Does the West really need to be great again?

From the US to Europe, panic is setting in as we witness the rise of a new multipolar world

“Make the West great again”: This was the headline slogan uttered by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during her recent meeting with US President Donald Trump in Washington.

Meloni’s trip to the US was highly anticipated at a tense moment in transatlantic relations, fuelled by Trump’s unorthodox stance on the war in Ukraine and his decision to target the world – allies included – with hefty tariffs.

Trump’s harsh stance on Ukraine was a sort of wakeup call for Nato’s European members, triggering a frenzy of meetings aimed at rebuilding Europe’s defence strategy, starting from the assumption that the US security umbrella is no longer reliable.

The net result: an €800 billion ($900bn) European rearmament plan.

At the same time, US tariffs have elicited mixed reactions, with some countries, such as China, quick to retaliate, and others keen to strike deals with the White House.

Europe has never closed the door to talks with the US, but it is still weighing countermoves if no understanding is reached. Stock markets have been on a rollercoaster amid the extreme unpredictability of US policy, with tariff announcements, pauses, new announcements and general chaos.

Meloni is considered to be among the European leaders who are more politically and ideologically aligned with the Trump administration, as is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Rules-based order

Away from the cameras, what Trump and Meloni discussed in the Oval Office is not known, but their joint statement notes that the US president accepted his Italian counterpart’s invitation to visit Italy “in the very near future”, and hinted at a broader top-level American-European meeting “on such occasion”.

The statement notes only that this idea is under “consideration”, which does not imply any commitment. But if Trump ultimately meets top EU officials during his forthcoming visit to Rome to attend the funeral of Pope Francis, then Meloni’s trip to Washington will, in retrospect, appear to have been a significant success.

As we await these potential developments, we must also examine the notion of “making the West great again”. When Trump first started his “make America great again” sloganeering a decade ago, what exactly did he have in mind? And what was in Meloni’s mind when she extended Trump’s ambition to all of the West?

The notion of the West as a political-civilisational concept more than a geographical one has been explained in multiple forums. Simply put, it is a group of countries attached to the US-led “rules-based world order”. This political notion has come to replace the system of international law, which has been increasingly abandoned, because it forces western nations to confront their failure to apply international law without favour, with Gaza being the most visible example.

The West is considered to be the pillar of the so-called rules-based world order, which encompasses a series of alleged good practices centred on freedom: free elections, free trade, free press, freedom of religion, etc.

But if this is true, and according to its advocates this is what makes the West great, then what is the reason for the obsessive search to “make the West great again”?

What do the western leaders who are claiming this necessity see as missing in their golden image of the West? What part is in decline?

Serious problem

Western “greatness” is less and less rooted in its supposed values – which, incidentally, are less and less upheld by its supporters, with Gaza once again presenting the most vivid example – than in its historical hegemony. The difference between leadership and hegemony can be extremely thin.

The West is thus “great” if it can successfully impose its views and narratives on the world without challenge, and less so if its soft power begins to disintegrate, as we’ve seen in recent decades.

A truly great entity should not need force to make its case. When soft power fades away, the easiest option is to resort to hard power – and this is the route the US has chosen for the last quarter of a century of the post-Cold War era.

Meanwhile, a new multipolar world is slowly arising, with many different examples – some good and some bad. There are different options on the menu now, no longer just one. The western era of “there is no alternative” appears to be in retreat. The West’s leading role can no longer be taken for granted.

Western nations seem terrified at this prospect. They believe they are the only ones entitled to lead humankind, while much of the latter seems to be considering other options.

When all your power is built upon an unquestioned global leadership/hegemony, when the latter slowly vanishes, you have a serious problem.

Can the West be great again? It must first drop its exceptionalism. Secondly, it must drop its illegitimate use of force, and turn instead back to the “force of the good example”.

All the panic being spread by western elites and their media echo chambers about the alleged existential battle between democracy and autocracy is nonsense – a rhetorical device used to scare ordinary people, while perpetuating a new western arms race to perpetual conflict.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/does-west-really-need-be-great-again