The New Right's Grand Strategy After Trump

Washington's foreign-policy establishment still assumes the American right will eventually revert to some version of Reaganite primacy once Donald Trump leaves the scene, but Leonard Schuette argues in Foreign Affairs that a genuinely different doctrine is taking shape instead. He calls it “civilizationism” — a vision of the West not as a set of universal values open to any nation willing to adopt them, but as a bounded, white, patriarchal and Christian civilizational space defined by geography and shared ancestry. Where the old consensus sought global primacy and the spread of liberal democracy, this successor doctrine rejects universal ambition altogether, along with the entanglements liberal internationalism has long imposed on American sovereignty. Schuette traces the idea through a rising cohort of New Right intellectuals and officials who treat Trump less as an aberration than as a rough first draft of a more coherent civilizational realignment still to come. In their telling, Washington's rivals — Russia, China, even parts of the Gulf — are not existential enemies to be confronted everywhere but fellow civilizational blocs to be accommodated within their own spheres. That logic would license precisely the kind of concessions on Ukraine, Taiwan or NATO's eastern flank that today's Republican foreign-policy establishment still treats as unthinkable. If a post-Trump generation of Republican leaders inherits this doctrine rather than discards it, Schuette warns, it would not just adjust American foreign policy at the margins — it would replace the framework Washington has used to define its role in the world since 1945.