US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin walk on the tarmac after they arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, 2025.ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images
Terence McNamee is a Senior Fellow of the Montreal Institute for Global Security.
Beware when the world’s most powerful leaders talk of “civilization.” Their abuse of the term could spawn a new international order.
Russia is “an original civilization-state,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a prominent annual forum in Sochi in 2023, adding that “the world is on its way to a synergy of civilization-states.” The same year, Xi Jinping called China “the only great, uninterrupted civilization that continues to this day in a state form.” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi describes his own state as “the most refined idea of human civilization.”
Even U.S. President Donald Trump, especially since his return to the White House, seems intent on having the United States joining the club. “With God’s help,” Mr. Trump assured Congress last year, “we are going to forge the freest, most advanced, most dynamic and most dominant civilization ever to exist on the face of this Earth.”
These leaders are not collaborating – at least not directly – to bring this order into being. It might even emerge by default. But one thing is certain: a global system run by countries that identify themselves as “civilization-states” bears no resemblance to the vision set out by Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos earlier this year. In calling for middle powers to club together in building a more just, values-driven (loosely defined) multilateralism, Mr. Carney blamed great powers for gaming the old system and ultimately killing it.
Yet the surge in civilizational rhetoric from Beijing to Delhi and from Moscow to Washington suggests that the post-Western world could be reorganized along lines that echo old patterns of domination and hierarchy. Mere “nation-states” could be consigned to a second tier.
For leaders like Mr. Xi, Mr. Modi and Mr. Putin, civilizational discourse has become an instrument of policy to legitimize their power at home and their spheres of influence abroad.
Mr. Putin decided in 2012 to formally classify Russia as a “state-civilization” comprised of many ethnicities united around traditional Russian and family values. He actively promotes various fictions, including the idea that Russian values are somehow genetically predetermined. His war on Ukraine is underpinned by another myth: that its land must be “restored” because Russians and Ukrainians are one people, belonging to a single spiritual space.
Mr. Modi claims the support of a Hindu god, Rama, historically known for his benevolence and virtue but lately rebranded by his party. These days, Rama is a warrior defending India against its enemies (read: Muslims) in the service of Mr. Modi’s attempts to remake a hugely diverse, multi-faith society into a Hinduized civilizational state.
Mr. Xi frequently speaks of China’s “continuous civilization.” Notions of identity, history and destiny are threaded into what he terms the “necessity of reunification” with “China’s sacred territory” of Taiwan.
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Civilization-states’ claims to authenticity are much more expansive than a nation-state’s. They are grounded in stories that are ancient in character and immune to critique. Cultural Darwinism – the notion that attachment to distinct civilizational identity and norms is inherent in peoples’ makeup and can’t be broken – runs through them. As does the idea of restoration: each has a distant past that must be redeemed by today’s leaders.
The influential British scholar Christopher Coker has linked the reinvention of China, Russia and India as civilization-states to a series of political, economic and social crises that shook the foundations of the West. He argues that its decline, both as a beacon for the world and as a custodian of the post-war order – a product of liberal (Western) norms and values – left a geopolitical vacuum. It would inevitably attract new forces.
It is no secret that Mr. Trump’s administration dislikes Canada and Europe. Their alleged betrayal of Western civilization rankles as much as their apparent free-riding off American military power. In their minds, the U.S. no longer leads or even speaks for the West; it is the West.
American singularity – a reckless exceptionalism underpinned by overwhelming might – is not new. Nor is the U.S. pivot away from Europe. But the civilizational gloss is.
Mr. Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico last year is of a piece with other symbolic steps, such as the colossal, classical-style victory arch planned near Arlington Cemetery, or his substantive policy shifts, including ripping up trade agreements and threatening to leave NATO.
However erratic or peculiar, each is a nod to America’s distant past, namely, an imagined version of the 18th century-founding of the Republic: a new, fiercely independent civilization of Greco-Roman inheritance, where individuals of all (European) races were famously “melted into a new race of men.”
If all this sounds more like a personality cult, that is by design. The idiom of civilization-states needs its emperors as much as empires did.
More importantly, what links the Trump administration with Beijing and other great powers is their rejection of universalism.
The great dream of Western writers was that human rights and the rule of law would be exported everywhere because they apply to all people regardless of nationality, culture or place.
But democracy-promotion has no place in a world of civilization-states. In large parts of the world, the concept is now dismissed as a tool of Western hegemony, a fantasy that leads to disastrous wars.
This is also one of MAGA’s essential truths. Mr. Trump’s team has no interest in exporting values or underwriting a liberal order. Indeed, they may genuinely hold the same view as China: this new world would not only be less preachy but more peaceful, too. As long as others respect civilizational boundaries and not interfere beyond their own, “harmony with co-existence” (as Mr. Xi often says) is possible.
The Iran War debacle may reinforce this logic. Mr. Trump’s appetite for military adventurism soared after his success in Venezuela. After Iran, he may stick to his own backyard.
Yet a new order based on civilizational spheres of influence would still be shot through with flashpoints for war. States claiming to be sovereign representatives of the values of their civilization are menacing by nature. They will go to war when they feel their credibility is on the line, even against their civilizational kin. Think Russia’s war against Ukraine, or the U.S.’s threats to forcibly take Greenland from Denmark.
Disputes amongst civilization-states over the norms and rules of the international system will likely be more acute in a world chopped up into spheres of influence. Conflict would no longer be bound by laws or conventions of the kind that, for all their shortcomings, still constrained Cold War rivalries and helped keep nuclear weapons in their silos.
The good news is that the more inclusive, pragmatic multilateralism advanced by Mr. Carney is winning the day in global fora. From Australia to Angola – where recently I attended a Europe-Africa Dialogue peppered with rosy references to his Davos speech – there is a growing consensus that whatever takes shape in the coming years, any new breed of hegemons must be resisted.
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In global trade, Mr. Carney has already demonstrated middle-power heft. He is leading diplomatic efforts to create new multiregional trade deals, positioning Canada, according to a recent Brookings report on the future of multilateralism, as “a geographic and diplomatic bridge.” Time will tell if middle powers like Canada can exert the same influence over the emerging security order.
The danger, as ever, is complacency. Western-made institutions are continuing to weaken under the strain of underfunding and waning legitimacy. A global framework that is fair and effective will require new coalitions and unyielding commitment by middle powers to build it.
The alternative may be a rejigged version of the old order, where big powers’ claims for supremacy are rooted in imagined versions of the past.