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.
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 of crises and doom (Homolar and Scholz 2019; Homolar and Löfflman 2021). The humiliation comes then when the people feel “cheated out” of their past of national greatness within their current situation and relative to others in society (Homolar and Löfflman 2021, 4). It is the populist leader who can voice these concerns and provide saving to the people. Indeed, the NSS even mentions shortly how “radical ideologies” have smothered US historical advantages in science and technology in seeking to “replace competence and merit with favored group status [that] would render America unrecognizable and unable to defend itself” (NSS, 2025, p. 11). This is the “politics of humiliation”, as philosopher Michael Sandel (2021, 25-26) refers to, which he relates to the US as a meritocratic society: a failure to achieve the nostalgic American Dream fuels resentment as it creates winners and losers, even in their own view.
In terms of global politics and foreign policy, this translates itself into a lack of recognition. The self is humiliated as it is not being recognized, both domestically and globally. Populist leaders and voters have grievances about their social and economic circumstances with a loss of status as they want to maintain a hierarchy of western supremacy, while the countries outside of this centre also do not feel taken seriously (Adler-Nissen and Zarakol 2020, 612-613). The US performs a global imperial leadership through racial and class-based hierarchies of consent or forceful coercion, while the left-behind white working/ middle class also feels increasingly as a minority (Parmar 2018, 152). Some critical and postcolonial thinkers see the United States and Western Europe through a boomerang effect, whereby colonialism in other parts of the world makes possible oppression and dehumanization amongst their own population leading to fascism (Jokic 2025, 602).
The narrative of humiliation becomes indeed more starkly put during the second Trump administration. The US and Europe are affected by this perceived humiliation; they are not merely in decline, but there is a sense that they are under attack from outside and from within. At the Munich Security Conference, Marco Rubio indeed speaks of “civilizational erasure” and a “menace”. During his confirmation hearing, he noted that the post-World War II international order and its institutions were being used as a “weapon” against American interests (Rubio 2025). Similarly, in September 2025, President Trump announced to a meeting to top generals of the US military, as they were requested to return back to the military base in Quantico, Virginia, that they should be rather deployed in the US “to defend the homeland” as the US administration “is rebuilding our great strength” (Trump 2025). The Democrat-run cities across the United States were said to be under attack by these “radical left Democrats”. “We are under invasion from within,” he asserted, “no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don’t wear uniforms”. He added: “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within” (Trump 2025).
Consequently, the humiliation narrative can increasingly be articulated as part of fascism within US foreign policy. The focus appears to be more upon different internal groups, a difficulty to overcome decline, but also the use of violence through mentioning “weapons” and “wars”. Fascism heralds victimhood by which the people see progress of a minority group as degrading to their own group. They wish to castigate the other and blaming them for the actual decline as an existential threat (Stanley 2018, xvi–xvii). This is different from populism, as discussed above. Fascism includes a paramilitary structure through which violence is enabled against the “enemy within” (Kaul and Buzan 2026, 9).
Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference spoke outright about “the threat from within” whilst starting to mention different groups to be blamed, although still in light of some democratic purpose. Nevertheless, violence is increasingly legitimized against perceived weaklings who are to blame for the humiliation. It is not that the country is weak, but these internal enemies are weakening the community, “a natural order” of a higher standing which has become “contaminated” (Griffin 1991, 37). As the seminal author on fascism, Robert Griffin writes, fascism is driven by myths of a country in decay and a need to rise up, which is not merely historically tied to Fascism in Western Europe. Rejuvenation is the “palingenetic myth” driving fascism, while there is a rejection of the representative democracy and traditional dynasties over a charismatic leader-follower relationship (Griffin 1991, 26, 32, 37). Fascism is revolutionary in wanting to bring down an order, whilst also reactionary and oppressive after the new nationalist order is put in place (Griffin 1991, 26-27).
Although fascism wants to bring down an order, fascism is not necessarily concerned with military expansionism as a foreign policy conduct in the global realm, although foreign policy is a site of contestation about the self and threats (Wojczewski 2025, 2, 4). The punishment can be toward external enemies, but also the internal enemies of the American community itself. They are parasites which need to be sanitized (Kaul and Buzan 2026, 9). Violence is needed to purify the ill body which is often seen as a representation of internal threats within society (Campbell 1998, 75). There is not simply a disagreement between participating voters, as is the case within a democratic regime, but groups are casted as parasitic outsiders from the body that are wasteful, dependent and of no use. One author, Thorsten Wocjzeski (2005, 1, 5-6) discusses, for instance, US foreign policy during the first Trump administration by which fascism was not entirely that clear yet, as he argues. This argument, with fascists politics being about a nation of decay and with a need for rejuvenating the country in attacking migrants and international institutions, has less attention, however, upon the different enemies within, a diseased body, and a decline that cannot be overcome that easily as affected by this.
Of course, a question is whether fascism was and is present during the first administration and beyond. In his book, originally and ominously titled Crippled America: How to make America great again (2015) President Trump saw a country that “was going to hell” that needs to start “winning again” starting with rejecting the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran (p. xiv, 1). However, this action could be in general mostly seen as a revolutionary attempt toward fascism, but not entirely there yet. This protofascism, as Kaul and Buzan (2026, 3) call it, makes the most waves, according to them, in terms of gathering loyalty for President Trump. Other ideas still need to still follow through: the totalizing idea of social transformation of repairing one’s society through a paramilitary structure that engages with punishing and rewarding groups in order to garner loyalty (Kaul and Buzan 2025, 5). That said, populism has become too unspecific to capture all the political changes we are seeing, as it hides the movements toward authoritarianism and nativism which is upon the trajectory toward proto-fascism, excluding non-native people that are not seen as part of the nation-state (Art 2022, 1008; Kaul and Buzan 2026, 9).
Indeed, others have noted this earlier during the first Trump administration and besides that, historically, the KKK and its close relationship with Democrat politicians in the American South was also regarded as fascistic. Already in 2016, Robert Kagan wrote a well-known op-ed “This is how Fascism comes to America”. Instead of economic solutions, what Trump offers is “an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence” (Kagan 2016). This created resentments and hatred towards others, ranging from Muslims, women, Hispanics, Arabs to refugees as he wants to “deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up”. Although it is debatable whether fascism was already present during the first Trump administration, it was already marked with violence and transgression. People living at the USA-Mexico and protesters for Black Lives Matter can attest to this and the 2021 attack on the Capitol was a shocking continuation (Specter and Ventakasubramanian 2023, 129).
Nevertheless, there is less attention for fascism and US foreign policy through the “enemy within”. I would argue, unlike Kaul and Buzan, that there is much more than a display of loyalty, but also inside enemies and a decline that is not easily overcome. The fantasy of violence by increasingly allowing for thuggery by white supremacist groups or incompetent policies during the Covid pandemic has moved to violence in the streets. There we now have the ruthlessness of the ICE raids with multiple victims within several states and the concentration camps criminalizing undocumented immigrants without a criminal record. But also, the tariffs placed upon other countries that harm the American people, yet are pushed as necessary to go through before one can rise up and things get better. Similarly, with the initiated attack by US and Israel against Iran, with death soldiers being addressed as necessary evils, as there will “likely will be more before it ends” although Trump announces that “everything possible” will be done (Trump 2026).
Aside from the foreign policy statements, the Heritage Foundation’s document remains therefore instructive as it appeals to the need for a rejuvenation of the nation, no longer being humiliated. Although denying that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 closely aligns with the Trump administrations plans, this report, as the most extensive articulation of Trump administration’s policies also mentions that “the greatest threat to America would come not from without, but from within” (Roberts 2023, 19). Indeed, in its foreword its put as its aims the family first, then the dismantling of the administrative state for the benefit of the American community, and only thereafter the defense of the nation’s sovereignty (Roberts 2023, 3).
The discussion of actions by the United States globally is therefore interesting, but it misses what drives the Trump administration (aside from strongmen politics), especially in the second administration, through the humiliation narrative and the enemy within. Fascism is corporal, with a need to cleanse itself from threats within to remain strong and to rejuvenate from a near certain decline. This is what further enables the violence against minorities and should be a starting point for future research now that the Trump administration attempts to tighten its grip globally and domestically.
References
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Further Reading on E-International Relations
