Washington and the World
Opinion | The ‘Free World’ Is Gone and There’s No Turning Back
No longer is there any pretense that the United States stands for the ideals that inspired it for 250 years. Europe and the rest of the world need to adjust.
Illustration by Bill Kuchman/POLITICO (source images via Getty Images and iStock)
Opinion by James Kirchick
03/21/2025
James Kirchick is the
author of “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark
Age” and a contributor to the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network.
In early 2017, less than two months into Donald Trump’s first term as president, I published a piece of speculative fiction. Set during a then-imaginary second Trump term, it depicts a nightmare scenario in which American troops abandon Europe, the pro-Russia Alternative for Germany wins 20 percent of the vote in a federal election, and Russia launches a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
My purpose in writing the story was to stir readers on both sides of the Atlantic out of their complacency regarding the parlous state of what used to be called the “Free World.” But it still didn’t prepare me for the series of events that began with Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference and ended with the humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by Trump and Vance before TV cameras in the Oval Office. While many may view that two-week period as indistinguishable from the rest of the Trump era, future historians won’t: They’ll record it as marking an epochal shift in global politics potentially even more significant than the collapse of the Berlin Wall or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. It marked the end of an era — the era of the American-led liberal international order.
That era began after the Second World War when an isolationist country reluctantly assumed the mantle of world leadership, an enormous, multifarious endeavor resulting in historically unprecedented economic growth, scientific discovery, human flourishing and peace. America’s material resources were essential to this decades-long, globe-spanning effort, but more important was the conviction, shared not only by hundreds of millions of Americans but countless people around the world, underlying it: that the United States was an exceptional nation uniquely positioned to be a force for good in the world.
Across those eight decades, an ethic of idealism undergirded American foreign policy, one traceable to the country’s founding. Whether Republican or Democrat, American presidents regularly invoked the providential role that the United States, as the world’s oldest democracy, was destined to play on the global stage. President Thomas Jefferson referred to the young nation he helped found as “the world’s best hope” while his archrival John Adams sent arms to the leaders of a slave rebellion that liberated Haiti. Over 150 years later, Dwight Eisenhower declared that “We could be the wealthiest and the most mighty nation and still lose the battle of the world if we do not help our world neighbors protect their freedom and advance their social and economic progress.” His successor John F. Kennedy famously declared that America would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.” And in his farewell address Ronald Reagan spoke of America as a “shining city upon a hill,” a phrase that his ideological polar opposite Barack Obama invoked during the 2016 election.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy meets with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on Feb. 28 2025. | Jim LoScalzo/EPA
Fulfillment of these lofty ambitions obliged America to support democracies and oppose dictatorships. As a global superpower with responsibilities no other nation was either able — or willing — to undertake, it could not afford to have the impeccably moral foreign policy of Sweden. Idealism inevitably clashed with realism, with the latter often triumphing over the former. This was especially true during the Cold War, when Washington helped engineer the overthrow of democratically elected leaders and supported authoritarian regimes. And it continues today with American backing of repressive governments in the Middle East. But even while employing immoral means, American leaders did so in the pursuit of what they considered moral ends, whether fighting communism, halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction, or resisting radical Islam.
Opponents of the American-led liberal international order harp endlessly upon its faults while taking its virtues — free and open sea lanes, the spread of liberal democracy, values-based alliances, the protection of human rights — for granted. Eager to lambaste the order for its many faults, they prefer not to grapple with the international system rapidly taking its place, a dog-eats-dog world where America has abdicated its role as global policeman and authoritarian states gain spheres of influence in which less powerful countries must bend to their will. Even the most vociferous critics of American global power may come to miss it once Russia, China and Iran gain dominance over Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
The centuries-long record of at least rhetorical support for right over wrong is what made last month’s Oval Office meeting so unsettling. In a display that ought to shame every American, the country’s top two constitutional officers acted like a king and his regent, demanding obeisance from a feudal supplicant. Within days, Trump suspended military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, and while both were later restored, the message he sent was unmistakable: Not even an ally under military attack can depend upon Washington for support. Having abandoned Ukraine out of personal pique, Trump then returned to taking on the world’s other villains: Canada, Denmark and Panama.
In addition to abandoning our democratic allies abroad, Trump is gutting America’s democracy-promotion apparatus at home. During the Cold War, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (the latter my former employer) broadcasted news and information beyond the Iron Curtain and continue this mission in regions of the world that remain unfree. (Many nations once subject to Soviet domination — including Poland, Czechia, and the Baltic states — can credit VOA and RFE/RL, at least in part, for their freedom). The United States Agency for International Development was founded during the administration of Kennedy to alleviate the social and economic conditions in which authoritarianism and terrorism thrive. And the National Endowment for Democracy, created under Reagan, provides grants to democratic activists around the globe. Trump has halted funding for all of these organizations, which represent the best of American values, to cheers from Moscow, Beijing and Tehran.
In place of the idealism that animated American leadership of the Free World, Trump has unleashed the atavistic cynicism of the Old World. In this new dispensation where might makes right, any appeal to moral considerations in the practice of American foreign policy is ridiculed as a deficiency of the weak while the amoral exercise of power is venerated as a virtue of the strong. Instinctive American sympathy for the underdog is supplanted by admiration for the strongman. An embattled democracy is accused of provoking the invasion of its own territory — the geopolitical equivalent of blaming a rape victim for her own assault — and for the first time in history America votes with the world’s rogues against its traditional democratic allies at the United Nations. The occupant of the office once synonymous with “leader of the Free World” slanders the president of a country fighting for its very existence as a “dictator” while lauding a despotic war criminal as “a great guy” and a “terrific person.” At least when Franklin Roosevelt (allegedly) said that Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza “may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,” he had the moral clarity to identify the caudillo for what he was, and the tact to do so behind closed doors.
While Trump borrows from the Andrew Jackson school of American foreign policy, notable for its strident nationalism and distrust of international institutions, the historical figure whose ideas (and slogans) he leans most heavily on is Pat Buchanan. Once a marginal figure on the American right, the former Nixon speechwriter and Republican presidential candidate stood for the same “America First” trifecta — anti-immigration, anti-intervention and protectionism — as Trump does today. In the brave new world of America First, no longer does America stand for the belief that democracies make better allies than dictatorships, that territorial aggression should be punished rather than rewarded, and that alliances are an asset, not a burden. In his Munich speech, Vance endorsed the inclusion of far-right parties in European governments, which he accused of posing a greater threat to their own people than either Russia or China. All of this is the result of a foreign policy utterly lacking in moral scruples.
The abandonment of morality as a factor in foreign affairs also marks a turning point for the Republican Party. Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. American conservatives once pointed to that event — the chaotic scenes of desperate Vietnamese fleeing the approaching communist onslaught, the 2 million boat people who managed to escape, the horrific repression that followed for those who did not — as a shameful example of what happens when the U.S. abandons an ally. Whatever the merits of American involvement in that conflict, the dire consequences of the American withdrawal reverberated across the region. Within months, Laos and Cambodia fell to communist insurgencies, vindicating the much derided “domino theory.”
Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine has the potential to dwarf these events in geopolitical magnitude and human suffering. If Ukraine is made to sign a peace deal that doesn’t provide clear-cut security guarantees it will only be a matter of time before Russian President Vladimir Putin attempts another Anschluss. Absent American leadership of the Free World, such an incursion could succeed in toppling the Kyiv government, leading to tens of millions of refugees and a massive Russian military presence on the border of several NATO member states. With the alliance’s guarantee of collective security in tatters thanks to Trump’s extortionist threats not to uphold it, NATO — the most successful military alliance in history — will for all intents and purposes be dead, opening the door for further Russian predation in Europe and elsewhere.
Looking for silver linings, some nostalgic for the recently departed era of American global leadership cling to the hope that everything will return to normal once a Democrat or traditional Republican moves into the Oval Office. While the fight over the future of conservative foreign policy is ongoing, there is no turning back. No longer confident of their place under the American security umbrella, alarmed allies like Poland and South Korea are exploring the possibility of acquiring nuclear weapons. The once-ridiculed French idea of “strategic autonomy” — a pole of European military power independent of the United States — is now the top agenda item across the continent. The “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing alliance composed of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand may shrink to “Four Eyes” due to the unreliability of its most powerful member.
What transpired during the last two weeks of February cannot be undone in the minds of America’s allies or its adversaries. And in a world where every man is for himself, what’s the difference between the two?
Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, attends a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier after the Victory Day military parade in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, May 9, 2024. | Maxim Blinov/Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
The story I wrote eight years ago ends on Victory Day with Putin proudly reviewing a massive military parade in Red Square. While Trump has denied that he will join the festivities this year, if he can force a deal on Ukraine, he may not be able to resist the temptation to exult in his undeserved role as global peacemaker. Standing alongside Putin in Moscow, tacitly conferring American recognition upon the first armed annexation of territory on the European continent since World War II, such a scene would mark the dawn of a new era, one in which it is increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction.