Over the last decade, Western media, academics, and policymakers have understandably viewed right-wing nationalist victories as temporary aberrations soon to be corrected. After Britons voted to leave the European Union in June 2016 and Americans elected Donald Trump that November, prominent commentators predicted a swift return to deepening globalization. And indeed, Europe extended its globalist project.
The United Kingdom’s globalist Conservative governments allowed net migration to rise to a record 906,000 in the year ending June 2023, more than four times pre-Brexit levels. Those same Conservatives passed a “net zero” emissions by 2050 into law in 2019, accelerated subsidies for offshore wind, and failed to tap North Sea oil and gas, even as energy bills climbed. And conservative ministers adopted World Health Organization guidance for Covid lockdowns, masking, and vaccination, and they expanded gender self-identification guidance in English schools.
German and French establishment parties enforced a cordon sanitaire or firewall against the “far-right” Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Rassemblement National (RN) parties, denying them coalition partners and most mainstream coverage, and American voters in 2020 elected Joe Biden, who reversed Trump’s border policies and rejoined the Paris climate accord on his first day in office. Biden restored Obama-era diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks across the federal bureaucracy and revived federal pressure on social media companies to remove disfavored speech.
But then, the reelection of Donald Trump in November 2024 dashed those hopes. Trump returned to power on promises to seal the southern border, deport illegal immigrants, end the electric vehicle mandate, withdraw from the Paris accord, and dismantle federal censorship of social media.
Within hours of taking office, he signed an executive order banning federal involvement in online censorship and stripped the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of its role in policing so-called misinformation.
Vice President JD Vance told a stunned Munich Security Conference audience in February 2025 that “the threat I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within.” In February 2025, Trump called the European Union an “atrocity” and announced new tariffs.
