Banner: Second cabinet of Donald Trump in August 2025. Wikipedia Commons
I was in the audience at SOAS, the University of London, on 16 November 2017 when Antonio Guiterres, the United Nations General Secretary, gave a speech on “Counter-terrorism and Human Rights: Winning the first While Upholding Our Values.” His opening point was that one of our big challenges as a human community was that globally the state paradigm had supplanted the human rights paradigm. Now, the rights of people per se were no longer the primary motivator in international dialogue and policy, but instead the rights of states. This meant little action regarding humanitarian crises in other countries because this might lead to foreign intervention in domestic affairs. Most countries, for various reasons, were on board for this. Indeed, in ASEAN it was an almost inviolable principle and cornerstone of ASEAN solidarity. Various authoritarian countries across Eurasia were also onboard given their hugely poor human rights records at home. The United States has now caught up with this bandwagon of ignoring human plight in favour of state immunity and has even gone so far as to stop funding human rights organisations and development programmes globally and almost writing off Africa (until the rare earths issue was driven home to the US by China) diplomatically.
The emphasis on the state paradigm, a lens through which many have interpreted the second Trump administration’s policies, has sometimes been criticised as it is often unclear how much motivation can be sourced to actual America First priorities and how much from personal political and economic ambition. It is also clear that the issues of the political leadership in the White House and those of the MAGA base that put them into power are at odds so far as the former appear to be merely instrumentalizing MAGA concerns to mask other agendas the MAGA base would probably not be happy with. All the steps that would be necessary in a scenario in which one would try to avoid effective scrutiny were rushed through running up to the 2024 election and in the year after. The MAGA base was convinced the mainstream news sources are propaganda outlets for the radical Left, the FBI and Attorney General’s Office have been sidelined and rendered incompetent, damaging files have been held back and in advance of their long delayed release “framed” to avoid intimate, obvious, and long-term connections with Epstein. But let’s not go there at this moment, it is too, by design, distracting from what is perhaps the larger issue.
The new National Security Strategy released by the White House on 4 December 2025 has identified European politics’ arguably main source of contemporary anxieties, the impact of massive immigration from extra-European societies, as the Trump Administration’s main concern in Europe now. In the eyes of the Trump Administration, Europe faces civilizational erasure, it suffers from a European “insecurity” to stand up for their civilizational sovereignty, and it is blinded by its hostility to Russia. Leave aside for the moment again all of the distracting discussions re what Trump was doing in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the supposed business deals with shady Russian operators that Epstein seems to have indicated, the inexplicable favouritism of Russia in any scenario involving Putin. There is no independent or reliable US body to investigate any of these claims anyway right now, even if evidence of anything existed, for the next three years these have to be taken as unfounded rumours. I write this with sincere apologies to Czechoslovakia (oops, I mean the Ukraine) which decided not to fight (oops, I mean is instead bravely standing up to) Nazi Germany (oops, I mean Putin’s Russia).
The shift in the US policy may not just be a sudden political choice. It goes right back to the 1990s thinking in the United States that tried to grapple with how the world order would be shaped after the end of ideology (ala Francis Fukuyama, the End of History), as Samuel Huntington told us in Clash of Civilizations that the world would now coalesce into civilizational blocs and Mary Kaldor suggested in New Wars, that wars would be motivated by challenges to (and not merely influence the politicization of) particular ethnic and religious identities. The Global War on Terror that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York mobilizing existing treaty (state level) infrastructure to fight radical Islam globally, Iran was further demonized by the West, and China’s rapid economic and military growth, as well as its strategic reach with the One Belt One Road Initiative would all seem to have indicated we were on the path globally to the new civilization alliances. But American and other policy makers still interpreted affairs through existing lenses, for the US, the humanitarian paradigm which it used as an arm of policy as the world’s superpower in a unipolar world, and the state paradigm, as it had the power to decided who was in the loop and who was outside, who was legitimate and who was a pariah state. To be effective, this required a balancing act to avoid extremes and so a lot of wiggle room remained. But go too far and Russia is kicked out the G7/G8/G7 (in 2014), sanctions are applied (now, alternative markets no longer make these that meaningful), and the U.S. could always apply military force. As China rose and scholars predicted a Chinese century, some scholars, Stephen Hopgood in the Endtimes of Human Rights (2013), identified the International Human Rights system as intimately and historically tied to American hegemony and as America fell into retreat globally, so too would the IHR agenda.
Over the last decade, however these tools, which were always complicated to wield, seemed ever more outdated. While America responded robustly to the China Challenge by re-entering areas of the world it had neglected, such as Southeast Asia, from the 2010s, it would see support for IHR decreasingly ineffective in pursuit of American policy objectives. Global South thinkers and politicians were depicting IHR-cloaked foreign military and aid interventions as masks for neo-imperialism, a way for the West to control the Global South. Palestinians and others were trying to take Israeli leaders to the International Criminal Court. The consequences of the Arab Spring and the Global war on Terror had contributed millions more to the masses of refugees, many non-white and non-Christian, seeking sanctuary in North Atlantic states. American right-wing activists tried to connect their pro-white agendas with pro-white anxieties in Europe. Although significant MAGA-style movements have emerged there, they have not been a national threat in most cases, until more recent economic problems in Europe, made worse by economic manipulations by Russia (the natural gas embargo) and the United States (the 2025 tariffs).
The newest policy statement by the Trump Administration may be intended as another news headline distraction from the Epstein files by some in the White House, but it is clear that there is a real agenda being pushed by figures more in the shadows. The president may have his eyes fixated on gold while he signs everything put in front of him, but in the background there are powerful people pushing for the intertwining of Russian, Israeli, and US interests. These shadowy interests clearly reflect the kind of civilizational thinking about global politics that Huntington predicted thirty years ago. They seek to erase WOKE-ness, the Decolonizing agenda, diversity and inclusion programmes everywhere, not just in the US, and they identify “their” population as White, their civilisation as Judeo-Christian rather than Abrahamic, and their lands as almost everything in the Global North, East Asia aside. For this group, the war in the Ukraine is nothing more than a tragic loss of white lives. Greenland and Canada need to be annexed, Europe needs to reverse its “erasure” and Russian wealth and strength, as Europe’s grandest march state between itself and East and South Asia, needs to be enhanced in cooperation with the United States and Israel and increasingly, they hope, a newly reawaken Europe. Construction of the Western civilisational bloc has now begun. It would appear, save for some major redirection, that Huntington was right.
Michael Charney is a FORSEA board member.
Mike Charney
SOAS
