By Ron Raskin
The U.S. election ended with a decisive win for Trump, and media worldwide is analyzing why it happened. Many point to the economy and immigration as key reasons. However, the root problem runs deeper: a widespread sense that things just aren’t going well. Sadly, this isn’t just a feeling—it’s a reality. And it’s not just a feeling—there are real problems. The U.S. and other Western countries are under growing pressure, with places like Ukraine and Israel facing direct conflicts.
Europe, which made up 28% of the global population in 1913, has now fallen below 10%. For the past 20-25 years, purchasing power and public wealth in major Western nations have stagnated, and their share of the world’s GDP is steadily declining. While U.S. wealth has grown significantly, it is concentrated in the hands of a small wealthy minority, leaving the middle class feeling that opportunities are shrinking and the American Dream harder to reach.
Of course, none of this is news to Western leaders. For decades, they worked to create a world where other nations’ growth would be beneficial rather than threatening, hoping that global prosperity would also encourage democracy and Western values. But it didn’t turn out that way. Economic progress in many regions hasn’t brought Western-style democracy with it, nor have Western values spread as hoped. Instead, some parts of the global South—or countries in opposition to the West—have chosen a different path, embracing a zero-sum view: “What we want, we’ll take.”
In response to these growing threats, the West is now urgently searching for a new direction. Far-right voices are calling for nationalism and isolationism, hoping to streamline bureaucracy and bypass the slower processes of democracy in favor of “strong-handed” national leadership. However, they overlook that the challenges faced today are beyond the power of any one Western nation to solve alone.
Right-wing parties like Europe’s ECR (European Conservatives and Reformists) and the Republicans in the U.S. are caught between nationalism and supporting a strong alliance among Western, Christian-majority countries. Hopefully, they’ll choose cooperation over isolationism.
Centrist parties continue to follow the decades-old approach of multilateralism, still grounded in Wilsonian idealism, envisioning a kind of global confederation of nations like the League of Nations or the United Nations. In Europe, this includes groups such as S&D, Renew, and the European People’s Party, while in the U.S., it is represented by the Democratic Party.
But this approach hasn’t really worked because there’s not enough common ground to hold it all together. While it might be relevant someday, today it feels premature, and the world seems more likely to divide based on core values—a world of Valores nations.
Left-wing parties are largely multilateralists and internationalists, often promoting ideas reminiscent of a global workers’ utopia—where everyone works hard, shares resources equally, and the world is divided into the working class versus the capitalist class. It seems they may have overlooked some lessons of the 20th century.
Strangely, no one seems to view the Western world as a genuinely unified entity—a Western Supranational Union .Both aspects—the scope of such a union of Western democracies (extending beyond Atlantic alliances) and the strength of its internal ties—currently lack proper representation.. None of the current political parties seem to back this idea.
The Western world already shares a lot: people in these nations have similar values, empathy circles, and their national interests often align well. Building even stronger bonds in both values and interests is essential for Western nations to unite and stand up to common threats.
The challenges facing Western countries are huge, and the outside pressure will either bring them closer together or risk overwhelming them. Now is the time for all Western nations—North America, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Israel—to join forces and stand strong together.