7 July 2025, NIICE Commentary 11430
Naziba Mustabshira
In June 2024, Hungary vetoed an extant aid package the EU had for Ukraine, endangering the months of hard-fought consensus among member states toward supporting Kyiv. Back home in the US, President Donald Trump was the leading contender for the Republican nomination despite undermining the 2020 election result, potentially introducing new transatlantic turbulence. And yet the far-right is on the rise in Europe, with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and Germany’s AfD making historic gains.
This is not the West that emerged from the ruins of World War II: an alliance based on liberal democracy, free markets and mutual defence. The greatest threat to the Western alliance in the 21st century may not be Russia, China, or other external challenges, but internal division and disunity. It is the slow-burning internal decay of democratic commitment among its own membership.
The Crisis Within: Liberal Values Under Siege
Democracy is under attack not just on its peripheries but in its very heart. In the United States, Trumpism has mutated from an electoral anomaly into an ideology of consequence. By refusing to concede, belittling the judiciary, and openly defying democratic norms, American democracy is standing on shaky ground.
In Europe, it is more structural. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary has increasingly been taken as a model for authoritarian rule—control of media, manipulation of the courts, restrictions on academic freedom. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has trod a careful line, tempering far-right rhetoric while instead promoting racialized general nationalist conservatism at home, including assaults on press freedom and civil rights. Meanwhile, France and Germany are wrestling with their own waves of domestic populism and harboring deep worries about whether the governments that follow will stick to the norms of liberal democracy. This dispersal of value(s) strikes at the root of the trust, which is necessary for collective action coordination. If democracy itself is disputed between allies, common policy objectives are taken hostage by conflicting ideologies.
A Fractured Alliance
The West, no longer the monolithic alliance it was, is divided. Hungary and Poland have cast their vetoes in the EU to thwart sanctions, migration issues, and court overhauls, which could bind them to democratic values. When forced to agree, it’s usually after a series of debilitating concessions.
On the other side of the Atlantic, American policy has only grown more erratic. The Trump administration withdrew from the Paris Agreement, NATO’s joint military exercises, and partying even with the very idea of withdrawing from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization itself. The Biden administration’s re-engagement with allies has been viewed with suspicion, for yet another US election could reverse course entirely.
France and Germany meanwhile have doubled down their demands for “Strategic Autonomy”—an attempt to protect European foreign policy from US unreliability. But that just makes incoherence worse: bilateral deals displacing common strategy, joint defence planning undermined by conflicting national priorities.
The Authoritarian Advantage
Its adversaries lose no opportunity to notice that disunity of the West. Russia and China, in particular, have filled each breach. Russia’s war in Ukraine is being undermined in a stealthy way through sanctions, evasions, gas deals with EU countries that are yet to break free completely. China, for its part, highlights American racial strife, gun violence, and democratic chaos as proof that liberal democracy is in tatters.
Authoritarian regimes have also been scaling up influence campaigns in Africa, Latin America and the Indo-Pacific — providing infrastructure and aid without the “burdens” of human rights oversight. The credibility of democracy promotion as an instrument of Western foreign policy has been compromised by the inability of Western countries to preserve democratic principles at home. The liberal order is losing its moral clarity — not because its challengers are inherently stronger, but because the West seems too weak-minded to stand by its own principles.
The Cost of Complacency
Unchecked, the West will soon head toward a dark time. NATO will continue to be a treaty organisation, but it will be devoid of its ideological core. The G7 may yet convene, but with shared liberal values, their statements will lack moral force. Transactionalism will replace trust. Security commitments will become conditional. In a world ever more defined by grey zones — cyberwar, disinformation, climate instability — that incoherence could be fatal. More perilously, the global south could seek another port in the storm. If democracy seems feeble, disorderly or hypocritical, attractive alternatives involving primary virtues of authoritarian models — disciplined, centralised and apparently efficient — do emerge.
A Warning and a Choice
The liberal international order the world witnessed after 1945 was never perfect. But it was based on principle — a belief in rights, rule of law, and consensual government. And those values animated not just policy but identity. Now, the West is at a crossroads. It can be a pact of convenience that relies on inertia and necessity to hang together, or it can pledge itself to a vision of the community formed around principles. The work will be difficult. It will demand confrontation not only with enemies but with ourselves. If the rot inside does not cease, the West will not collapse in a bang, nor a military defeat. It will just dissolve — its breakdown will go unnoticed and its values won’t even be missed. And history will write not that the West lost, but that it lost itself.
Naziba Mustabshira is a Research Intern at NIICE and also a third-year student in International Relations at the Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP), Bangladesh.
