The end of liberal hegemony
Europe must decide if it can become a serious actor on the world stage
Artillery Row
By
Doug Stokes
6 December, 2025
The era of liberal hegemony is over. For three decades, the guiding principle of American foreign policy was a fusion of messianic universalism and raw power, a belief that the United States existed not merely to secure its own interests but to evangelize the “rules-based international order” to the ends of the earth. From the Balkans to Baghdad, American grand strategy was predicated on the assumption that Washington was the armed curator of a global garden.
The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), just released by the Trump administration, is the obituary for that era. But for Europe, it is something far more urgent: a cold shower. The document dismantles the machinery of automatic American protection and replaces it with a framework of sovereign realism. It is a colder, sharper vision of the world, and it delivers a message that Brussels, Berlin, and Paris can no longer afford to ignore: the American legion is not coming home, but it is locking the gates of its own fortress.
The most striking feature of this document is its explicit rejection of the ideological crusade. For years, the “Freedom Agenda” was the shibboleth of the transatlantic establishment. Yet the 2025 NSS declares, in stark, unadorned prose, that U.S. policy is “not grounded in traditional, political ideology”. It buries the era of nation-building by asserting that America will “seek good relations … with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change”.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-end-of-liberal-hegemony/
