In the last year, the US administration has been redefining its foreign policy with a clear move away from the US-led international order since the Second World War. The United States has brought back the spheres-of-influence discussion with the Trump administration asserting a stronger position in the Western Hemisphere rejecting other great powers’ influence, also called the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (The White House 2025, 4). Meanwhile, the US has acted permissively toward China and Russia and their strongmen in their own realm (Goddard 2025, 11). However, the discussion remains a lot upon the US redefining its position in global politics, its relations with great powers, and who is regarded as strong or weak, while the new battle lines are also with the threat from within that is to be blamed.

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This article focuses more closely on this threat and its significance for US foreign policy under the second Trump administration. This will be done through the narrative of humiliation, in light of populism and fascism. This discussion came up during Vice-President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2025. Vance (2005, 16) emphasized the “shared democratic values” between the US and Europe which are not affected by an “external actor”, such as Russia or China, but rather the “threat from within”. This threat was anchored upon the “retreat of Europe from some of its fundamental values” as Europe’s elites had thrown out democratic principles by not listening to the people (Vance 2025, 22-23). Instead, it had been protecting “illegal immigrants” and Muslims undergoing “Quran burnings”, while also attacking anti-feminists, Christians and prolifers (Vance, 2025, 17-18).

A year later in his Munich Security Conference speech, Marco Rubio (2026) saw a shared civilizational purpose that was under pressure through forces of “civilizational erasure that today menace both America and Europe alike”. The Western civilization with its shared heritage had fallen in “terminal decline” with a loss of pride “shackled by guilt and shame” of one’s own culture (Rubio 2026). Rather as a proud sovereign, liberal democracies focused more on the citizens globally through trade and even more so on migration. Similarly, with the National Security Strategy mostly focused upon the Western Hemisphere or great power politics, one of its overarching aims was also that it wanted the “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health” with “strong, traditional families that raise healthy children” (NSS, 2025, p. 4). Clearly, the US and Europe are seen as in decline through a retreat of their values, further affected by minority groups.

The discussion is not actually about an “external other”, as Vance also mentioned, but rather about the self, in temporal, spatial and ethical terms (Hansen, 2006, p. 46). Both the US and Europe are constructed either as having shared democratic values or as a Western civilization that should listen to the people or not loose its pride, spatially and ethically. In that way, they could be juxtaposed against China and Russia as the “external others” and as authoritarian regimes. However, that is not the most significant representation here. Both the US and Europe are clearly contrasted against themselves over time as loosing their fundamental values, so in ethical and temporal terms. Indeed, the US and EU are in decline over time, while increasingly incapable to tackle the breakdown of civilizations or the threat of minorities. This is exacerbated by the opening of the “floodgates” to millions of migrants in the last decade and the “unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies” by which already one in five inhabitants are from abroad (Vance 2025, 21-22; Rubio 2026).

There is thus a clear reference to decline in statements about US foreign policy. This is not unusual in itself, but the question about US decline has not often been regarded as a threat by enemies from within or a as a real moral failing within society that is not easily overcome. There have been various cycles of discussions about US decline in the last few decades, either through the Sputnik moment of the Soviets with a perceived technological gap in the 1950s or the discussions about “imperial overstretch” as coined by historian Paul Kennedy at the end of the 1980s (Joffe 2009, 21). Many presidents have referred to some form of US decline or renewal, including President Obama after the financial crisis and President Kennedy about the space race in the 1960s. Or the other way around: there is talk about a culture war by presidential candidate Pat Buchanan but not US decline.

This declinism is often explored through the notion of relative decline of power capabilities between great powers, but for the Trump administration it is fruitful to look at the humiliation narrative. Populist research has shown that populist leaders portray often past societies nostalgically in contrast to a current state........

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