Without America, ‘the West’ Will Splinter, Wither and Die
The West is not a geography but an ideal worth defending, in Ukraine or anywhere. Donald Trump doesn’t understand that.
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Photographer: Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump is disrupting so many institutions and norms, it’s hard to keep track of what matters and what doesn’t. Is the chaos merely performative (befitting a celebrity who got his big break on reality television)? Or does it amount to a historic rupture? Much suggests the latter, because Trump is well on the way to burying a large idea: that of “the West.”
Like the Global South, the West is not primarily a geographical notion, for its European and North American trunks have antipodean, Asian and other branches. It is instead, as the German historian Heinrich August Winkler defines it, a “normative” project — an evolving, sometimes vague but nonetheless coherent bundle of values.