Was nationalism used by Americans after WWI and WWII to destroy European empires and to make place for American empire, accidental or not very much?
President Woodrow Wilson championed the principle of "national self-determination" to dismantle multiethnic European empires like Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans. However, this was driven by his idealistic vision of a peaceful, democratic world order, rather than a calculated strategy to build an American territorial empire. To Declare the real goal would be foolish when the dismantling of old empires was going on. Eager and idealistic nationalist warriors were needed.
Historically, this dynamic unfolded in a few key ways:
• Wilson’s Vision: In his Fourteen Points, Wilson advocated for ethnic and cultural groups to govern themselves, directly undermining the legitimacy of empires and arbitrary colonial rule.
• Rejection of Territorial Ambition: Instead of seeking colonies, Wilson’s administration initially favored isolationism and worked to prevent the U.S. from seizing territory. The U.S. even began a transitional process toward Philippine independence in the decades that followed. After WWII, the U.S. embraced global hegemony to contain Soviet expansion, creating an informal empire defined by economic, military, and institutional dominance.
• The "Accidental Empire": The U.S. did not build a traditional territorial empire in Europe after WWI. However, the economic and institutional shifts of the era laid the groundwork for American global influence and globally spread American military bases. This allowed the U.S. to eventually champion the Liberal International Order following World War II. Emerging from WWII as the sole industrial power not devastated by the war, America established a global system of alliances, military bases, and international economic structures (like the Bretton Woods institutions). This established a form of global hegemony—often referred to as an "American Empire" or Pax Americana.
We are living now at the sunset of nation-state, that lost usefulness, when entire civilizations are barely surviving.
“Most Americans have heard of Christian nationalism, according to Pew. Soon, they may be hearing about Christian civilizationism.
For the past few years, I’ve reported at a conference of the world’s conservative leaders in London. It’s called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and it gathers Trump cabinet officials, British parliamentarians, European far-right leaders and manosphere influencers. This year, Jordan Peterson’s suit guy was there in an embroidered Last Supper jacket.
The conference is funded by oil and gas companies, billionaires and evangelical Christians, the investigative team at Unearthed found. More than 4,000 people from more than 80 countries attended the three-day event at a palatial glass conference center in west London.
They came to listen to high-profile speakers, network, look at anti-woke art and shop for books like “The Manbook: A Point-by-Point Guide to Sucking it Up and Getting the Job Done.” (The points included “make a steak” and “go to church.”)
The main idea of the event, and what everyone seemed to be discussing onstage, was “civilizational renewal.”
It’s the notion that Western countries are in decline, but that bigger families, closed borders, abundant energy and what the conference organizers call “Judeo-Christian” governance can revive them.
President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk have all invoked this idea over the last year. So have European populists including Nigel Farage of Britain, Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Giorgia Meloni of Italy. “We are the ones who are carrying forward the light of Western civilization,” Trump said last week at an event on the National Mall.
It’s an escalation of Christian nationalist rhetoric that offers a unifying mission for the religious right everywhere. And experts say the shift goes beyond semantics.
“I wouldn’t describe it as a rebranding; I think what’s going on is far more radical than that,” Philip Gorski, a professor of sociology and religious studies at Yale, told me. ”What you’re seeing is a reorganization and reorientation of the Christian right in the United States and other parts of the world that really is quite profound.”
What is the context?
The idea of “Western civilization” became popular around World War I, when professors developed courses that claimed a single, continuous civilization connected ancient Greece to the modern United States. These courses were a standard part of American college curriculums for decades.
But migration and multiculturalism challenged the idea that Western countries shared a single history, culture and religion. Few, if any, elite universities now require students to take “Western civ” classes. But a coalition of conservatives are trying to bring the idea back.
“We are part of one civilization: Western civilization,” Rubio told European leaders at a security conference in Munich this year. “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser, rang a similar bell in his eulogy for the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, declaring that the “lineage and legacy” of the MAGA movement “hails back to Athens, to Rome.”
Who is pushing this?
Gorski, at Yale, started noticing the “shift from nationalist to civilizational rhetoric” a year or two ago. He identified four distinct groups that are pushing the idea that civilization is in crisis — threatened by immigration, falling birthrates and a lack of meaning.
Secularism, they argue, drained life of purpose, shrank families and left people lonely.
The most influential of these groups is a circle of Catholic scholars who oppose religious pluralism and want the church to be dominant in politics. (They call themselves “integralist” or “post-liberal.”)
Then there are tech billionaires like Musk and Peter Thiel, who has said he wants to fight the “Antichrist.”
Gorski also cited Christian reconstructionists, who have influence with the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; and New Apostolic Reformationists, like the White House faith adviser Paula White-Cain.
“These are intellectual thought leaders, but I think this is starting to trickle down a little bit,” Gorski said.
How it works
The ideology is powerful because it gives cosmic stakes to partisan political fights. “A civilization will die if it loses its sacred story,” Rod Dreher, an Orthodox Christian writer, said at the conference. The call for “civilizational renewal” gives conservatives a sacred story — one of decline and rebirth — which in turn gives their work a greater sense of meaning and purpose.
This story is broad enough to unite conservatives from different contexts, because its whole premise is that “Western civilization” transcends national borders. “The civilizational rhetoric provides a kind of a lingua franca,” Gorski said, “that allows some of these groups to align with each other and imagine that they’re on the same page.”
But critics like Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes “The Ethicist” column for The Times, say “Western civilization” is a myth — one invented as a cover for white ethnonationalism. Gorski also warned that calls for civilizational renewal in the past, after the French Revolution and in Weimar Germany, were a pretext for authoritarian rule. “I think it’s really far more threatening to democracy than the sort of old-style Christian nationalism was,” he told me.
Some people at the conference worried the focus on civilizational renewal was myopic — and risked making Western countries into isolationists. Alexander Browder, 17, is a high-school student who has been sanctioned by Russia for unveiling a cryptocurrency money-laundering network. He told me Western countries should focus less on cultural revival, and more on managing global threats.
Other conference attendees I spoke to from non-Western countries — Armenia, Gambia, Nigeria and Madagascar — said they supported the idea of civilizational renewal.
They weren’t sure, though, that the public would buy the dream that speakers were selling.
“They’re presenting the West as a utopia,” said Abdullah Tijani, 28, a lawyer and journalist from Nigeria who was part of a group of young Africans the organizers had invited. If that’s true, he wondered: “Then why are so many people angry?”
A new Gallup poll found 65 percent of Americans think the country would be better off if more people were religious.” [1]
1. The Elite Conservatives Trying to Revive ‘Western Civilization’: Believing. Jackson, Lauren. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jun 28, 2026.
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