Since the capture of Nicolás Maduro by the United States on January 3, 2026, there have been many complaints about the end of the rules-based international order and the rise of unbridled power. And yet this ignores not only the fraying of the post-war system since 1989, but also the reality that empires have never disappeared and that imperial power, with deep civil and religious roots, is more primary and enduring than the sovereignty of the nation-state based on formal law.
While the realpolitik of raw power politics has been on the rise since the end of the Cold War, interstate conflict (and civil war) is by no means inevitable – as proponents of "offensive realism" (John Mearsheimer) and "tragic realism" (Robert Kaplan) erroneously argue. In contrast to these secular versions of realism, Catholic Christianity defends a realist tradition that sees international peace and solidarity as more fundamental than war and competition between great powers. Drawing on the Augustinian vision of the two cities, Pope Leo XIV began to renew this tradition in his address to the Vatican diplomatic corps on January 9, 2026. His theopolitical realism extends the order of love (ordo amoris) beyond both liberal globalism and populist nationalism.
The resurgence of nationalism in the West did not begin with the populist revolt of the time of Brexit or with Trump's first victory in 2016. Its origins can be traced back to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the affirmation of US unipolarity in the 1990s, which supported George H.W. Bush's invasion of Panama, Bill Clinton's "humanitarian" interventions, and George W. Bush's neoconservative crusade. All three administrations deployed military power in violation of both international law and the rules-based order. Far from supporting Western universalism, they defended American exceptionalism and America's "manifest destiny" to be the hegemon and defender of democracy and the rule of law. This marked fusion of realpolitik and idealism has shaped U.S. foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson's speech to Congress in 1917, in which he declared: "The world must be made secure for democracy. Its peace must rest on the tried and tested foundations of political freedom. We have no selfish ends to pursue. We do not desire conquest or domination."
Paradoxically, the rules-based liberal order – with deep roots in the anti-colonial project of the late eighteenth century in 1776 and as a republican alternative to the imperial monarchy (especially after 1789 and 1848) – morphed into a new form of imperialism led by the United States. During his visit to London on Christmas Day 1918, to celebrate victory in World War I, Wilson declared before the assembled court of St James's that the old imperial order embodied by Britain had come to an end and that America represented a new dawn of sovereign nation-states. In doing so, the United States elevated the Westphalian principle of national self-determination to the overarching criterion of the international system.
From Wilson onward, the United States regards nation-states as liberal egos on a large scale. This conception is based on liberal norms of individualism and voluntarism, deeply rooted in American political life and exported by successive administrations that promote national ends by imperial means. The Wilsonian tradition of U.S. foreign policy shows how liberalism and nationalism converge and collude in tying domestic executive power to the exercise of military power abroad.
Trump's second term has doubled down on the quest for American supremacy, which lies at the heart of the U.S. National Security Strategy released in November 2025. Continuing a pattern already seen during Trump's first term, when he ordered the killing of General Qasem Soleimani, leader of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, the current US administration is intensifying the use of unbridled executive power to deploy American military capabilities, including joint operations with Israel against Iranian nuclear facilities. the bombing of Islamic radicals in Nigeria and now the arrest of the Venezuelan leader. In turn, this is in deep continuity with a long-standing American practice of targeted capture or assassination, as in the case of Daniel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Colonel Gaddafi and Osama bin Laden. The idea that Trump embodies some form of neo-isolationism is as misleading as the idea that America is a nation-state committed to the universal defense of national sovereignty – a matter to which I will return shortly.
What may be distinctive during Trump's second term is the deployment of military power using private defense contractors, such as Palantir and Anduril, to ensure information and technological superiority, often linked to the use of special forces and in contradiction to the previous idea of open-ended campaigns and "endless wars," as in Afghanistan or Iraq. And yet, as Adam Tooze has observed, "far from being unthinkable, what the Trump administration has done in Venezuela has been imagined over and over again. And as for legality, international law has always been entangled in the chosen instruments of liberal warfare — sanctions, blockades, and punitive special operations. If armed operators look like a modern-day Frankenstein, this is our monster." Once again, there is more continuity than rupture between the liberal-conservative quest for unipolar hegemony since 1989 and the populist quest for America First.
What is certainly distinctive is Trump's practice of unscrupulous realpolitik, using military means to expand America's political and economic empire. The Trump administration treats allies and adversaries alike, making deals with leaders "with whom you can do business, not exchange virtues." Instead of a democratic transition based on principles, the goal is a double transaction – access to natural resources and elimination of enemies, such as Maduro. This approach is inextricably linked to a radicalized form of mercantilism, which rejects global free trade in favor of national power through protectionist policies to minimize imports, maximize exports, and secure raw materials and markets. Linked to this is the U.S. imperialism of resources and its increasing focus on colonizing territories from Venezuela to the Panama Canal and from Canada to Greenland. Here the American imperial orientation is visible with the greatest clarity.
The politics of the great powers is intrinsically imperial in three respects. First, large states, especially continental powers like America, seek to control their "backyard" or neighborhood. Second, they are determined to secure market outlets for their exports and access to natural resources for domestic production. Third, they pursue some kind of "civilizing mission."
For the Trump administration, it consists of Western hemispheric hegemony, while for Moscow and Beijing it consists of the projection of what they consider their civilizational state power through their respective spheres of influence. Perhaps the biggest discontinuity from the post-1989 period is Trump's recognition that we live in a multipolar world and that rivals like Russia and China possess legitimate spheres of influence. That is why he wants to push them out of his backyard, while failing to oppose them on Ukraine and Taiwan. His attack on Europe, also in line with US efforts to "divide to rule" since 1945 and especially since 1989, stems precisely from the fact that the EU lacks all the attributes of a great power and that former European empires – particularly the UK – are treated as little more than vassal states.
In the face of Trump's realpolitik and hostile foreign powers that believe in a "clash of civilizations" against the West, Britain and Europe must recognize that the old era of liberal globalization has given way to a new era of "raw power in the national interest." The Kantian utopia of "perpetual peace" that won the support of the elites in the 1990s was always part of an abstract idealism based on empty values whose emptiness would be filled by an equally vacuous materialism – the pursuit of brute power and wealth. The alternative is a realism that starts from the world as it is, not as we would like it to be, and that traces a transformation from nationalism, protectionism and the search for security towards shared interests and the mutual flourishing of peoples and nations.
Pope Leo XIV's recent speech outlines a realistic-Catholic alternative, starting from the argument that the new era dismantles the remnants of the post-1945 order. A diplomacy of dialogue is being replaced by a diplomacy of force. Limits on war, not least the prohibition on states using force to violate the borders of other states, have been abolished. Peace is not the search for an ordered universe governed by universal justice, but the domination of aggressors who impose a justice of the victors. As the pontiff states, "this gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence." This includes "the protection of the principle of the inviolability of human dignity and the sanctity of life [which] is always worth more than any mere national interest." Nationalism undermines our shared humanity.
The Pope is no less critical of globalism. His critique is less about the dysfunction of global governance and more about the degradation of language – the loss of meaning and lack of conceptual clarity: "words lose their connection with reality, and reality itself becomes questionable and ultimately incommunicable." Without truth there is a relativism that barely conceals the absolutism of an immediate will to power. While language should be the place of encounter and mediation aimed at bringing people together, "language is increasingly becoming a weapon with which to deceive, hit and offend opponents". Beyond the problem of propaganda, the pontiff is particularly severe towards Western discourses on freedom of expression.
All this threatens fundamental freedoms, especially religious freedom, which is "the first of all human rights, because it expresses the most fundamental reality of the person". Upholding religious freedom and freedom of conscience is a vital safeguard against the scourges of our time: from anti-Semitism to the persecution of Christians, from the erosion of the dignity of refugees and migrants to the increased use of capital punishment, from the undermining of the family to systematic attacks on life itself – including abortion, surrogacy and euthanasia.
It is here that Pope Leo's renewal of Augustine's vision of the two cities acquires meaning. Augustine's account is profoundly realistic insofar as he begins with the city as it is—the earthly city—centered on "pride and self-love (amor sui), the thirst for worldly power and glory that leads to destruction," and oriented nonetheless toward the city of God, "eternal and characterized by the unconditional love of God (amor Dei), as well as from love of neighbor, especially the poor." Far from opposing eternity in comparison with time, Church with State, or assuming a dialectical role of faith in civil society, the Pope rightly insists that:
Christians are called by God to inhabit the earthly city with their hearts and minds turned to the heavenly city, their true homeland. At the same time, Christians living in the earthly city are no strangers to the political world and, guided by the Scriptures, seek to apply Christian ethics to civil government. The City of God does not propose a political program; Rather, it offers valuable reflections on fundamental questions concerning social and political life, such as the search for a more just and peaceful coexistence among peoples. Augustine also warns of the serious dangers looming over political life due to false representations of history, excessive nationalism and distortion of the ideal of the political leader.
To defend ourselves against the errors and excesses of nationalism and globalism, the earthly city requires a transcendent foundation and purpose. For the tradition of Catholic realism it is the common good that helps nations and peoples to pursue a peace that Augustine conceptualizes as the "tranquility of order", founded on the ordo amoris – the concentric circles of love for family, friends, members of the local and national community and even strangers in our midst who become our neighbors. Solidarity, sharing the burdens of this hard and ruthless life, is the universal ethic of every particular society.
The ghost of war has returned to haunt Europe. And now this ghost asks of us the apparent impossible: to recover our exiled traditions of the art of government and the art of the soul, and to build political communities founded on bonds of national and international solidarity that reject the profane and guard the sacred. But only the impossible can now be remotely realistic.