The US National Security Strategy, published in late 2025, suggested that Europe was facing ‘civilisational erasure’ or, in layman’s terms, was becoming ‘uncivilised’. This CEPS Explainer is the first of a duology addressing fundamental issues for Europe posed by Donald Trump’s second presidency. To respond to this critique, the Explainer discusses the different components of contemporary Western civilisation and subjects them to US-European comparisons.
The overall finding is that contemporary European civilisation, for all its complexities and imperfections, has a strong and positive identity, whereas under Trump’s leadership the transatlantic chasm is becoming so wide that the concept of the ‘West’ no longer makes sense. Europe has every interest in asserting its own civilisational model.
To read the second paper in this duology please click here.
