Yan Xuetong: Trump's Imperial Turn and the End of the West

"The result is that the United States will no longer be a Western democratic country in the traditional sense, but will gradually evolve into a semi-dictatorial state."

Yan Xuetong tends to dismiss the ideological tropes favoured by some Chinese IR scholars—such as the “the East is rising, the West is declining” or a shift towards multipolarity (rather than US-China bipolarity)—as fantasies. Even so, he argues that beliefs about ideology and legitimacy still matter, because they shape trust, deterrence, and a state’s “strategic credibility”.

This emphasis frames Yan’s assessment of the implications for “the West” of Trump’s newly revamped version of the Monroe Doctrine. Reflecting on what he regards as an “imperialist” and “semi-dictatorial” turn in the American polity, he concludes that the collective identity of the West is in steep decline and potentially heading for a fall—particularly if Trump follows through on his stated ambition to conquer Greenland. Attacking the territory of an allied state would dismantle the conceptual foundation of the Western alliance: the “democratic peace theory”, according to which democratic states do not attack one …