Having been re-elected to the White House, Donald Trump has not merely regained power: he has accelerated the historic rupture already begun during his first term. In just a few months, his decisions have shaken the foundations of the international order inherited from the end of the Cold War, provoking stupefaction and denial, particularly in Europe. Strategic decoupling from the Old Continent, questioning NATO, abandoning multilateralism, and the unvarnished assertion of power relations — all of this goes to show that Trumpism version 2.0 now openly embraces the end of the moral illusions that structured the “collective West.”
For Alain de Benoist, this sequence marks far more than a simple change in style or political personnel. It signals entry into a multipolar world—brutal, stripped of universalist discourse—where Europe appears more dependent and more disarmed than ever.
In this in-depth interview, the leading philosopher of the French New Right analyzes the lasting consequences of this geopolitical shift and the dead-ends closing in on a continent that still refuses to learn its lessons.
Breizh-info.com: In what way does Trump’s second term mark an even deeper rupture with the world order inherited from the post-Cold War era?
Alain de Benoist: During his first term, Donald Trump was not yet prepared to take the turn he is currently taking. During the Biden presidency, he had all the time he needed to identify his objectives, refine his way of seeing things, and take stock of his entourage in order to know whom he can truly count on. As soon as he was re-elected, he launched into a frenzy of announcements that has left (and continues to leave) the rest of the world stupefied. First, because of his rather peculiar personality. Take a paranoid and megalomaniac narcissist, a populist demagogue, and a business shark, mix them all together, and you get Donald Trump.1 A character halfway between Ubu2 and Caligula.
The most profound rupture, the one with the heaviest consequences, is the “decoupling” between Europe and the United States. In the space of a few months, it has caused the fracturing of the “collective West,” undermined the foundations of the Atlantic Alliance, and modified the rules of international trade. It now threatens NATO’s very existence.
Even if many do not realize it, this is a truly historic event that will weigh on the decades to come. Believing that all this will calm down when Trump leaves the White House would be a mistake. Once trust has disappeared, it takes considerable time to heal. Especially since after Trump, there is a good chance we will see J.D. Vance succeed him. Now, Vance is often presented as a man who has “all of Trump’s qualities without his flaws.” There will be no going back.
Alain de Benoist’s essential thoughts on the US-EU “decoupling” have been brought to you in English by Arktos Journal:
Breizh-info.com: Can we speak of a definitive shift toward a multipolar world, or does American hegemony remain intact despite Trumpian rhetoric? Trump presents himself as a “non-interventionist” president, yet in recent months he has multiplied interventions. Are we truly witnessing the end of American messianism, or merely a redefinition of its forms?
Alain de Benoist: It remains intact, but it is reformulating itself in a world that has already changed considerably. Trump knows very well that we are heading toward a multipolar world, that American hegemony is threatened, and that American society is more fragmented than ever. Since he admires the strong and despises the weak, he is inclined to recognize that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have a certain legitimacy to dominate within their respective spheres of influence. But he does not follow this logic through to its conclusion, as his interventions in Iran and the Middle East demonstrate. The reputation he has acquired for being “non-interventionist” is completely false. The core of his electoral base favors isolationism, but that is not his case. At the same time, he breaks with his predecessors on at least four points.
First, he does not want interventions that drag on. He fears more than anything, and rightly so, a quagmire of the Afghanistan or Vietnam type. He prefers interventions that can be counted in days (bombing Iran), or even hours (kidnapping Maduro).
Second point, which is the most revealing: he no longer feels the need to dress up his interventions in the mantras his predecessors invoked to gain the support of the “international community” (another entity on the verge of extinction). He no longer says he wants to defend “freedom and democracy,” he admits without qualms that such is his pleasure. This is a return to the law of the jungle. At least you cannot accuse him of being a hypocrite!
Third point: he does not seek to mobilize his allies; he presents them with a fait accompli, for the excellent reason that he no longer considers them allies. This goes hand in hand with his abandonment of multilateralism.
Finally, showing thereby that he knows nothing of the nature of politics, he only condemns traditional wars by placing all his trust in trade wars, as demonstrated by the punitive character of his tariff decisions. This is a revolution.
Read Alain de Benoist’s latest penetrating essay, penned in the wake of the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro and brought to you in English by Arktos Journal:
Breizh-info.com: Does his Davos speech against the European Union and NATO seem to you to be electoral posturing, or does it reflect a coherent geopolitical strategy?
Alain de Benoist: Certainly not electoral posturing. It is simply the implementation of the new orientations set forth in that other historic document, the “National Security Strategy” made public on December 5th by the White House. The United States makes known without qualms that the Western Hemisphere is henceforth their exclusive zone of influence—their private preserve. The “alliance networks and allies” of the United States are mentioned there under the heading “means at America’s disposal to obtain what we want,” which has the merit of clarity. Also revealing are the words used by Stephen Miller, Trump’s policy advisor, to justify the American military intervention in Caracas: “We live in the real world, a world governed by force, power, and might.”
Breizh-info.com: Could Trump’s questioning of NATO’s role precipitate the collapse of the Atlantic Alliance as we know it?
Alain de Benoist: In practice, the Atlantic Alliance has already disappeared. NATO, founded in 1949, was intended to give the allies the status of vassals. This North Atlantic Treaty Organization should have disappeared when the Soviet system imploded. Instead, it became a tool authorized to intervene anywhere in the world to defend American interests.
When Trump announced his intention to seize Greenland, which is currently under Danish authority, the fact that the Danes belong to NATO did not make him hesitate for an instant. Copenhagen then found itself in a grotesque position, able to invoke against the United States only the very same NATO that belongs to the United States. The truth is that Trump has already decided to gradually disengage from NATO, for the simple reason that this organization costs him more than it brings him.
The tragedy is that Europeans, faced with this radically new situation, are in denial. Instead of learning the lessons of American “decoupling,” they do everything to oppose it and proclaim in every possible way that they wish to remain faithful allies.
To proclaim oneself the ally of someone who no longer wants allies is as stupid as stubbornly refusing to consider someone an enemy when they have decided to regard you as an enemy.
Breizh-info.com: Europe appears more dependent than ever, both militarily and in terms of energy. Does it still have a chance of achieving strategic emancipation?
Alain de Benoist: This is not a matter of “chance,” but a question of will. Europe is indeed more dependent than ever on the United States, and on all fronts (from armaments to artificial intelligence, from software to credit cards). Does it have the means to reclaim its sovereignty? Potentially yes, but on the condition of wanting to—and knowing that such an objective will require at least 15 or 20 years.
The European Union, which is quite determined that market-Europe should not transform into power-Europe, will not hear of it. The member states are divided. Donald Trump, who considers them less than nothing (alas, not wrongly), insults and humiliates them every day, yet they continue to rely on the United States to satisfy their vital needs. Faced with the threat of invasion of Greenland, Denmark could have done three things: give the Americans two months to evacuate the military base they have there, hit back tit-for-tat on tariffs, and cancel its recent order for American F-35 jets. Instead, we remained at the stage of indignant disapproval. This is the spectacle we are witnessing almost everywhere.
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Breizh-info.com: Does the Sino-American rivalry now structure all of global geopolitics, to the detriment of regional conflicts?
Alain de Benoist: Of course. Everyone knows that this rivalry will constitute the backdrop of the coming decade. Trump’s weaknesses toward Putin are explained by the fact that the American president has not lost all hope of seeing the Kremlin distance itself from Beijing. On this point, he is deceiving himself.
Breizh-info.com: Trump claims he wants to make America’s allies pay more. Are we witnessing the end of the “free protection” granted by Washington since 1945?
Alain de Benoist: First of all, there has never been any “protection.” The American umbrella was necessarily full of holes, since no country can expose itself to nuclear retaliation by attempting to protect a country other than its own. The very principle of nuclear deterrence is that it cannot be exercised for the benefit of a third party. The protection you speak of was, moreover, not “free,” since we have paid for it (and continue to pay for it) with the Americanization of our customs. Let us not forget, finally, that NATO was from the start an American initiative and tool, and that the United States has always used it as an argument to prevent the emergence of an autonomous European defense. The reversal of position we are witnessing today is only more bitterly ironic.
Breizh-info.com: Can we see in Trumpism a form of “civilizational realism” in the face of liberal globalism?
Alain de Benoist: In a way, yes, since American interventionism, now sporadic, no longer claims to inspire a universal normative order. Trump wants to be able to intervene wherever he wants, but he is not seeking to establish a new world order. This is another fundamental rupture. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said at Davos, “the old order will not be restored, we must not mourn it.”
We are leaving a world governed by liberal democracy, the rule of law, free trade, and the ideology of human rights. We are entering the world of power relations without ideological and moral dressing, the world of “great spaces” and “civilizational states.” In matters of international relations, realism is always better than moralizing abstractions. And we will already see things more clearly when the new state of affairs is recognized for what it is.
We are far from that, unfortunately. The spectacle offered by the Trumpist right in Europe, in the name of an “Occidentalism” that has long since lost all meaning, is dismaying. These people congratulate themselves on seeing Donald Trump work to make America great again without understanding that this objective requires the diminishment of Europe. They rejoice at the idea that Trump praises sovereignty without grasping that in matters of sovereignty, Trump recognizes only his own. They speak with their feet dangling in the void.
Donald Trump cannot be our friend, because our respective interests will always diverge. Saying that he has taken certain measures that “go in the right direction” should not lead one to believe that to take similar ones here — with less brutality, one hopes — we must submit to his demands. But it is true that when it comes to identifying the enemy, the European right has never seen much further than the end of its nose…
***
Interview conducted by YV at Breizh-Info.com
Interview originally published on Breizh-Info.com, January 27th, 2026.
In the published article, it says “tribun politique,” however, this was clarified in a correspondence with Alain de Benoist, and his intent was for it to say “tribun populiste,” which I have chosen to translate as “populist demagogue.” This may have simply been a typo on the part of Breizh-Info.
Ubu is a reference to the French play Ubu Roi, which was written by Alfred Jerry in 1896. It is a satirical parody of several Shakespearean works about a king who leads a revolution.
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In this far-ranging and aesthetic volume, you can explore the ups-and-downs and the horizons of Europe through essays by Alain de Benoist, Philippe Conrad, Rémy Soulié, Henri Levavasseur, Jean-Philippe Antoni, Jean-François Gautier, Thibaud Cassel, Alix Marmin, Jean-Yves Le Gallou, Guillaume Travers, Olivier Eichenlaub, Anne-Laure Blanc, Paul Éparvier, Grégoire Gambier.
Sounds like you need therapy for the breakup you caused and are in shambles emotionally! Literally, you sound like a woke girl realizing, at last, consequences! You are lost! Time to return to Forest! The road to glory begins in the Wilderness!
Sounds like you need therapy for the breakup you caused and are in shambles emotionally! Literally, you sound like a woke girl realizing, at last, consequences! You are lost! Time to return to Forest! The road to glory begins in the Wilderness!