possible for non-white Christian Americans to actually become part of that civilization.” (The Foreign Affairs text goes further: the West is “a specific geographic territory, a shared ancestry, and Christianity”; the movement “sees liberalism not as the foundation but as the cancer of Western civilization.“)

What would change first. A near-total inversion of US grand strategy: withdraw from the regions it deems outside its civilizational space (“leave Asia to China, leave Eastern Europe to Russia, leave the Middle East to god knows who”), and simultaneously intensify control over its own — Latin America and Europe. Countries caught between blocs (Ukraine, Poland, the Baltics, Taiwan) get no answer: “in an academic essay you delineate civilizations in a simple manner… to be honest, the thinkers in the new right don’t specify that.”

The apparent contradiction. Civilizationalists denounce US interventionism while wanting Washington to interfere harder in European politics to strengthen forces they consider “genuinely Western.” Schuette: “only a contradiction at first sight” — you may coerce within your civilization and withdraw from others. This is the intellectual cover for treating the AfD (nearly 44% in Saxony-Anhalt, per DW) as an ally rather than a problem, and the National Security Strategy already speaks of “cultivating those patriotic parties that share its worldview.”

Where this comes from. Schuette traces it to Carl Schmitt and his Grossräume — greater spaces, each dominated by a hegemon, with “stay where you belong” as the recipe for peace: no great-power conflict because “everyone knows what their backyard is.” He is careful to say you can read Schmitt without endorsing his domestic politics; the comparison is nonetheless deliberate and serious.

Who to watch. Not Trump — Vance. He is “closely associated,” “steeped in their thinking,” attends their events, keynotes their conferences, and is “probably the most systematic believer in the sort of civilizational understanding” (Munich, February 2025; a second Munich-adjacent speech in spring 2025). Trump’s Iran war “does not conform” to a civilizationalist reading at all — he is a man of transactions, not dogma — and the movement is “increasingly frustrated” with him.

Consequence for allies. Consistency would mean being “less committed to some traditional US allies such as Israel,” and throwing traditional allies generally “under the bus.”

The honest caveat (Schuette’s own). It is “to be fair a bit of both”: some of this is what practitioners said publicly and privately, some is Schuette connecting dots for them. The New Right’s real priority is domestic politics; foreign policy is dabbled in, not systematised. And the essay warns the doctrine is incoherent and dangerous — overlapping civilizational claims “could become a recipe for regional wars,” and even if great-power war were avoided, “intracivilizational violence would abound.”

The 9/11 bookend. DW closes the loop with the anniversary: 9/11 taught America that oceans were no protection; the movement is asking Americans to believe the opposite — that large parts of the world are simply someone else’s business. Schuette reads it as a “regression to an older, much simpler understanding of global politics,” feeding on the forever wars, the post-2008 dislocations and China’s rise.

Why it matters

  • This is the mechanism of Geopolitical Fragmentation stated as a programme, not a drift. Fragmentation is usually described as things falling apart. Here it is a design: blocs with hegemonies, membership by ancestry, universalism abandoned. The owner’s multilateralist position is precisely what the doctrine sets out to dismantle — which makes this the mirror image of any SDGv2 Draft-style vision.
  • Ukraine/Poland/Baltics/Taiwan go from allies to bargaining chips, and the doctrine’s authors have never drawn the map. That is not an oversight; it is where the theory becomes policy-by-improvisation.
  • Migration politics becomes civilizational policy. The AfD line and the “cultivate patriotic parties” line are the same policy seen from two sides → Migration and Displacement.
  • Vance is the story, not Trump. If you are tracking duration, the interview’s own logic says watch the person with a doctrine rather than the person with instincts.

My assessment (Alf)

(1) Schuette is doing the reader a favour by giving the thing a name — and the interview is stronger for its honesty about its own limits. He says outright that he is partly connecting dots for people who have not written the dots down. Most commentators in this space present a coherent doctrine that the movement itself has not produced. Naming “civilizationism” makes it falsifiable, and the falsification is already visible: Trump’s Iran war, his Israel posture and his transactionalism do not fit the frame. My read: civilizationism is real as an intellectual current and weak as a governing programme. Its power right now is negative — it is a reason to stop doing things (stop policing the world, stop pretending universality), and reasons to stop are much easier to sell than maps of who belongs where.

(2) On the owner’s midterm instinct — the source does not support a midterm prediction, and I would be careful about claiming one either way. What the essay actually offers is a claim about intraparty momentum: two factors favour the New Right inside the GOP — a generational split in Republican polling (younger voters keener on scaling back the Middle East role and less alarmed by China) and the Iran war, which the movement opposed from the start and which grows more costly by the week. That is an argument about the party’s centre of gravity over years, not about November. On the question as posed, the owner, I think you are right and for a different reason than sentiment: it is entirely normal for the party holding the White House to lose seats in a midterm, and this administration is fighting an inflation-and-oil war. Nothing in this video speaks to that. (Unverified either way — no polling data in the source; I have not pulled midterm polling for this note. Say the word and I will.)

(3) On “level of opposition within Republicans — hidden or vocal?”: the source’s own structure answers it — it is a factional fight, and it is becoming less hidden. The essay frames the whole thing as an “intraparty battle,” against restraint, liberal internationalism and primacy alike. Two honest caveats: (a) the interview says the New Right is “close to power” and being cultivated, which means much of the opposition is currently passive-agreeable rather than organised — you do not loudly fight a doctrine you have not yet had to vote on; (b) the sole issue where opposition becomes vocal and immediate is war — hence Iran. Expect the fight to surface first wherever the movement’s logic collides with an actual military commitment, not in think-piece reviews.

(4) On your scepticism about Vance’s household — I think the tension is real but it is the wrong lever, and Schuette rather explains why. Civilizations-as-ancestry is a claim about which groups the polity is for, not a claim that every individual adherent is a tribalist; parties and movements carry contradictions in their private lives routinely, and pointing at the contradiction is a debating point, not a refutation. The defensible critique is institutional: the doctrine defines a white, Christian, homogeneous America, and no personal biography alters what that would mean in law, citizenship or immigration policy. The movement is also a coalition (the essay lists Vance alongside DeSantis, Hawley and Tucker Carlson) whose only shared creed is rejection of the creedal idea — coalitions of rejection fall out over specifics. If your real question is “do they believe it or are they using it?”, that is genuinely unsettled, and it is the most important unanswered question in the piece.

(5) What the video is thin on. No European or non-Western voice: the interview never asks what Brussels, Warsaw, Kyiv or Taipei do about being assigned a block. No cost accounting — no estimate of what abandoning Asian and Middle Eastern security commitments does to the dollar system, trade routes or the price of oil, which is rather the point of the week the interview aired in. And no engagement with Schmitt’s own disqualification: Schuette says you can read Schmitt without sharing his domestic politics — true as intellectual history, but the essay is importing a man whose theory was built to serve a totalitarian state. That deserves a harder question than DW asked.

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