Cancelling the West. Transatlantic relations in the era of culture wars

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the debate on long-term trends in Transatlantic relations. It does so by examining some of the ways in which the central ideational foundation of the Transatlantic area, namely “the West”, has become increasingly contested in a highly polarized US domestic discourse. By drawing on, and contributing to, the constructivist scholarship on Transatlantic relations, which argues for the importance of collective identities for long-term foreign policy orientation, the article examines how the notion of “the West” became increasingly politicized under Trump’s presidency. The article then examines the Democrats’ understanding of the US place in the world and shows that the US commitment to Europe is premised and contingent upon a joint commitment to democracy, rather than an imagined ethnonationalist bounded community. As an identity-conferring concept between the US and Europe the paper shows, “the West” no longer fulfils a unifying function in US mainstream public discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Transatlantic relations
• US foreign policy
• the West
• culture wars
• Trump administration

1. Introduction

For many years, numerous scholars have argued that Transatlantic relations, understood as “the overall set of relations between the European Union and the United States, within the broader framework of the institutional and other connections maintained via NATO and other institutions”, are slowly eroding (Smith, 2018, p. 539). This post-Cold War trend is often alleged to be driven by opposing views on significant policy issues, disagreements over institutional arrangements, and fundamental societal changes in norms and values (Riddervold & Newsome, 2018). Several scholars have primarily attributed this decline to domestic trends on both sides of the Atlantic rather than changes in geostrategic interests (e.g. Aggestam & Hyde-Price, 2019; Burgoon, Oliver, & Trubowitz, 2017; Nye, 2019; Risse, 2016). When it comes to the US, during the four years of Trump’s presidency the domestic political terrain changed substantially. While much of the media coverage has focused on the GOP’s trials and tribulations under Trump, the Democratic Party has also undergone a rapid change (Graham, 2018). However, while the Democrats have moved to the left on virtually every single domestic issue, not much has, at first glance, changed when it comes to foreign and security policies. Instead, the Democrats sometimes found themselves attacking the Trump administration from a foreign policy orientation that could even be perceived as to the right of Trump: for being soft on Russia; for being reluctant to admitting new members to NATO; and even for undertaking any diplomatic overtures to North Korea (Beinart, 2018).

At the same time as scholars have pointed to an erosion of Transatlantic relations following the end of the Cold War, recent scholarship on US foreign policy has tended to emphasize the powerful domestic status quo forces that make US foreign and security policy impervious to major changes. The most common scholarly explanation for why the turbulent Trump administration failed to change much of substance in US foreign and security policy has been attributed to the intransigent foreign policy community in and around Washington DC, or “the Blob” as former senior Obama-advisor Ben Rhodes once disparagingly referred to it as. The Blob, Rhodes argued, was responsible for the US war in Iraq and continuously kept pushing for an interventionist US foreign policy (Samuels, 2016). And although there are differences on particular issues, the foreign policy community is virtually unanimous in its support for liberal internationalism, and, for the most part, opposed to US restraint (Walt, 2018, p. 95). As a consequence, the foreign policy community is decidedly pro-NATO and in favour of the US retaining its traditional role as ultimate backer of Europe’s security. In addition to Biden’s own long-standing history of involvement in US national security, the foreign policy team he assembled epitomized the liberal internationalism that has reassured European leaders about the ironclad US commitment to NATO. We are thus left with something of a puzzle. Are we to believe that in regard to Transatlantic relations, business is back to usual with a Democrat in the White House? And what then about the slow erosion of the Transatlantic bond that other scholars have pointed to?

In this paper, I examine what some of the powerful trends within the American political landscape may hold in future stock for the long-term US approach to relations with Europe. In particular, during the Trump administration, foreign policy increasingly became part of the raging US culture war. As a consequence, I argue that despite the back to business as usual appearance of Transatlantic relations, there is a deeper story of change to be told with potential long-term repercussions for the US commitment to Europe. Drawing on constructivist scholarship, which has previously established the importance of the “cultural glue” underpinning the transatlantic community (Hemmer & Katzenstein, 2002; Jackson, 2006; Risse, 2016; Van Ham, 2001, p. 394). I show how under Trump’s presidency we witnessed a wholesale politicization of the idea of the “West” itself in mainstream US discourse. I suggest that one of the most serious long-term consequences of the Trump presidency for Transatlantic relations may have turned out to be the ways in which one of the organizing identity-conferring concepts of Transatlantic relations, namely “the West” rapidly became politicized. The thoroughgoing delegitimization of the Trumpian worldview also provides the frame of reference against which one has to understand the discursive infrastructure of the Biden administration. I show how “the West”, as a community of identification, has been replaced by the open-ended and universalist concept of democracy in Biden’s foreign policy discourse. Rather than the eventual withering away of NATO, such a discursive shift would enable a more realist US foreign policy towards Europe, one that would neither favour nor disfavour key European allies from other non-Western major democracies like India for reasons of ethnonationalist identification. That is not to say, however, that there may be many other reasons for the US to favour a closer relation to European countries over other democracies. The case made in this article should not be overstated. There are a number of factors that influence the multifaceted Transatlantic relation, including geostrategic interests, institutional path-dependency, trade flows, personal and professional networks, and a host of sometimes reinforcing, sometimes opposing ideational factors. Rather than trying to lay the entire puzzle, which would entail a careful weighing of different factors in relation to one another, this article examines what has happened to one piece of it.

The article unfolds in five steps. The first section presents the on-going scholarly debate on the domestic determinants of US foreign policy and situates the contribution of the article in relation to this debate. The second section turns to the constructivist literature, which has grappled with making sense of long-term domestic changes and their impact on Transatlantic relations for some time. By drawing on constructivist scholarship, the section establishes the fundamental importance of the “West” as an identity-conferring concept for the Transatlantic area. The third section examines how US relations with Europe were inserted into the US culture wars, primarily by examining the reactions to Trump’s so-called Warsaw speech in 2017. The fourth section examines how the Democrats have worked out a conceptual schema for understanding the US place in the world that no longer relies on civilizational affinities and bounded identities, and teases out the long-term implications for Transatlantic relations. The concluding section summarizes the argument of the article.

2. Domestic polarization and US foreign policy

In recent years, the debate on the domestic determinants of US foreign and security policy has, as Hermann Kurthen observed, been centred on two starkly opposing theses: “the Blob thesis” and “the polarization thesis” (Kurthen, 2021). The first position holds that there is an overwhelming consensus on the broader outlines of US foreign and security policy, which makes its basic tenets extraordinarily resistant to change (Drezner, 2017; Porter, 2018; Walt, 2018). Stephen Walt, who has most comprehensively argued the case for the vital significance of this community for US foreign policy defines it as “those individuals and organizations that actively engage on a regular basis with issues of international affairs”, which include everything from State Department bureaucrats, CIA analysts, fellows at foreign policy think tanks, professors, journalists covering US foreign policy, staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Human Rights Watch lobbyists (Walt, 2018, pp. 95–96). In such a broad sense, the Blob is usually understood as an epistemic community, i.e. a group of people with a similar set of fundamental beliefs pertaining to the global role of the US. The basic world-view of this community may best be summarized as a staunch commitment to liberal internationalism and the pursuit of US primacy (Porter, 2018, p. 46). In terms of Transatlantic relations, this position entails a strong commitment to NATO and key European allies.

While understandably popular as a way of explaining why so little of substance in US foreign and security policy changed under the Trump administration, the Blob thesis has a number of shortcomings. First of all, it tends to ignore significant variation in the belief-systems of the rather diverse groups and individuals that collectively constitute the US foreign policy community. Based on extensive interviewing among the DC think-tanks, Hermann Kurthen concludes that “the blob thesis, while correctly capturing a pro-international order consensus among globalists, neglects deeper divisions that divide realists, pragmatic liberals, and liberal’s interpretation of how to achieve international order goals” (Kurthen, 2021, p. 5). To put it differently, a finer comb is needed to tease out these differences of views. Second, the thesis also ignores the fact that US grand strategy has changed significantly over time and thus presents a rather static view of US foreign policy, unable to explain variation over time (Kitchen, 2020). Finally, the main proponents of this thesis, who are all in favour of US restraint and opposed to liberal internationalism, tend to conflate description with prescription and ignore sound methodology such as counter-factuals and a careful examination of competing explanations (Jervis, 2020).

What is sometimes known as “the polarization thesis” on the other hand, points to a growing rift between Republican and Democrat lawmakers, as well as within the broader electorate, stretching back at least as far as to the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War (Kurthen, 2021). Republican foreign policy officials, the argument goes, became dominated by neoconservatives and hard-nosed realists who have been much more willing to use military force in order to advance US national interests, whereas Democrats increasingly came to favour a “soft power” approach coupled with a promotion of normative ideals such as human rights. Moreover, there are fewer and fewer centrist Republicans and Democrats left in Congress, making bipartisanship more difficult for every election (Schultz, 2017). However, it has often been difficult to pinpoint what this polarization has meant for the broader contours of US foreign and security policy.

Many observers expected the establishment figures of Clinton and Bush to square off in the 2016 US elections, which would seemingly have guaranteed that US foreign policy discourse remained on familiar ground. Instead, Trump and his administration brought the rhetoric associated with the so-called alt-right straight into the White House itself (Hunter & Bowman, 2016). The Trumpist movement’s guiding commitments may be described as a blend of “nativism, conspiracism and authoritarianism” (Rehman, 2018, p. 31), and its immediate origins are often traced back to the Tea Party Protests in 2009 (Peters, 2019). Simultaneously, and undoubtedly in part as a reaction to Trumpism, many Democratic voters moved to the left. As part of what Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias famously called the “the Great Awokening”, particularly white Democrats have over the last few years sharply moved to the left on issues of race (Yglesias, 2019). Lilliana Mason has shown how a variety of social, economic, religious and racial cleavages have increasingly come to align themselves into a simple binary – Republican or Democrat, and argues that the election of Trump may be understood as “the culmination of a process by which the American electorate has become deeply divided along partisan lines” (Mason, 2018, p. 3). By the end of Trump’s presidency, analysts at the Pew Research Institute concluded that “Americans have rarely been as polarized as they are today” (Dimock & Wike, 2020).

How to understand the effects of the increasing polarization on US foreign policy? This article seeks to add a perspective to the polarization thesis, which has so far neither been examined with respect to US foreign policy nor conceptualized within IR theory. Closely linked to an increased polarization in the US electorate lies a phenomenon known as “the culture wars”. The culture wars are certainly not new phenomena. James Davison Hunter coined the phrase in the early 1990s (1992), but their origins are usually traced back to the cultural changes in the 1960s and have tended to flare up with different foci since then (Hartman, 2015). However, the Trump administration was arguably the first one ever to bring their central focus into the White House. As leading historian on the subject Andrew Hartman put it, “with the Trumpist capture of the American right, the racial lines of the culture wars are fully visible again” (Hartman, 2018, p. 51). How may we understand this in theoretical terms? The next section turns to constructivist interpretations of long-term Transatlantic trends, and argues that the culture wars have politicized US collective identity in ways which may be consequential for its long-term commitment to Europe. The question is not whether the US would be less willing to support Western leadership or lead the West itself, but rather that the very notion of a West has become part of the culture wars.

3. Collective identities and Transatlantic relations

There is an extensive literature that argues that socially constructed collective identities matter in foreign and security policy. An identity, i.e. an understanding of a collective self, is in constructivist scholarship understood to precede an interest. To put it differently, in order to develop a certain want or an interest, an actor first needs an understanding of its self. Therefore, identities are logically prior to interests (Wendt, 1999). Following such an understanding, many of the constructivist authors who have written on long-term trends in Transatlantic relations define the US-European area in terms of a security community, which emphasizes the importance of “shared identities, values, and meanings” (Adler & Barnett, 1998, p. 31). According to these authors, a security community is not only based on common interests and an institutional framework, but, most importantly, a common identity – a “we-feeling” of sorts. As Patrick Jackson puts it, the notion of a socially constructed area of Transatlantic security “envisions a cultural community spanning the Atlantic Ocean and binding the United States to Europe in a fundamental way; as such, it has practical implications for policy when deployed as part of a process of legitimation” (Jackson, 2006, p. 241).

The most important reason for conceptualizing the Transatlantic area as a security community is, in the words of Thomas Risse, that it “directs our attention toward different causes for the survival or demise of such orders” (2016, p. 25). To clarify such a constructivist lens, it is useful to contrast it to its main rivals. A neorealist analysis directs us to an examination of interests, and the implications of shifts in the underlying distribution of material capabilities among major powers in the international system. For instance, for neorealist John Mearsheimer, the crucial question for the future of Transatlantic relations is how European countries will position themselves in the intensifying US–China rivalry (2019, p. 49). A liberal analysis, on the other hand, would focus on the role of institutions, interdependence, and trade patterns. Liberals would typically stress the importance of NATO’s institutional “adaptability” (Wallander, 2000), as well as the extensive economic interdependence between the US and European countries, and may emphasize how post-Cold War globalization of trade came to replace the Soviet threat as the most important foundation of the Transatlantic relation. In contrast, a constructivist analysis puts the focus on the collective identities that are understood to be more fundamental, albeit often more elusive than either interests or institutions. How then to empirically examine underlying collective identities pertaining to Transatlantic relations? Different constructivist authors have approached the question in different ways. In 2001, Peter van Ham argued that the “cultural glue” that is keeping the US and Europe together in the form of a constructed Western civilization is not strong enough to sustain NATO into the future (2001, p. 394). As empirical evidence for this claim, he pointed to the Bush administration’s return to the conversative themes of family and religion as pulling the US apart from an increasingly socially liberal Europe. More recently, Thomas Risse distinguished between elite communities and mass public opinion and argued that at the beginning of Trump’s tenure value differences between the US and Europe had at that point become salient enough to be politically exploitable. As a result, he suggested that “Citizens as well as elites are less and less prepared to exercise or support strong Western leadership in global affairs” (2016, p. 39). At the same time, however, identities are elusive not only since they are often difficult to empirically examine, but also since they may point in contradictory directions.

Another way of empirically examining collective identities is to turn to discourse analysis. While also being interested in the social construction of collective identities, albeit in and through discourse, discourse analysts have shown that different discursive frameworks enable different kinds of foreign policy practice (e.g Doty, 1993; Hansen, 2006). Discursively oriented constructivists writing on Transatlantic relations have been at their most persuasive when examining the creation of NATO in the first place. Christopher Hemmer and Peter J. Katzenstein have examined the different trajectories of institutionalized security arrangements in Europe and Southeast Asia, asking why there is “no NATO” in Asia (2002). They argue that perceptions of collective identities are crucial for understanding why the US decided to establish a dense institutional framework in Europe rather than ad hoc bilateral agreements as in Southeast Asia.¹ Due to a set of intermingled historical, political, cultural, and racial factors, “US policymakers saw their potential European allies as relatively equal members of a shared community”, whereas allies in Southeast Asia were perceived as “part of an alien and, in important ways, inferior community” (2002, p. 575). The East Coast foreign policy establishment, virtually all of European descent, strongly identified with Europe, and emphasized a common Western civilization between the US and Europe. As Hemmer and Katzenstein put it,

One of the most striking aspects of the discussions surrounding the formation of NATO is the pervasive identification of the United States with Europe. This aspect is exemplified by the strident assertion that the North Atlantic already existed as a political community and that the treaty merely formalized this pre-existing community of shared ideals and interest. … In political debates in the United States, one found constant references to a “common civilization,” a “community,” a shared “spirit,” “like-minded peoples,” and “common ideals” (2002, p. 581, 593).

Patrick Jackson has offered a similar argument in his account of the formation of NATO: “Although state representatives are clearly involved in the formation of the Alliance, if we examine their articulations closely we notice that they often claim to be speaking and acting on behalf of a quite different actor: “Western Civilization””. (2003, p. 224) In particular, he shows how closely NATO was linked to the identity-conferring concept of “Western civilization”, and argues that such a discursive association continued to play a role in the accession to NATO of former members of the Warsaw Pact after the end of the Cold War. And indeed, as Van Ham points out, Samuel Huntington would approvingly refer to NATO as “the security organisation of western civilization” (2001, p. 395). Contributing to the constructivist authors who argue for the importance of collective identity for long-term foreign policy orientation, in the following section, I examine how the notion of “the West” as an identity-conferring concept, became increasingly politicized and questioned under Trump’s presidency.

4. Trump and the politicization of “the West”

Donald Trump was the first president to place culture war issues front and centre of his two presidential campaigns as well as his presidency. His tenure exhibited a “rhetorical uniqueness” in trying to polarize rather than unify the US electorate (Hall, 2021, p. 50). As Time journalist Brian Bennett noticed, Trump’s political messaging was fundamentally geared towards mobilizing his base rather than attempting to persuade a broader electorate about the reasonableness of his policies. To that effect, his 2020 election campaign was designed as “a kind of a perpetual outrage machine”, stoking the rage of his base (Bennett, 2019). In this section, I demonstrate how “the West” became discursively linked to issues of race, ethnicity, and religion, which were at the very heart of the current round of culture war (Hartman, 2018). In order to understand this conceptual linkage, however, one first needs to appreciate how central ethnonationalism was for the Trumpian worldview.

A novelty in Trump’s presidency was that his “America First” agenda tended to rely on ethnic rather than civic nationalism, which, as Hilde Restad has shown, entailed “the rejection of universally applicable, liberal ideals in favour of bounded ethnonationalism” (Restad, 2020, p. 22). Instead, the Trump administration tended either explicitly or implicitly to emphasize “thicker” identity-conferring concepts, such as ethnicity, religion, or even race. His foreign policy tended to reflect his administration’s turn to ethnic nationalism. This clearly set him apart from other post-Cold War presidencies, and was rather a throwback to earlier periods in US history, where racial hierarchies were foundational for American foreign policy thinking (Restad, 2020; and see Hunt, 1987). Most notable in this respect, arguably, was that his administration tended to approach immigration as an existential threat, akin to a textbook definition of securitization (Fermor & Holland, 2020). Early on, a travel ban, which prohibited individuals from a number of Muslim-majority countries from entering the US, was instituted. This policy was often interpreted as targeting Muslims and Islam as such and widely referred to as the “Muslim Ban”. Second, Trump tried, with varying degrees of success, to deliver on one of his central campaign promises, i.e. to construct a physical barrier along the Mexico-US border. However, as Ben Fermor and Jack Holland point out, these attempted securitizing moves were not particularly successful, since they met with massive challenges from politicians, media outlets, activist groups and courts (Fermor & Holland, 2020). Instead, they tended to draw an increasing number of actors – including corporate America – into the culture wars (Hartman, 2018).

Related to the promotion of ethnonationalist rhetoric and policies, Jeffrey Haynes has shown how Trump’s campaign tended to promote a “clash of civilization” view of global politics, which portrayed Islam and the West as fundamentally at odds with each other (Haynes, 2017). Unlike George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Trump did not always draw clear distinctions between Islamist terrorists and regular Muslims. While Trump’s predecessors had sought to avoid a portrayal of a civilizational clash, Trump rather sided with the far-right in the US who had been pushing for such a framing for a long time (Haynes, 2017, p. 68). Within this alt-right conceptual infrastructure, “the West” had an important place to play and is usually understood “not so much a community of nations tied by liberal political principles as a geographically bounded ethnocultural bloc” (Rehman, 2018, p. 32).

During his tenure as president, however, Trump did not make “defending the West” a particular prominent theme. And, to nuance the argument further, unlike some of his advisors and leading voices within the alt-right movement, Trump’s own world-view may arguably better be described as transactional and economistic than ethno-nationalist (cp Laderman & Simms, 2017). The National Security Strategy that the Trump administration released in 2017 is clearly rooted in a conservative and realist word-view with US exceptionalism at its core, sceptical of international institutions, but makes no appeal to “Western civilization” when mentioning Europe (2017). When he did, as we shall see, it became clear that the concept had become firmly entrenched within the discursive flames of the culture war that his administration had continuously been stoking. On his way to a G20 meeting in Hamburg, Trump stopped in Warsaw and gave a speech “to the people of Poland” in July 2017 (Trump, 2017). Evoking Poland’s communist past, Trump claimed that,

This continent no longer confronts the specter of communism. But today we’re in the West, and we have to say there are dire threats to our security and to our way of life. You see what’s happening out there. They are threats. We will confront them. We will win. But they are threats.

Further, on what fundamentally unites the Transatlantic community, he argued that,

Our own fight for the West does not begin on the battlefield—it begins with our minds, our wills, and our souls. Today, the ties that unite our civilization are no less vital, and demand no less defense, than that bare shred of land on which the hope of Poland once totally rested. Our freedom, our civilization, and our survival depend on these bonds of history, culture, and memory. … Just as Poland could not be broken, I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail. Our people will thrive. And our civilization will triumph.

Less remarkable than the speech itself was, for the argument pursued in this paper, the way in which it was taken up by US mainstream commentators. In the US media, the speech was directly inserted into the intense culture wars, and the reactions tended to focus on Trump’s abovementioned mobilization of the West as a way to articulate the unity between the US and Europe.

The Atlantic’s Peter Beinert expressed a critique of the speech that was echoed by several commentators:

The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white. … America is racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. So when Trump says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. (Beinart, 2017)

For similar reasons, Vox contributor Sarah Wildman called the speech an “alt-right manifesto” and argued that “Trump cast the West, including the United States and Europe, on the side of ‘civilization.’ With an undercurrent of bellicosity, he spoke of protecting borders, casting himself as a defender not just of territory but of Western ‘values’” (Wildman, 2017). In Slate, Jamelle Bouie also picked up on Trump’s use of the West and interpreted the speech as conjecturing a civilizational clash with the aid of “white nationalist rhetoric” (2017). For Trump, Bouie argued, “'the West’ is defined by ties of culture and religion”(2017). Similar interpretations of the speech were made by writers in the New York Times (Kratsev, 2017), Washington Post (Capehart, 2017), Salon (Tesfaye, 2017), and New Republic (Heer, 2017).

On the other side of the political spectrum, The Wall Street Journal called it “Trump’s Defining Speech” and hailed it as an “affirmative defense of the Western tradition” (2017). Marc Thiessen at the conservative leaning American Enterprise Institute also defended it and noted that his “words could have been spoken by Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush or John F. Kennedy – indeed by virtually any of Trump’s predecessors. And if they had been spoken by his predecessors, they would have been almost universally hailed” (2017). In the National Review, writing in response to leftist reactions, Dennis Prager opined that for the contemporary US Left “those who wish to protect or save Western civilization are talking about saving the white race” (2017). Thus, the reactions to one of Trump’s defining foreign policy speeches showed how politicized the very notion of a Western identity had become. An appeal to “the West” as a way of conferring an identity between the US and Europe had clearly become highly contested, and directly linked to the racial reckoning that the US was starting to go through.

5. Beyond the West: the Biden administration’s universalist conceptual infrastructure

This section examines key Democratic foreign policy texts, including the Democratic Party’s platform on foreign policy, the Interim National Security Strategy Guidance, as well as key speeches and distils some of the major organizing concepts of the Democrats’ foreign policy discourse. Taken together, they have to be understood as a wholesale rejection of the Trump administration’s ethnonationalism. The conceptual infrastructure that the Biden administration put in place rests on a staunchly universalist set of ideas. Three major themes run through the Democrat’s foreign policy discourse in this respect: (1) a tight coupling of US foreign policy and its domestic politics; (2) a rejection of global authoritarianism; and most importantly (3) a focus on democracy as the major organizing value-laden concept. Such a discursive infrastructure posits an altogether different normative underpinning for Transatlantic relations than the one explored in the previous section: one that depends on shared and open-ended democratic values rather than bounded identities such as “Western civilization”, “culture” or anything which could be deemed to have an ethnonationalist connotation.

5.1. Linking domestic to foreign policy

The first and most fundamental conceptual cornerstone in the Democratic foreign policy discourse is the strong connection made between domestic politics and foreign policy.² Anthony Blinken places this message at the very core of his first major speech as Secretary of State: “More than at any other time in my career … distinctions between domestic and foreign policy have simply fallen away. Our domestic renewal and our strength in the world are completely entwined” (Blinken, 2021). This is also a theme that Leftists within the foreign policy community (e.g Duss, 2020) as well as academic commentators (e.g. Rana, 2018; Walzer, 2018), have emphasized in the last couple of years. In this understanding, the US has historically and mistakenly compartmentalized its domestic politics from its foreign policy.³ There are two major aspects involved in making a stronger connection between the two. The first is the straight-forward belief that US foreign policy has previously tended to neglect US domestic needs and the “aspirations of the American middle class” (DNC, 2020).

The second aspect of this linkage is more profound in that it holds that in order for the US to conduct a credible and effective foreign policy, it needs simultaneously to deal with its own domestic problems. Biden articulated this view clearly as a presidential candidate:

The United States’ ability to be a force for progress in the world and to mobilize collective action starts at home. That is why I will remake our educational system so that a child's opportunity in life isn't determined by his or her zip code or race, re­form the criminal justice system to eliminate inequitable disparities and end the epidemic of mass incarceration, restore the Voting Rights Act to ensure that everyone can be heard, and return transparency and accountability to our government. (Biden, 2020, p. 65)

A very similar message lies at the heart of the Interim National Security Strategy Guidance released in March 2021, and which so far provides the most comprehensive window into the Biden administration’s thinking on foreign and security policy.⁴ The Strategy Guidance argues that a “broader understanding” of security is needed for today’s world “that recognizes that our role in the world depends upon our strength and vitality here at home” (Biden, 2021a, p. 6). Only by simultaneously rebuilding its own house will the US be in a position to meet the multifaceted contemporary global challenges. Echoing domestic policy debates within the US, and in particular its racial reckoning which intensified after the murder of George Floyd, the text points to the challenges of addressing and dismantling systemic racism in the US, including eliminating voter suppression and institutional disenfranchisement (pp. 7, 18-19). In fact, as pointed out in a report from the Congressional Research Service, the Strategy Guidance commences with “perceived shortcomings in domestic social and economic”, rather than an assessment of the external threats that the US faces (McInnis, 2021), which demonstrates how profoundly the administration links domestic politics to US foreign policy.

5.2. A rejection of global authoritarianism

The second central theme in the Democrats’ foreign policy discourse is the identification and rejection of global authoritarianism, which cuts across state borders and includes the US itself. In September 2018, Bernie Sanders articulated the rise of “an authoritarian axis” in global politics, defined as embracing “hostility toward democratic norms, antagonism toward a free press, intolerance toward ethnic and religious minorities, and a belief that government should benefit their own selfish financial interests” (Sanders, 2018a). This axis unites Trump with Putin’s Russia, Orbán’s Hungary, Xi’s China, MBS’s Saudi Arabia and Netanyahu’s Israel. Sanders contrasts the “authoritarian axis” with the need for “an international progressive front”, which should seek to “reach out to those in every corner of the world who share these values, and who are fighting for a better world”. In a speech at Johns Hopkins University a few months later, Sanders made this divide central to his foreign policy thinking: “On one hand, we see a growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism, oligarchy, and kleptocracy. On the other side, we see a movement toward strengthening democracy, egalitarianism, and economic, social, racial, and environmental justice”, and singles out, among others, Orbán’s Hungary as part of the global authoritarian movement (2018b).

Aaron Ettinger has identified the authoritarian/democratic fault-line as central to the leftist internationalism of Elisabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders during the primaries (Ettinger, 2020, pp. 44–45). This theme, however, has arguably become mainstreamed among most Democrats. Already as a candidate, Biden warned of the global “advance of authoritarianism, nationalism, illiberalism” (2020, p. 64), and the Democratic platform on foreign policy asserts the importance for US foreign policy to push back on rising authoritarianism (DNC, 2020). Finally, it occurs as a central theme in the Interim National Security Strategy Guidance, which again links domestic to foreign policy challenges and posits that the US itself as “increasingly under siege”, from illiberal global trends (Biden, 2021a, p. 7). Closely linked to the global authoritarian tide is the proposed antidote to the affliction: democratization at home and abroad.

5.3. Democracy as the major organizing value-laden concept

Early on, Biden made a commitment to democracy central to his foreign policy thinking and called democracy “the foundation of American society” and “the wellspring of our power” (2020, p. 65). In 2020, he promised to organize a global Summit for Democracy in his first year in office, if elected president, to revitalize the world’s democracies and push back on the global authoritarian tendencies. Biden identifies democracy as that which “allows us to self-correct and keep striving to reach our ideals over time” (2020, p. 65). The Democratic platform on foreign policy, likewise, makes democracy central in the fault-line which cuts across states, and argues that “we need to signal clearly our profound concerns about democratic backsliding in a number of allied states, and why we need to work with allied democracies to end democracy’s global recession” (DNC, 2020). In his forward to the Strategy Guidance, Biden makes a concerted effort at revitalizing democracy fundamental to US foreign policy and argues that “democracy holds the key to freedom, prosperity, peace, and dignity” (2021a, p. 3). And finally, Anthony Blinken explicitly makes the fight for democracy central not only because it is under assault by authoritarian forces aboard, but also since it is being eroded within the US – pointing specifically to structural racism and election disinformation, as well as the storming of the Capitol in January 2021 (Blinken, 2021).

This discursive infrastructure has clear implications for the ideational foundation of Transatlantic relations. First of all, it should be pointed out that Biden as well as other Democrats have strongly been affirming the US commitment to NATO and European security. The Democratic platform on foreign policy, for instance, asserts that Transatlantic cooperation “is crucial to addressing almost every global challenge we face” (2020, p. 78). However, this commitment is reaffirmed without any identity-conferring language. The Strategy Guidance rather posits that this link is in the US national interest: “our vital national interests compel the deepest connection to the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere” (Biden, 2021a, p. 9). Elsewhere, the US commitment to Europe is couched as part and parcel, and indeed contingent upon, a shared support for democracy. In his Munich speech in March 2021, Biden again posited the global fault-line between authoritarian and democratic forces and asserted that “in so many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault” (Biden, 2021b). He also emphasized that US foreign policy in supporting Europe is “not about pitting East against West”. While Biden, unlike Sanders, did not single out Hungary, or for that matter Poland, by name, it was clear that US commitment to Europe was premised upon a joint support of democracy, rather than a postulated ethnonationalist bounded community such as “the West”.

6. Conclusion

This paper has examined the ways in which the ideational foundations of the Transatlantic area have become increasingly contested during the Trump era and into the early days of the Biden administration. To that effect, it showed how this foundation became inserted into the US culture war, where appeals to “the West” or “Western civilization” were interpreted as part of the ethnonationalist discourse that the Trump administration had been promoting. Therefore, one of the enduring legacies of the Trump government in this respect, may be said to be its politicization of what Hemmer and Katzenstein refer to as the “European-focused American identity”, that underpinned the formation of the Transatlantic security community in the first place, and sustained it well after the end of the Cold War (2002, p. 602). The paper has shown that as an identity-conferring concept between the US and Europe, “the West” no longer fulfils a unifying function in US mainstream public discourse. Turning to the Democratic foreign policy discourse, the paper argued that it should be interpreted as a wholesale rejection of Trumpian ethnonationalism and relies on universalist and open-ended concepts, most notably democracy, when affirming an affinity with Europe.

At the same time, one should certainly not underestimate the extent to which future US policy towards Europe will be determined by geopolitical interests, not least how European states will position themselves in the looming conflict between the US and China. As many constructivist authors have emphasized, collective identities, whereas of fundamental importance, tend not only to be co-constituted with a variety of interests, they may also point in different directions, and sometimes directly conflict with geostrategic or economic interests. The Trump administration’s ethnonationalist impulses, for instance, which ideationally would point to affinities with Europe tended to be trumped by economic considerations and a narrow US nationalism. It is thus much too early to predict what policy implications might flow from the discursive shift of the basis of identification between the US and Europe identified in this article. However, it is nevertheless worth pointing out that a discursive foundation has been laid for a US foreign policy which would not discriminate between “Western” and “non-Western” democracies. In the final analysis, as both the US and Europe are becomingly increasingly diverse, ethnonationalist language of identification is less and less likely to sustain Transatlantic collective identities.

Acknowledgements

I thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The article was written within the Swedish Defence University’s research programme on Transatlantic security and defence, which is funded by the Ministry of Defence.

Notes on contributors

Stefan Borg

Stefan Borg is Associate Professor in Political Science in the Department of Security, Strategy and Leadership, Swedish Defence University. His research interests include international security, Transatlantic relations and international political theory. His work has recently appeared in Review of International Studies, Security Dialogue, and Journal of International Political Theory.

Notes

1 However, they are careful to point out that collective identities are certainly not the only factor in explaining the origins of NATO. Geostrategic and economic interests undoubtedly also played important parts. For a very different account, see Cha (2010).

2 This argument could be understood as seeking to redress domestic problems in order to generate the resources needed to meet US external objectives and was an important part of US Cold War strategy. See Gaddis (2005).

3 It should be noted though, that many on the Left would not agree with this interpretation. The Wisconsin School of Diplomatic History, often referred to as the New Left, rather held that the US always put its foreign policy in service of its domestic interests. Thanks to one of the reviewers for pointing this out.

4 For the first time in US history, and demonstrating its profound disagreement with the National Security Strategy that the Trump administration released in 2017, the Biden administration released an interim guidance on national security, instead of waiting until a new national security strategy could be formulated.