Restoring a Hollowed-Out Western Alliance

The transatlantic alliance has long been undermined by Western elites' weakening commitment to their religious and cultural heritage. Harsh reality is beginning to change that.

The argument: If we forget who we are, we stand to lose the will to defend ourselves, against enemies without and within; restoring our cultural memory is essential to restoring the West.

WHY IT MATTERS

In Warsaw in 2017 President Donald Trump posed the central question facing the transatlantic alliance: Does the West have “the will to survive….the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?” Trump’s point was that the West had become so submerged in postmodern confusion that we risked forgetting who we are: a successful—a blessed—civilization rooted in Judaism and Christianity, a precious heritage worth defending.

Nine years later, at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio attributed our transatlantic troubles to the same predicament: many Western elites harbor doubts whether the West is worth defending. As Rubio said, such uncertainty is fatal: at the outset, we must know “what exactly we are defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; …a way of life.” Rubio urged America’s allies to remember who they are: “we are defending a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history…Acting together….we will …deter the forces of civilizational erasure that menace America and Europe.”

Despite the West’s continuing identity crisis, solid first steps toward revival of the transatlantic alliance are underway. Harsh reality has forced a strategic rethink in the Western alliance. Trump’s rhetoric and policies—and much more so, Russia’s belligerence—have shocked European NATO members into radically upping their defense spending. The same two factors have helped European leaders that they can no longer rely on America while neglecting their own defense. Finland and Sweden have joined NATO, Germany is strengthening its military capabilities, and NATO’s northeastern flank—Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland—has taken “decisive, coordinated steps to reinforce border protection and defense.” The alliance is now working to turn higher spending into real, dramatically increased military capability.

"Risk of war, violence and decline are constants of human history; "peace through strength" is the only coherent response."

On the ideological front, the steadily growing popularity of civilizational conservatism throughout Europe, in the form of the populist right wing, is perhaps the greatest sign of the continent’s resilience. For all their differences, what binds these forces together—Germany’s AfD, Britain’s Reform UK, France’s National Rally, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, and others- is, writ large, the desire to reassert national sovereignty and protect the various national manifestations of the Western way of life in Europe. These civilizational forces—for all their flaws—are countering the stubborn determination of establishment elites, including nearly all the established parties, to cling to the debilitating dream of advancing peace by relinquishing national sovereignty to the supranationalist EU.

To endure, the West needs two things: a domestic consensus in favor of its own civilization for political stability, and sufficient military strength to deter external enemies. As we pursue domestic policies that revive the West’s Judeo-Christian moral foundations, we must not forget the crucial importance of maintaining a strong defense. Both require clarity about what we are defending, and why. As Rubio argued, we must recover the resolve ,, to uphold the “memories, traditions and faith of our ancestors as a sacred inheritance” that binds Europe and North America together.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Risk of war, violence and decline are ineradicable constants of human history. In this civilizational moment, “peace through strength” is the only coherent response— requiring both military strength against threats without, and civilizational strength to counter threats within. Adherents of the Judeo-Christian West must engage on these fronts, and work hard to encourage the positive trends we are seeing.