Battle for West’s Soul Intensifies as Trump and Europe Drift Apart

On 19 March 2025, The Atlantic report­ed that recent ten­sions between Pres­i­dent Trump and Euro­pean lead­ers reflect a deep­er ide­o­log­i­cal con­flict over Enlight­en­ment val­ues that is divid­ing both con­ti­nents. The arti­cle begins:

For Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, last mon­th’s spat at the White House with Ukraine’s Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Zelen­sky was “great tele­vi­sion.” To the rest of us, it was a hor­ri­fy­ing real­iza­tion of our worst fears: a real-time crum­bling of the Euro-Amer­i­can alliance, which has been the bedrock of the inter­na­tion­al order since 1945. Euro­peans have recent­ly been dis­cov­er­ing a new resolve for stand­ing on their own. Per­haps the most can­did response came from the Euro­pean Union’s for­eign-pol­i­cy chief, Kaja Kallas, who said that “the free world needs a new leader.” There is plen­ty of good sense in the EU tak­ing a res­olute stand. The need for “strate­gic auton­o­my” is not only the pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of French Pres­i­dent Emmanuel Macron; it has been part of the bloc’s cod­i­fied glob­al strat­e­gy since 2016 as well…

Read more

Key Points:

• Nation­al con­ser­v­a­tives view Chris­tian­i­ty and tra­di­tion­al val­ues as essen­tial foun­da­tions for West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, reject­ing glob­al­ist liberalism.
• Hun­gary’s Orbán pro­vides a mod­el for nation­al sov­er­eign­ty that increas­ing­ly appeals to Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives seek­ing cul­tur­al renewal.
• Patri­ots for Europe, now the third-largest Euro­pean Par­lia­ment group­ing, rep­re­sents grow­ing momen­tum for nation­al­ist polit­i­cal movements.
• Vice Pres­i­dent Vance advo­cates for transat­lantic rela­tions based on shared reli­gious and cul­tur­al bonds rather than lib­er­al demo­c­ra­t­ic values.

Dis­claimer: This post was gen­er­at­ed using AI, with added con­text where pos­si­ble. Please ver­i­fy all infor­ma­tion before using. Images are also AI-gen­er­at­ed and are for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es only—they do not depict real events.