Establishment officials in Europe and the United States are shedding longstanding norms of empire denial by taking positions on what the Trump administration’s foreign policy means for the future of Pax Americana.

Since former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and longtime architect of American empire Ivo Daalder declared “the end of Pax Americana” after the 2024 election of Donald Trump, deliberation over the fate of U.S. imperial power has intensified at the highest levels of government, where officials are trying to determine if the United States will continue to dominate the world.

Although many establishment officials remain reluctant to speak of U.S. imperial power, the Trump administration’s foreign policy has grown so volatile, now including military aggression against Venezuela, that several establishment leaders have begun to reveal deep concerns over the implications for Pax Americana.

In May of last year, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen went so far as to propose a Pax Europaea as an alternative.

“We cannot sit idly by as upheaval unfolds,” von der Leyen said. “We cannot allow ourselves to be thrown off course by the seismic changes that we are facing.”

For over a decade, foreign policy elites have been deliberating over the future of Pax Americana, or the global imperium that the United States has led and dominated since the end of World War II.

Since well before von der Leyen issued her call for a Pax Europaea, U.S. strategic analysts have been trying to discern the most consequential factors for Pax Americana. Driven by deep anxieties about challenges to U.S. imperial power, including the knowledge that all empires have fallen, they have come to focus on two major developments.

One is rising powers. Concerned about China and Russia, U.S. strategic analysts began warning about a transition away from a unipolar world dominated by the United States to a multipolar world wracked by great-power competition.

In 2012, the National Intelligence Council delivered a stark warning in its Global Trends report. “With the rapid rise of other countries, the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and Pax Americana—the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945—is fast winding down,” the National Intelligence Council reported.

Although analysts agreed that the United States remained the world’s most powerful country, knowing it could still direct major attacks against countries such as Venezuela, they feared that the United States was losing its ability to impose its will on the world. Following Russia’s 2014 intervention in Ukraine, analysts increasingly asserted that global politics was entering a new era of 

© Eurasia Review