Reclaiming Western Identity: A Human Rights Day Response to America's New National Security Strategy

Starting with the Glaring Absence of Human Rights

America's new National Security Strategy (NSS) mentions human rights and the human rights framework exactly zero times. This absence makes Human Rights Day (December 10, commemorating the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights) an apt occasion to examine major themes in the NSS. The omission is not merely notable—it is disqualifying. Surely one major goal of any country's national security strategy must be to protect the human rights of its citizens. What else is security all about? And surely one excellent way of doing so is to help protect human rights around the world. How better to protect the human rights of Americans than to find appropriate ways of supporting human rights everywhere?

The omission of human rights in the NSS also sits uneasily with the document's explicit commitment to the preservation of a "Western identity." While human rights are a global accomplishment and the passing of the Universal Declaration counts among the great achievements of humanity, the rights discourse that gave rise to it is a central component of Western culture. The American Declaration of Independence itself stands in this tradition by formulating moral ideals that are supposed to apply to everyone.

But while the omission of human rights raises immediate doubts both about the soundness of the security strategy and its self-assured connection to Western identity, there is more to come. European countries are said to face "civilizational erasure" because they are not taking "Western identity" seriously enough—to such an extent that they may no longer be trustworthy allies. The NSS envisages the future of transatlantic relations as driven by an alliance with right-wing parties in Europe, which are depicted both as capturing the will of the people and as being in touch with "Western identity." All of this echoes themes from JD Vance’s appearance at the Munich Security Conference in February this year.

One place where the claim that European countries are erasing the Western legacy finds friendly reception is Russia. While the NSS envisages “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”—by itself a striking statement not just within transatlantic relations but in international diplomacy—Russia is not discussed as a serious threat. European countries are implicitly chided for creating a situation where they have to regard Russia as an existential threat rather than finding a path toward “strategic stability.”

It will all be music in Putin’s ears.

European countries are said to face ‘civilizational erasure’ because they are not taking ‘Western identity’ seriously enough—to such an extent that they may no longer be trustworthy allies.

I do four things in this essay. The first is to explain why we should not see the Trump government as the preserver of Western identity. The second is to create some context by exploring the notion of Western identity from a nuanced but critical angle. Human rights must have a place in any serious accounting of that notion—an accounting I develop below around four key principles: Critical Inheritance, Institutional Experimentalism, Uncomfortable Universalism, and Reflexive Pluralism. There is no need to cede the notion of Western identity to right-wing politics.

The third is to explore Western identity from the standpoint of Indigenous philosopher John Mohawk. Mohawk emerged from a tradition to which Western identity brought the full measure of real civilizational erasure. To the extent that we want to think about connections between Western identity and civilizational erasure, the pertinent connection is not that Europe is currently erasing this identity. It is instead that the erasure of other cultures—especially Indigenous cultures—has been one aspect of Western identity all along. Anyone who claims the Western legacy should undertake a comprehensive reckoning, and see where this tradition can now be enriched by engagement with traditions it used to oppress.

A concluding fourth point is that the current global migration, so vexing to the Trump administration, is itself the outcome of how Western identity has operated in the world. A responsible exercise of Western identity looks very different from what we see the Trump administration do. Western identity, properly understood, is worth defending. Such an understanding works to the benefit of the whole world, is aware of its own complexity and what it has done in the world, includes human rights as central—and bears little resemblance to what this government offers.

Western Identity: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome—Trump's Washington?

To begin with, I think it makes sense to talk about something like "the West," "Western legacy," or "Western identity." This discourse concerns the history of Western European and North American countries and their role in the world. But this is a messy subject that requires a nuanced approach.

According to what would be a decidedly charitable reconstruction, the Trump government seems to understand Western identity around themes of Judeo-Christian values, national sovereignty, traditional culture, and a belief in American preeminence. (I set aside any investigation of how essential ideas about ethnic, racial, or cultural supremacy are to this self-understanding.)

Across history, appeals to "Western identity," alongside appeals to "Western culture," "the legacy of Antiquity," "European culture," "European civilization," and similar concepts, have often been made in pursuit of partial political or intellectual interests. Especially in conservative politics it has always been tempting to present oneself as the preserver of a great past in times that are described as degraded.

We should note that the NSS does mention rights. However, it conceptualizes them not in ways that involve the human rights framework, but as “God-given natural rights of American citizens.” These rights are discussed in a paragraph that ends with references to allegedly “elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.” We are familiar with such unfounded attacks on European democracies for their efforts to fortify themselves against right-wing takeovers since Vance’s speech in Munich. (Also see here.)

What all this makes clear is that the Trump administration endorses rights only to the extent that they fit in with their particular understanding of Western identity. They reject the comprehensiveness, inclusiveness, and dynamism characteristic of how the human rights movement has learned from historical failures.

While all key components of the Trumpian worldview should appear in any historical accounting of what the "West" has meant, there is much more to this history, as I explore below. Especially people who are distinctly proud of their, or of the, Western legacy should be wary of claims by this government to represent that legacy. We often hear that the Western legacy is ultimately grounded in three cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome. It is Christian religion (or perhaps the Judeo-Christian tradition), Greek thinking, and Roman law that set the West on its course. As will become clearer, such a view of Western identity is dramatically limited. But let us say, for now, that this is your view.

At its core, Christianity is a religion of love—a commitment that does not sit well with this government's predilection for cruelty against the vulnerable. (See here, here, and here.) Christianity is built around a savior who is born in a stable, surrounded by animals, after the humans who bring this savior into the world have been turned away by others and refused shelter. This savior's entire mission centers on calling people to love the vulnerable and welcome the stranger.

And whatever else Greek thinking is about, it is about making truth, evidence, and analysis central. Nobody who sees themselves in the tradition of Greek thinking should find climate change denial acceptable in 2025. The tradition of Greek thinking also does not sit well with the government's attacks on some of the world's greatest universities. (Also see here.) And Greek thinking certainly could not endorse the claim that creates much unity among Trump supporters—that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

So the road from Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome does not lead to Trump's Washington.

A belief in Roman law involves a commitment to the rule of law, the primacy of the system of laws over the interests of any one individual, especially the head of state. No government that deploys its own justice machinery against political opponents should see itself in the tradition of Roman law.

So the road from Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome does not lead to Trump's Washington.

It is therefore inappropriate for America's current government to make any special claims to Western identity. It is equally inappropriate to argue that those who disagree with right-wing parties about the essence of Western identity are setting up Europe or North America for civilizational erasure.

What to Make of Western Identity?

Western Identity: A Vexing Question

Having established that the Trump administration lacks standing to claim the mantle of Western identity, we can now examine this concept more carefully. The question of "Western identity" is unavoidable but also deeply problematic. It is unavoidable because the term structures much contemporary political discourse, historical understanding, and cultural self-conception. It is problematic because defining such an identity risks oversimplification, exclusion, and the perpetuation of hierarchies that have done immense damage.

Yet wrestling with this question remains necessary—not to construct walls, but to understand what we value, where we came from, and how we might move forward. The "we" here refers primarily to those who identify with Western traditions, one way or another. But because the West has shaped the contemporary world, the relevant "we" is not limited to such insiders: like it or not, Western identity concerns everyone.

The Genealogical Problem

Any honest reckoning with Western identity should foreground genealogy rather than essence. There is no timeless, unchanging core to "the West." Instead, we find a series of retrospective constructions by which later societies claimed inheritance from earlier ones. Renaissance humanists reached back to classical antiquity; Enlightenment thinkers positioned themselves as heirs to both Athens and Jerusalem; modern liberals invoke a continuous tradition from Magna Carta through the American Revolution to contemporary human rights. (So, yes, human rights do need to be mentioned.) Each of these genealogies involves selective memory, convenient omissions, and strategic emphasis. Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome will appear frequently in any serious genealogy.

To be sure, ancient Greeks and Romans would find little recognizable in modern "Western" society. They practiced slavery as a matter of course, subordinated women systematically, and had utterly different conceptions of selfhood, politics, and the divine. The medieval Catholic Europe that preserved classical learning was more theocratic than democratic, more communal than individualistic, more focused on the next world than this one. The Enlightenment that supposedly marks the birth of modern Western values was simultaneously the age of colonial expansion and the transatlantic slave trade.

What we call "Western" is a constructed tradition that different groups have assembled, contested, and revised over time.

This genealogical complexity does not invalidate the concept of Western identity, but it should make us cautious about treating it as natural, obvious, or self-evident. What we call "Western" is a constructed tradition that different groups have assembled, contested, and revised over time.

And anyone who conceptualizes Western identity around themes of Judeo-Christian values, national sovereignty, traditional culture, and a belief in American preeminence should remember that the Western intellectual who arguably brought the most profound global transformation is Karl Marx. His critique reshaped politics, economics, and social thought worldwide—from the creation of welfare states in Europe to liberation movements in the Global South to ongoing debates about capitalism's sustainability.

Marx is as essential to the Western tradition as Christianity or human rights.

Potential Core Commitments

If we move beyond genealogy to ask what contemporary Western identity might coherently mean, several candidates emerge—not as timeless essences, but as historically developed commitments that remain live options for us.

First, there is the political tradition of constitutional governance, rule of law, and the limitation of arbitrary power. From habeas corpus to separation of powers, Western societies have developed mechanisms for constraining authority and protecting individuals from the state. This is not the domineering Western tradition, nor is it exclusively Western—similar ideas appear elsewhere—but it does represent a sustained, institutionalized commitment with deep roots.

Second, there is an intellectual tradition of critical inquiry, debate, and revision. The university as a particular way of organizing the life of the mind, the scientific method, the idea of progress through reason—these institutions and concepts have Western genealogies and have profoundly shaped Western self-understanding. The commitment is not to having the right answers but to the process of questioning, testing, and refining our beliefs.

Third, there is a moral individualism that sees persons as bearers of rights and dignity independent of their social roles, group memberships, or utility to collective projects. This idea, with roots in Christianity's central concept of the godlikeness of human beings and full flowering in the Enlightenment, has been among the most powerful contributions to Western identity. Human rights have emerged from this tradition.

At the same time, in its absolutist forms, moral individualism has also been a source of atomization and alienation. Alienation became one of the central preoccupations in Western thought from the nineteenth century onward. Hegel placed it at the center of modern Western consciousness. Clearly all was not well with the collective mental health of Western identity given how central the theme of alienation would become across all domains of culture.

Fourth, there is a cultural inheritance—Shakespeare, Goethe, and Cervantes; Mozart, Molière, and Van Gogh; Gothic cathedrals and modernist skyscrapers—that constitutes a shared reservoir of reference, argument, and inspiration.

The Shadow Side

Any definition of Western identity must reckon with the shadow that accompanies these commitments. The same societies that developed rights for some denied them categorically to others. Constitutional governance at home coexisted with colonial despotism and imperialistic aggression abroad. The Enlightenment's universal reason was invoked to justify racial hierarchies. Individual rights were systematically withheld from women, the poor, racial minorities, LGBTQI+ people, and others.

The West contained significant pathologies, as thinkers like Nietzsche diagnosed with particular force. Moreover, "Western identity" has frequently functioned not as a description but as a weapon—a way of asserting superiority, justifying domination, and excluding those deemed insufficiently "Western." The very language of "the West versus the Rest" creates a binary that flattens complexity, denies agency to non-Western societies and individuals, and perpetuates the colonial mindset it claims to have transcended.

Any contemporary articulation of Western identity must grapple with this history.  Hitler's concentration camps arose from within Western culture. Buchenwald, one of the most notorious, sits just miles from Weimar—the city of Goethe and Schiller, arguably the pinnacle of German high culture.

No such articulation can simply celebrate the achievements while bracketing the atrocities as aberrations. The question is whether the resources within the Western tradition—its commitment to self-criticism, its evolving understanding of human dignity, its capacity for institutional reform—are sufficient to address the harms done in its name.

Western Identity: A Modest Proposal

Perhaps what we should mean by Western identity now is not a fixed essence or a comprehensive worldview, but a particular stance toward tradition. Western identity, at its best, might be characterized by:

• Critical Inheritance: Engaging seriously with our intellectual and cultural past while refusing to treat it as sacred or unquestionable. Taking Shakespeare, Kant, and Beethoven as conversation partners, not authorities. Putting anyone on a pedestal is always a bad idea.
• Institutional Experimentalism: Commitment to the rule of law, democratic governance, and human rights, understood not as perfected achievements but as ongoing experiments requiring constant refinement and extension. Human rights and democracy are respectively necessary to support each other.
• Uncomfortable Universalism: Maintaining universal moral commitments (human dignity, freedom, equality) while recognizing that "universal" claims have often masked particular interests, and that different cultures may realize these values differently.
• Reflexive Pluralism: Understanding that Western societies are internally diverse—by class, religion, ethnicity, ideology—and that this diversity is not a problem to solve but a condition to navigate.

"Western identity" cannot be defined through simple reference to geography, ethnicity, or even a fixed set of values. It is better understood as a set of tensions, commitments, and questions that we inherit and transform. The task is not to defend this identity against outsiders or to abandon it as irredeemably tainted. The task is to engage it critically, extend its best possibilities to everyone, and remain open to what we might learn from other traditions.

This conception offers no triumphalism, no claim to superiority, no warrant for imposing values on others. It recognizes that many of the ideals Western societies claim are neither distinctively Western nor consistently practiced. Yet it insists that the particular ways these commitments have been institutionalized and debated in Western contexts create both possibilities and responsibilities worth preserving and developing.

As part of such conversations, we should explore themes of Judeo-Christian values, national sovereignty, traditional culture, and a belief in American preeminence. But this particular understanding of Western identity would face a staggering amount of scrutiny from within the Western tradition itself—and it is doubtful that the Trump government and its supporters can defend their understanding of "Western identity" against other voices that have as much or more claim to this identity.

In that spirit, my proposal is that we should see Western identity as following a road from Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome to Critical Inheritance, Institutional Experimentalism, Uncomfortable Universalism, and Reflexive Pluralism—rather than to Trump’s Washington.

John Mohawk on Western Identity as the Aggressive Pursuit of Ideals

This internal Western debate about identity, however sophisticated, remains limited by its frame of reference. To understand Western identity more fully, we need to hear from those outside its self-conception, particularly from those who have suffered from its expansion and dominance. This brings us to John Mohawk.

Mohawk (1945-2006) was a Seneca scholar, writer, and activist. The Seneca are one of the tribes that formed the Iroquois Confederacy, a once powerful group of tribes in what today is Upstate New York and the adjacent parts of Canada. In terms of nomenclature, they prefer being called the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

Mohawk was an important voice in Indigenous intellectual circles, extending well beyond the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. He wrote extensively about Indigenous perspectives on history, colonialism, environmentalism, and Western civilization. His analysis is particularly valuable here because it examines Western identity not as an insider reformulating the tradition, but as someone whose own tradition experienced the full force and sheer brutality of Western expansion.

Anyone who takes their own Western identity seriously should take a deep interest in Mohawk’s work.

The View from Outside the Story

Mohawk approaches the question of Western identity from a radically different vantage point than the internal Western debate outlined above. Grounded in Haudenosaunee intellectual traditions and a deep analysis of colonialism, his thought offers crucial challenges to how "the West" understands itself. Mohawk's book that concerns us most is Utopian Legacies: A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World, published in 2000.

For Indigenous thinkers like Mohawk, Western identity is not primarily about Shakespeare, Beethoven, or the Enlightenment, constitutional government or individual rights. It is about a particular relationship to land, to other peoples, and to the natural world—a relationship characterized by extraction, domination, and a cosmology that legitimizes such abuses.

Unlike not only Indigenous cultures but also most other cultures around the world, Western culture has been driven by the idea that there can be only one sound utopian vision for the future, a unique moral reality for everyone. 

Utopian Legacies analyzes Western civilization as fundamentally shaped by a worldview of conquest and unlimited growth. The "West,” then, is not defined by its stated values but by its actual practices: the enclosure of commons, the commodification of nature, the Doctrine of Discovery, the replacement of reciprocal relationships with property relations, and the assumption that the earth exists as raw material for human exploitation.

Unlike not only Indigenous cultures but also most other cultures around the world, Western culture has been driven by the idea that there can be only one sound utopian vision for the future, a unique moral reality for everyone. Western culture developed a distinctive understanding of what it meant to pursue the ideal of a perfect world. Historical progress was defined as the successive realization of the uniquely best ideal.

This mindset drove the Western conquest of the world. There are many reasons other cultures did not attempt to conquer the world. One of these reasons was that they did not think they possessed a utopian vision for the world that had to be spread, no matter the costs.

The rest of the world suffered badly from this understanding of the pursuit of ideals—and this understanding of what the pursuit of ideals means is an essential historical ingredient of the Western identity with which anyone who sees themselves in this tradition ought to reckon.

The Spiritual-Ecological Critique

Alongside many other Indigenous intellectuals, Mohawk saw Western civilization as rooted in a severed relationship with the natural world—a worldview that positioned humans as separate from and superior to nature, entitled to dominate it. This contrasts sharply with Indigenous philosophies that understand humans as embedded in complex webs of relationship and reciprocal obligation with other beings.

For Mohawk, the problem was not merely that Western societies had done awful things, but that Western cosmology itself was structured in ways that made ecological destruction and social domination almost inevitable. The concepts of "progress," "development," and "civilization" that are central to Western identity presume a linear trajectory away from nature, toward ever-greater technological control and resource extraction.

As far as Mohawk is concerned, even contemporary Westerners who celebrate their tradition of critical inquiry or human rights often fail to question the assumptions of their worldview—assumptions about human exceptionalism, about nature as resource, growth as inherently good, individual ownership, or the superiority of the written word over oral tradition. The West's vaunted self-criticism, from this view, remains largely bounded within premises it typically declines to examine.

From such a perspective, an understanding of Western identity centered on themes of Judeo-Christian values, national sovereignty, traditional culture, and a belief in American preeminence would fall far behind what the Western tradition is capable of—even before being exposed to the kind of criticism he articulates.

Indigenous Alternatives

Mohawk did not simply critique Western civilization; he articulated alternatives rooted in Indigenous philosophy. He wrote about Haudenosaunee governance, which emphasized consensus, peaceful resolution of disputes, and the rights of future generations. He explored Indigenous economic concepts based on sustainability rather than growth, on use rights rather than absolute ownership, on gift economies rather than pure market exchange.

These ideas are not offered as romantic alternatives or museum pieces, but as living traditions with sophisticated answers to questions Western philosophy is still struggling with.

One of the deepest problems with Western identity is its reluctance to learn from or even recognize as legitimate the philosophical traditions of peoples it has colonized. The West's self-conception as the source of human progress, reason, and rights makes it remarkably resistant to recognizing sophisticated thought in non-Western, particularly Indigenous, contexts.

Especially in times of ecological crisis, those of us who wish to develop Western identity in a direction that advances rather than stymies humanity should learn from Indigenous thought—which has sustained human communities in balance with nature for millennia.

Concluding Thoughts on Western Identity and Contemporary Migration

The world we inhabit today has been created over the last half millennium through the exercise of Western identity, that is, from centuries of colonialism and imperialism. This world is organized into nation-states because that is the model of political organization that countries like Spain, France, or the UK exported to their dominions. And even though globalization as understood earlier in this century has been waning, we inhabit a politically and economically intensively interconnected world.

Migrants from the developing world could rightly say especially to people in the West that “we come to you now because you came to us first.” They could say this not only to European countries that had actual colonies, but also to the United States, which found alternative ways of bending other parts of the world to its will.

Migrants from the developing world could rightly say especially to people in the West that ‘we come to you now because you came to us first.

Migration—whether of refugees fleeing wars or people just seeking economic betterment—is a direct consequence of this interconnectedness. Migration does cause problems and challenges, to be sure, and these require sustained policy responses. But migration also offers opportunities that can be harvested through the right policy responses. There is no need for a political outlook that plays off migrants against society’s most vulnerable. Contemporary developed societies have enough resources and understanding to tackle the world’s major problems.

The need to come to terms with migration in a world created by exercises of Western identity is one of the biggest challenges of this century. This is the current stage of a global culture and political order the West has created. Now it is the West's responsibility to help solve the problems of our times. Keeping the planet inhabitable for future generations is one aspect of this. Climate change is not going away because a U.S. president calls it a “con job.”

Creating a world in which human rights are respected is another aspect of this. Owning up to all these responsibilities is by no means an expression of cultural defeat or self-erasure. Instead, it is the right kind of exercise of Western identity in the 21^st century.

The absence of human rights from the NSS is thus not merely an oversight but a failure to understand what Western identity, at its best, demands of us. It represents a retreat from the responsibilities that Western expansion created. Anyone seriously committed to Western identity—understood as a tradition of Critical Inheritance, Institutional Experimentalism, Uncomfortable Universalism, and Reflexive Pluralism—should reject the narrow, defensive vision the current American administration offers.

Western identity, if it means anything worth preserving, requires us to face both the achievements and the harms of this tradition, to learn from those who have suffered under it, and to work toward a genuinely inclusive global order. Anything less is not preservation of Western identity but the betrayal of what is best about it.