How The West Was Lost

Last Updated on: 20th February 2025, 12:55 pm

“The West” is a phrase that has great significance for Americans. Those two words encapsulate the idea that America enjoyed a special Manifest Destiny, defined as a license to expand westward beyond the Mississippi River all the way to the Pacific, trampling on any indigenous people who happened to stand in the way. Some historians suggest that Germans who visited the US after the First World War were impressed by the way America pushed to expand its boundaries and neutralize all resistance. When they returned home, they shared their admiration for the process, which many believe helped shape the notion of lebensraum — room to live — which became a justification for Germany’s conquest of its neighbors in the Nazi era. In its summary of a book by Edward Westermann entitled Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian wars: comparing genocide and conquest, the Smithsonian Institute wrote:

As he prepared to wage his war of annihilation on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler repeatedly drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe and the United States’s westward expansion under the banner of Manifest Destiny. The peoples of Eastern Europe were, he said, his “redskins,” and for his colonial fantasy of a “German East” he claimed a historical precedent in the United States’s displacement and killing of the native population. Edward B. Westermann examines the validity, and value, of this claim in Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars.

The book takes an empirical approach that highlights areas of similarity and continuity, but also explores key distinctions and differences between these two national projects. The westward march of American empire and the Nazi conquest of the East offer clear parallels, not least that both cases fused a sense of national purpose with racial stereotypes that aided in the exclusion, expropriation, and killing of peoples. Westermann evaluates the philosophies of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum that justified both conquests, the national and administrative policies that framed Nazi and U.S. governmental involvement in these efforts, the military strategies that supported each nation’s political goals, and the role of massacre and atrocity in both processes.

Defining “The West”

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security, and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist. In an essay for Bloomberg on February 19, 2025, entitled “Without America, ‘the West’ Will Splinter, Wither and Die,” he explained that, “The West is not a geography but an ideal worth defending, in Ukraine or anywhere. Donald Trump doesn’t understand that.” Trump is well on the way to burying the idea of “the West.”

Like the Global South, the West is not primarily a geographical notion, for its European and North American trunks have antipodean, Asian, and other branches, Kluth wrote. German historian Heinrich August Winkler defines it as a “normative” project — an evolving, sometimes vague but nonetheless coherent bundle of values. Trump and his movement do not share those values and that is now sinking in across the rest of the West, which the United States has led for the past eight decades. German Christoph Heusgen, a national security advisor to Angela Merkel, is the outgoing chairman of the Munich Security Conference, which met last weekend. “We have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore,” Heusgen said in closing the conference.

He was responding to a speech given by Trump’s vice president, J.D. Vance. A day after visiting the Dachau concentration camp, Vance harangued the audience in Munich that Europe should worry less about Russia and China and more about its “threat from within.” Kluth said that threat is “apparently an anti-democratic, woke-ish outbreak of censorship that manifests in cancelling elections such as Romania’s — which was corrupted by a Russian disinformation campaign — and suppressing movements such as the Alternative for Germany, a far-right party that German intelligence services are monitoring for neo-Nazi tendencies. The Germans in the audience could not believe Vance’s inversion of the message they had drawn from the Holocaust and camps such as Dachau, which is — Never Again.”

“To Germans, that exhortation means that lies must never again be allowed to stand unopposed; that the tyranny of a plurality must never again crush the rights of minorities or individuals; that “human dignity shall be inviolable” whether a person is native-born or migrant, whether she belongs to the in- or any out-group. And yet here is the Trump administration, rebroadcasting Russian propaganda, wooing far-right movements such as the AfD, and flipping the lessons of history while posing for pictures at Dachau,” Kluth wrote (emphasis added).

There’s a reason why Germans are especially shocked at the cynicism coming out of this new White House, Kluth said. After the Holocaust, the West Germans became good Europeans and democrats, but they did so under US tutelage and protection. They learned their “Western” values from their conquerors-turned-liberators — the Americans. Kluth asked:

What is this thing called “the West?” Its philosophical seeds were sown in Athens and Rome, but its womb was the medieval Occident (as distinct from the Orient in the ‘Middle East’), and specifically the Catholic and later Protestant (as opposed to Orthodox) lands of Christianity. The gestation was the Enlightenment — and the American and French revolutions it birthed — with its emphasis on individual freedom, rationality and self-determination. In the two centuries since, the West has kept evolving to stand for democracy, the rule of law, human rights, tolerance and constitutionalism. It constantly had to confront and vanquish its own demons, from slavery to colonialism and authoritarianism. Each time, it prevailed — at least so far.

The West became a geopolitical concept only after defeating Nazism and Fascism in World War II. Its first formal institution was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, originally founded ‘to keep the Americans in Europe, the Russians out, and the Germans down.’ Others included what is today the European Union. Many nations want to join these institutions because they are also organs of the West. The Ukrainians protesting on the Euromaidan in 2013-14 wanted to get both into the EU and away from Moscow, which to them represents an authoritarian ‘East’ as Beijing does to the people of Taiwan, or Pyongyang to South Koreans.

Hence the cognitive dissonance in the non-American West as US officials negotiate directly with their Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia — about the fate of Ukraine and apparently a more general détente between Washington and Moscow — even as the Europeans who were not invited to the table gather separately in Paris to figure where this Trumpist turn leaves them. Hence the angst gripping America’s allies every time they behold Trump threatening Canada or Denmark, while finding kind words for his counterparts in Moscow or Beijing. Nothing suggests that Trump, as leader of the most powerful nation in history, understands the value of the West to both America and the world. That doesn’t mean that the West is doomed. But it does bode ill for Ukrainians and Europeans — and for anybody anywhere who yearns for a world with more freedom and justice rather than less.

On February 20, 2025, historian Heather Cox Richardson posted on Substack, “The United States has turned its back on Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. ‘We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,’ a European diplomat said. ‘The transatlantic alliance is over.'” As if to drive home the point, the White House posted this outrageous item on social media yesterday.

"CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!"
–President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/IMr4tq0sMB

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 19, 2025

The End Of The West

Elon Musk has been screeching about a “woke mind virus” sweeping through North America and Europe now for years. It is not hard to see that what he is complaining so bitterly about is the concept of “the West,” which is really the notion of liberalism which holds that the people hold the sovereign power of their nations, not kings, emperors, or oligarchs. How fitting that the MAGAlomaniacs are holding up the “tired old man we elected king” as the new monarch of America. During the Revolutionary War, American colonists fought and died to get out from under the yoke of King George III. Now we are back to square one with a new tyrant who is demand unswerving loyalty and styling himself as the new king.

“The West” is indeed a concept, not a place. It is a concept best captured by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he said, “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Trump, Musk, and their many minions reject that notion in its entirety. There is much debate over who said, “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” but whoever the author was, the sentiment is accurate. It’s the end of the world as we know it; most people just don’t realize it yet. By the time they do, it will be too late to put a stop to the authoritarian juggernaut. Mark Twain observed that when the rich rob the poor, it is called business, but when the poor fight back, it is called violence. Buckle up, people. Things are about to get bumpy and remain so for the foreseeable future.