--- title: "The New War Hawks: How Western Liberals Became the New Defense Spenders" description: "It is a tale as old as modern democracy. After years of social spending and reform at home, and years of starry-eyed diplomacy abroad, voters decide that the softer, more idealistic wing of their political class has had its turn. The world is getting unpredictable, foreign adversaries are starting to get a little too bold, and the national right is here to deliver. Step aside, the message runs, and make way for the party of defense, ready to lay down the law.\n\nOr so the story used to go, played out again and again across Europe and North America, election cycle after election cycle. Over the span of the last decade, that calculus has been reversed. A wave of Western liberal leaders has advocated for military expansion, European rearmament, and massive spending on weapons of war. At the same time, much of the Western right has started doing precisely the opposite: arguing for isolation, defending the far cheaper status quo, and pushing their nations away from any talk of actually using their militaries for anything beyond explicit homeland defense.\n\nThe reasons for the shift come from all across the world, and the story of how this grand reversal on defense came to be is, ultimately, the story of a rapidly changing global order. This is an account of how rising threats, the breakdown of an old set of rules, domestic political realignment, and a string of unwelcome shocks combined to make hawks out of the very people who once campaigned against them.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Over the past decade, Western liberal leaders have become the leading advocates for rearmament and higher defense spending, while large parts of the Western right have moved toward isolationism and a cheaper, defense-only posture.\n- The turning point can be traced to February 2014, when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv during the Maidan Uprising, setting in motion Russia's seizure of Crimea, the Donbas insurgency, and the full-scale invasion of 2022.\n- A wider breakdown of the rules-based international order — challenged by the very powerful nations meant to enforce it — has emboldened middle and minor powers to test what they can get away with, from Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh to the Houthis in the Red Sea.\n- Partisan attitudes toward Russia flipped after 2016, with American Republicans warming and Democrats cooling, a divide that hardened into a defining feature of Western politics and pushed liberals to define themselves against authoritarian strongmen.\n- For pro-globalist leaders, defense spending is framed less as an end in itself than as the price of protecting an interconnected, stable world that they believe makes nations safer, richer, and more influential.\n- Western liberals were pushed toward rearmament as much as pulled: by the loss of traditional conservatives as a defense constituency, by a world that no longer plays nice, and by Washington's blunt warning that European security can no longer be outsourced to the United States.\n- The result is the largest rearmament effort across the West in many decades, with leaders such as Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Donald Tusk, and Mark Carney spearheading the European drive.\n\n## A Single Day That Changed the Calculus\n\nSometimes a seismic shift in international politics can be traced to a single year, a single week, or even a single day. The grand movement of Western liberals into their new role as war hawks arguably began on February 21, 2014. On that day, at the height of the Maidan Uprising, the Russia-backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv in secret, one day before he was officially stripped of his presidency by the Ukrainian parliament.\n\nThe flight of Yanukovych, and with it the success of the Maidan, was only the latest domino to fall in Eastern Europe. But it was the one that committed Ukraine, Russia, the continent, and the wider world to a sequence of events that now looks practically inevitable. Within days, Russia began its invasion of Crimea. Not long after, it turned its attention to the Donbas. After more than half a decade of escalation, agitation, and Machiavellian manipulation, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.\n\nTo say simply that Western liberals became hawks because Russia invaded Ukraine would not be inaccurate, but it would capture only a narrow slice of the full story. The flight of Yanukovych is better understood as the moment when a series of scattered disruptions to the post-Cold War order solidified into something more coherent and far more durable. And that change did not happen only within Russia's sphere of influence. It happened everywhere, in ways the West noticed but was slow to answer.\n\n## A Decade of Global Upheaval\n\nThe history matters here, so it is worth bringing the blur of the last decade into focus. In Eastern Europe, Russia was the major disruptor — first by seizing Crimea, then by inflaming, supporting, and to a large extent running the long insurgency in the Donbas. Perhaps most consequential was Russia's decision to stonewall an early Ukrainian advance that might otherwise have ended the crisis, forcing Kyiv to accept that the Donbas separatists were under Russian protection. Elsewhere, Moscow intervened in direct support of Syria and began seeding shadowy paramilitary groups across the globe.\n\nChina, meanwhile, gathered power rapidly. It chipped away at Hong Kong for years before functionally eliminating the \"One Country, Two Systems\" framework in 2020, and dredged up an unprecedented number of artificial islands to cement its maritime claims. The United States, for its part, formed close alliances with Kurdish paramilitaries in Syria and then turned its back on them. It struck a nuclear deal with Iran and then walked out of it. It drew out a painful occupation of Afghanistan that ended about as badly as anyone could have imagined. And the rise of Donald Trump kicked off a global resurgence of the hard right, disrupting a social foundation that establishment leaders in many countries had assumed was stable.\n\nIn the Middle East, the Arab Spring curdled from a hopeful movement of pro-democracy liberation into a series of bitter, multidimensional, and intractable conflicts that left hundreds of thousands dead. In Syria, Libya, and especially Yemen, humanitarian crises spiraled dramatically out of control. The world bore witness, but its response fell far short of what observers at the time might have expected. The Islamic State shocked the world with new levels of public, gleefully advertised brutality and established a short-lived but fearsome caliphate across much of Iraq and Syria. Turkey unilaterally seized a chunk of Syrian territory and then fought Kurdish paramilitaries its NATO allies had only just been supporting. Israel expanded settlements across the West Bank and normalized relations with several important regional players. Qatar spent years under a blockade that the world still rarely discusses.\n\n## When All Bets Came Off\n\nBeyond the Middle East, the picture was no better. The government of Myanmar carried out a genocide against its Rohingya Muslim population and, despite international condemnation, largely got away with it until a military coup overthrew the government. India saw the rise of Narendra Modi and a steady drift away from its longstanding policy of strategic non-alignment, while a wave of coups installed powerful military regimes across Africa. Armenia and Azerbaijan went to war again. Several leaders who first gained power during the Arab Spring made authoritarian grabs to keep it, and the Taliban took Afghanistan by force. Figures from Jair Bolsonaro to Rodrigo Duterte left indelible marks on the nations they ruled, while the world watched, transfixed but unable to act, as Russia massed an invasion force on Ukraine's border and then attempted to conquer its neighbor outright in 2022.\n\nFrom that point on, it has felt as though all bets are off. Russia formally annexed four Ukrainian oblasts and has fed staggering numbers of men, rubles, and military hardware into a war far more complicated than anyone anticipated. Armenia and Azerbaijan fought again, this time decisively, with Azerbaijan completing a major territorial capture. Finland and Sweden joined NATO. Sudan's military regime went to war with its own paramilitary counterpart, and China sharply escalated tensions in the South China Sea. The October 7 attacks led to a ruinous war in Gaza, the destruction of Hezbollah, deeply alarming exchanges between Israel and Iran, and a trade blockade against Red Sea shipping by Yemen's Houthi rebels. Haiti, Sudan, and the African Sahel descended into nightmare; the Wagner Group wrote its name into the history books in its enemies' blood and its own; and Bashar al-Assad fell from power in Syria at the very moment his war had seemed won. India and Pakistan recently fought an undeclared war; Israel and Iran did much the same; and a combination of Chinese investment, American dealmaking, and Russian mercenary forces now appears to be carving up the globe in real time. This is not a churn that looks likely to stop anytime soon.\n\nTwo overlapping conclusions follow from running through all this recent history at once. First, only by looking at these changes together can one really grasp how the world has shifted. The situation has become far more chaotic; major, regional, and minor powers have grown emboldened to do as they please without fear of consequences; and the pace of upheaval keeps accelerating. Wars of expansion are back, the unipolar order of the post-Cold War years has been turned on its head, and global competition for wealth and resources is nowhere near as cut-and-dried as it once was. Second, it is the sum of these changes that has produced the reversal at the heart of this story: Western liberals acquiring a new taste for major defense initiatives, at the very moment the traditional big spenders on defense — Western conservatives — have had a change of heart in the opposite direction. Change begets change, and the world's shifting attitude toward defense is a direct response to shifts in how the world itself now functions.\n\n## The Old Rules and Their Breakdown\n\nIt helps to be specific about the change at hand rather than retreating into bold pronouncements. A phrase that has been done to death over the last decade captures the underlying shift: the breakdown of the rules-based international order. On its face, the concept is straightforward. Countries are bound by diplomatic treaties, economic agreements, and international organizations — a global set of expectations about good behavior that the most powerful or wealthy nations are supposed to enforce so that everyone else follows along. Since World War II, that is roughly how the world has worked, even through most of the Cold War. It has also been the defining achievement of generations of leaders, who hammered a messy, complicated world into a relatively orderly set of patterns that kept most nations in line most of the time.\n\nBut Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China's maritime takeover, and the United States' disregard for its own treaties and agreements are all direct challenges to that order — and they come from the very powers meant to be enforcing it. It is one thing for a weaker nation to flout the rules while the powerful agree on a response, as with NATO's intervention in Kosovo. Even where the world failed to intervene quickly, as in the Rwandan genocide, perpetrators faced real consequences for years afterward. Now, however, the nations with the power and influence to lead enforcement are the same ones trying to get away with their own funny business. American leaders may not approve of India pulling out of a landmark water-sharing agreement with Pakistan, but those same leaders want no repercussions for having walked away from Iran's nuclear deal years earlier.\n\nOnce this dynamic takes hold, knock-on effects follow, falling broadly into two categories: powerful nations passing the buck, and less powerful nations testing what they can get away with. Among the powerful, there is no longer a clear answer to who will step in and restore order — not in Sudan, where hundreds of thousands may have died in recent years, nor in the Red Sea, where airstrikes have not stopped the Houthis from lobbing ordnance at shipping. The answer used to be that the United States would lead an international coalition, predominantly through NATO, or that Russia would deploy a peacekeeping force. Neither holds anymore. Instead, when crises emerge and worsen, the world's four most powerful geopolitical forces sit on the sidelines and invite one another to act first. The US reiterates that it is done with foreign wars; China maintains a classically risk-averse posture; Russia keeps invading Ukraine; and Europe, after decades of inaction on defense, simply lacks the means to respond.\n\nSeeing this, smaller nations begin to probe the limits. Azerbaijan invades Armenia and captures Nagorno-Karabakh, ignoring the Russian peacekeepers meant to deter exactly that. The United Arab Emirates sends weapons to brutal partners while importing vast quantities of smuggled African gold and passing it off as its own. India and Pakistan trade four days of fire rather than letting the international community help draw down tensions. The list goes on, and each example chips away further at the credibility of the old rules.\n\n## Drawing Lines in the Sand\n\nThrough this lens, the swing of Western liberals toward defense can be read as an attempt to play catch-up — to gather the strength needed to make the rules-based order mean something again. That order was once the shared project of mainstream liberals and conservatives alike. But that consensus is fracturing fast, as a surging hard right dismisses those ideas in favor of isolationist policies that swear off large-scale foreign involvement in pursuit of narrow national self-interest. This brand of conservatism may relish the trappings of military might as a way to command pride and rally support at home, yet in its ideal world those militaries are for parades and homeland defense, not for upholding a global system.\n\nSo it is Western liberal leaders who have taken up the mantle of the rules-based order, and right now that order cannot be reasserted without a degree of military strength. It is too late to rapidly reverse today's state of affairs or undo the damage already done, but these nations can start drawing their lines in the sand and make sure they are ready to enforce them when adversaries inevitably test them. In NATO, that means the vast effort to rearm and prepare for the possibility of war that leaders such as Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Donald Tusk, and Mark Carney are spearheading. In the Indo-Pacific, it has meant the United States, under President Biden, strengthening an interlocking web of alliances around China — a geopolitical net designed to constrain further expansion of Beijing's authority.\n\nUnder this view, defense spending is not the goal in itself but a means to two ends: preventing the West's adversaries from exploiting weak international systems even more than they already have, and beginning the long, decades-long work of rebuilding those systems. It is a posture defined less by appetite for conflict than by a sober calculation about what it now costs to keep the world from sliding further into disorder.\n\n## The Political Push and Pull\n\nThere is also a domestic political angle, best understood through the shifting triangle of three forces: the leaders of Russia, the American right, and the American left. The world may have been stunned by the favor Donald Trump showed Russia at the outset of his second term — before a sudden about-face whose durability remains an open question — but the broader drift of American Republicans toward Vladimir Putin's Russia has been underway for years. In the early 2000s, after the Soviet collapse, Americans broadly regarded Russia as a friend on the world stage. That changed rapidly, especially on the right, after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Then something shifted again in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election: Republican opinion on Russia swung sharply positive while Democratic opinion swung even further negative.\n\nRussia had not done anything new to cause that change. It had been throwing its weight around in the Donbas for years, and its conduct in late 2016 was not unusual compared with the two years prior. What had changed was that, inside the United States, Russia had become synonymous with the question of election interference. In 2016, Moscow was accused of putting a thumb on the scales to help Trump win. To take a somewhat cynical read, the realignment is not hard to explain. People who wanted Trump to lose, and for whom a foreign-interference scandal would have been advantageous, developed sharply more negative views of Russia. People who wanted Trump to win, and for whom such a scandal would have been inconvenient, grew more receptive to the idea that Russia had not interfered at all.\n\nIn the years since, the partisan divide only deepened. Grassroots Republican activists, social-media personalities, and others spent half a decade or more minimizing or defending Russia's actions in Ukraine while amplifying concerns about Ukrainian corruption well past the severity most Western governments would recognize. Only in the last year or so has Republican political leadership fully aligned with Trump's approach, but the undercurrents were there all along.\n\n## Europe's Mirror and the Liberal Reaction\n\nA similar cycle played out in Europe, where in country after country hard-right movements ran into accusations of Russian collusion and faced varying consequences. In France and Germany, the accusations did not prevent historic surges in the far right's power. Elsewhere, they proved a greater barrier — sometimes to the point that liberal governments, in trying to constrain the far right, ended up martyring it. Consider Romania, where the results of a first-round presidential election were thrown out after a hard-right populist, alleged to have surged on the back of a Russian influence campaign, finished first.\n\nAcross the continent, populist movements are growing closer not only to Russia but to other right-leaning and increasingly authoritarian states led by their respective strongmen: Hungary under Viktor Orban, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Brazil under Bolsonaro, India under Modi. Even China is enjoying a growing sense of alignment with the European far right, at the very moment it bids to become the principal superpower standing across from the United States.\n\nAll of these shifts on the right help explain a corresponding movement on the left. In a world where the political right grows closer to leaders the left perceives as adversarial, it follows that the left would seek to distance itself — partly as pure reaction, partly to offer a sharp political contrast and rally its own base, and partly because a marriage between an empowered right and these global adversaries would create cascading problems for liberal factions. If, say, a German government under Alice Weidel grew very close to Russia and China, German policy might drift in directions Moscow and Beijing would find agreeable: a diminished military, greater economic compliance, less willingness to interfere in their affairs.\n\nSo for Western liberals, flooding money into defense proactively interrupts right-wing ambition in several ways at once. It can boost their own political fortunes through a stronger military, greater global influence, and the economic boom that a well-executed pivot to defense procurement can bring. It lets them take a firmer stand against perceived adversaries while making a more compelling case to their own people — that these adversaries are both worth standing up to and within reach of being stood up to. When a nation like Russia or China appears to pose a clear and existential threat, liberal leaders can point to their procurement efforts and say, in effect, \"we can stand against them, so do not resign yourselves to defeat.\" Where a majority already believes a nearby Russia or China is a threat, a liberal push on arms creates a powerful contrast: we will protect our sovereignty; they will sell us out.\n\n## Return of the Globalists\n\nFrom domestic politics, the argument turns to geopolitics, where a rules-based order does far more than preserve the status quo. If one accepts that this order is something Western liberal leaders generally like and want to live within, then it is worth emphasizing how its parts fit together. A more secure world — one with a lower risk of conflict and a greater capacity among powerful nations to enforce peace and stability — is a world that can cooperate far more efficiently. Greater stability means more trade deals, more investment, more commerce, and more exchange of ideas and goals. Simply put, it means globalism. And with the United States no longer a reliable guarantor of globalist principles, and a range of actors getting in the way, the burden of asserting that stability falls on other Western leaders if they intend to benefit from it. That holds for the United States under liberal leadership just as it does anywhere else.\n\nIt is not hard to see how greater military spending by pro-globalist leaders would carry attractive incentives for both their nations and their own political fortunes. If the central premise holds — that nations generally grow safer, richer, and more influential in an interconnected world — then investing in the tools to create and protect that world is entirely reasonable. The point here has less to do with whether the globalist vision ultimately bears fruit than with the belief that it can and should. Because if that is the premise these leaders operate under, then the ability to act as a strong security guarantor becomes inseparable from their larger vision.\n\nEven the present moment suggests a globalist approach would work better had Western militaries been ready sooner. A more efficient naval and air campaign to protect Red Sea shipping would have spared the world much of the trouble the Houthis have caused. A West more able to act as a security guarantor in Africa would have left less room for nations to turn to Russian paramilitaries who extract enormous resources and place them beyond Western reach. One could go further back and argue that a more fearless Western response to the breakdown of order in Syria, Yemen, the Congo, Venezuela, or the Sahel might have kept the global migration crisis from reaching its current extremes — and that a stronger West might have deterred Russia from attempting to seize its neighbor by force, sparing the world a vast sanctions regime and a broader divorce of the European and Russian economies. None of this is a promise that such rosy outcomes would actually have materialized. It is only to insist that there is real connective tissue between the perceived potential of an interconnected world and the value of far stronger militaries than most Western nations have built.\n\n## The Cost of Decades of Delay\n\nIt is too late to undo any of those past decisions, but that does not mean Western liberal leaders cannot learn from their mistakes and prepare to step into the gap when the defense of their vision is demanded. Rearmament — in Europe, Asia, North America, or anywhere else — is a process of decades, not weeks or months. As frustrating as it is to delay gratification that long, a failure to engage in the long process carries serious costs.\n\nIt is precisely because Europe did not invest in itself militarily two decades ago that it now faces the real possibility of a Russian assault on NATO. It is because nations such as Japan and Australia took a sluggish approach to building defense capacity — even allowing for Japan's unique constitutional limits — that only the United States can lead a Pacific defense against China if one ever becomes necessary. And it is because of the many failures of nations like France in places like Africa that France has lost the trust of so many states that have since pushed it out. The decisions of policymakers two decades ago are being managed by the policymakers of today; and perhaps, if today's leaders act, the policymakers of two decades hence will inherit a less precarious position. That is the implicit wager behind the entire rearmament drive: pay now, in money and political capital, so that successors are not forced to pay far more later, in blood and lost sovereignty.\n\n## Movement by Force\n\nWestern liberals have been pushed into becoming hawks as much as they have been pulled by political or national interest. For years, Europe chose to hide behind American power rather than build the capabilities to stand on its own. Yet however ham-fisted and needlessly abrasive the manner, the second Trump administration delivered Europe an extraordinary kick in the pants on rearmament — to the point that the continent now looks as though it might finally get its act together. As stunned as European leaders and publics were by the suggestion that the United States might abandon its NATO commitment to collective defense, the warning had an enormous effect.\n\nBut there has not been just one kick. Western liberal leaders have been ushered down a long line of rebukes, pausing at each just long enough to receive a swift correction before moving on to the next. For each nation, it starts at home. As conventional conservatives have either been absorbed into hard-right politics or fled toward the liberal old guard, liberal and centrist leaders have lost the convenient cover of the hawkish establishment that once pushed them into military initiatives while letting them preserve alignment with a defense-averse base. Now these factions cannot rely on traditional conservatives either to pass military expansions during their own time in power or to supply the political pressure that once forced liberal governments into hard spending. No one is coming to save these leaders, not in the way they once were saved.\n\nThen there is the uncomfortable reality that the rest of the world no longer sees any reason to play nice. Ambitious major powers and feisty middle powers know full well that the international order lacks real means of enforcement. With that comes a hard truth: the world is about to change fast, no matter what Western leaders want. The new rules of the global game are rougher, more cutthroat, and driven far more by greed and gain than by any veneer of international goodwill. It is a game Western leaders can either learn to play or resign themselves to losing catastrophically. In this version of the game, a nation like Russia or China needs only two things to conquer a neighbor or capture a new vassal: the will to do it and the strength to back it up. In that world, Russian tanks eventually do roll across NATO's eastern borders — maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day. These nations can be ready to fight or ready to lay down; the choice is theirs.\n\n## A Searing Indictment and an Opportunity\n\nFinally, there is the kick from voters themselves, who have made clear in recent years that they regard their leaders' approach to governance as a failure. The rise of the hard right across the Western world has driven liberal leaders to take defense into their own hands, but it is more than that. If a ruling coalition has governed for ten, twenty, or thirty years and is then upended by a political revolution that succeeds precisely because it promises to overturn everything that coalition built, that is a searing indictment of both its leadership and its larger promise to its people. Leaders such as Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Weidel, and Giorgia Meloni are not accidents. They are products of the moment that produced them, a moment defined by widespread discontent with the status quo.\n\nHere lies one final reason for the liberal pivot on defense. The pivot might prove a great idea; it might end in failure. But to stay the course — to keep praising an approach to the world that constituents believe is broken — is a foolish endeavor, practically destined to come apart. If the rise of the Western hard right has handed its opponents any political gift, it was the decision to advocate a more favorable view of leaders such as Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, and Xi Jinping — figures whom a large share of Western citizens still distrust and, in some cases, still consider an existential threat. Now, more than ever, Western liberal leaders have an opportunity to claim what has been a conservative promise for decades: we will protect you, we will ensure our sovereignty, and we will stand up for this nation's prosperity, its values, and above all its people, against those we regard as our adversaries.\n\nSo how did Western liberals become the new war hawks? All of the above: rising global threats, the breakdown of an old order, domestic political change, the loss of others to do the job for them, and one kick in the pants after another. Taken together, that tangle of factors has pushed Western leaders to the cusp of the largest rearmament effort in many decades. The geopolitical rules of the entire world are being rewritten — and the new war hawks are rewriting the rulebook to match.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What does it mean that Western liberals became the \"new war hawks\"?\n\nIt means a reversal of a long-standing pattern. For decades, Western conservatives were the party of defense spending and assertive foreign policy, while liberals favored social spending and diplomacy. Over the past decade, that flipped: liberal leaders now champion military expansion and rearmament, while much of the Western right argues for isolationism and a cheaper, homeland-defense-only posture.\n\n### What event is identified as the turning point for this shift?\n\nFebruary 21, 2014, when Russia-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv during the Maidan Uprising, one day before parliament stripped him of the presidency. That flight set off Russia's seizure of Crimea, the long Donbas insurgency, and ultimately the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In retrospect, it marked the moment scattered disruptions to the post-Cold War order solidified into a coherent and durable change.\n\n### What is the \"rules-based international order,\" and why is its breakdown significant?\n\nIt is the post-World War II system in which countries are bound by treaties, economic agreements, and international organizations, with the most powerful nations expected to enforce good behavior. Its breakdown is significant because the challenges now come from the very powers meant to enforce it — Russia invading Ukraine, China's maritime expansion, and the United States disregarding its own agreements — which encourages smaller nations to test what they can get away with.\n\n### Why did partisan attitudes toward Russia flip in the United States?\n\nBefore 2016, Americans broadly viewed Russia more favorably, with opinion souring on the right after the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Around the 2016 election, Russia became synonymous with the question of election interference. Those who wanted Trump to lose grew more negative on Russia, while those who wanted him to win became more receptive to the idea that Russia had not interfered — hardening a partisan divide that deepened for years.\n\n### How is defense spending connected to globalism?\n\nFor pro-globalist leaders, a secure and stable world enables more trade, investment, and cooperation — the foundations of globalism. With the United States no longer a reliable guarantor of those principles, other Western leaders see military strength as the means to protect the interconnected world they believe makes nations safer, richer, and more influential. Defense spending becomes the price of sustaining that vision.\n\n### Why is rearmament described as a process of decades rather than months?\n\nBuilding serious military capacity — shipyards, air power, industrial bases, trained forces, and alliances — takes many years. The argument is that Europe faces a possible Russian threat today precisely because it failed to invest two decades ago, and that only sustained, long-term spending can prepare nations for crises that may not arrive for years. The decisions of today's policymakers will shape the options available to their successors.\n\n### How did the United States push Europe toward rearmament?\n\nThe second Trump administration, in a blunt and abrasive manner, signaled that the United States might not honor its NATO commitment to collective defense. However shocking to European leaders and publics, that warning had an enormous effect, jolting the continent toward building the military capabilities it had long outsourced to Washington and accelerating the largest European rearmament drive in decades.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Aspects of the Changing Geopolitical Order — CSEP](https://csep.org/flagship-paper/aspects-of-the-changing-geopolitical-order/)\n- [Geopolitical Risk — S&P Global](https://www.spglobal.com/en/research-insights/market-insights/geopolitical-risk)\n- [Republicans Used to View Russia as an Adversary — CBS News](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/republicans-used-to-view-russia-as-an-adversary/)\n- [Trump, Russia and the Republican Party — TIME](https://time.com/6757904/trump-russia-republican-party/)\n- [How Republicans Moved from Reagan's \"Evil Empire\" to Trump's Praise of Putin — The Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/25/how-republicans-moved-reagans-evil-empire-trumps-praise-putin/)\n- [Trump, Ukraine and Russia Explainer — The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/09/trump-ukraine-russia-explainer)\n- [Le Pen's Far Right Served as Mouthpiece for the Kremlin — France 24](https://www.france24.com/en/france/20230603-le-pen-s-far-right-served-as-mouthpiece-for-the-kremlin-says-french-parliamentary-report)\n- [What Are Marine Le Pen's Ties to Vladimir Putin's Russia? 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— Journal of Democracy](https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-rebirth-of-the-liberal-world-order/)\n- [Financial Times — Article](https://www.ft.com/content/c0466566-bc4f-435f-a7fa-e30b90de59de)\n- [Australia Election, Defense Spending, Dutton, Albanese — Breaking Defense](https://breakingdefense.com/2025/05/australia-election-defense-spending-dutton-albanese-labor-liberal-vote-results-trump/)\n- [Trump, Putin and Senate GOP on Ukraine — The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/trump-putin-senate-gop-ukraine.html)\n- [Republican Opinion Shifts on Russia-Ukraine War — Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/04/17/republican-opinion-shifts-on-russia-ukraine-war/)\n- [Russia and the West: What Went Wrong — DGAP](https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/russia-and-west-what-went-wrong-and-can-we-do-better)\n- [US Far-right Groups and Russia Links — The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/10/us-far-right-groups-russia-links)\n- [Russia's Changing Relations with the West — Global Affairs](https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/russias-changing-relations-with-the-west-prospects-for-a-new-hybrid-system/)\n- [Playing Both Sides: Central Asia Between Russia and the West — Chatham House](https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/03/playing-both-sides-central-asia-between-russia-and-west)\n- [SAGE Journals — Article (PDF)](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/13691481211036381)\n- [Middle East Coverage — BBC News](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37658286)\n- [The Rules-Based International Order: Catalyst or Hurdle for International Law — BIICL](https://www.biicl.org/blog/73/the-rules-based-international-order-catalyst-or-hurdle-for-international-law)\n- [What Does \"Rules-Based Order\" Mean? — Lowy Institute](https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/what-does-rules-based-order-mean)\n- [Rules-Based Order vs. the Defense of Democracy — Carnegie Endowment](https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/09/rules-based-order-vs-the-defense-of-democracy?lang=en)\n- [London Conference 2015 Background Papers — Chatham House](https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/London%20Conference%202015%20-%20Background%20Papers.pdf)\n- [Romania, Georgescu and Russian Interference — AP News](https://apnews.com/article/romania-georgescu-europe-elections-president-russia-interference-e6e0c77dde4dce526b0118fc4416b88f)\n- [Putin and the Far Right in Europe — The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/11/putin-far-right-europe-ukraine-eu-slovakia-russian)\n- [How the European Far Right and Far Left Converged on China — The Diplomat](https://thediplomat.com/2024/12/marriage-of-convenience-how-the-european-far-right-and-far-left-converged-on-china/)\n- [The Rise of Turkey as a Superpower — Harvard Kennedy School](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/rise-turkey-superpower)\n- [Balance of Power in the Middle East: Turkey, Syria, Iran — The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/19/balance-of-power-middle-east-turkey-ankara-syria-rebels-iran)\n- [Turkey as an Aspiring Great Power — Geopolitical Monitor](https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/turkey-as-an-aspiring-great-power/)\n- [Precarious Power: Azerbaijan — Foreign Affairs](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/azerbaijan/precarious-power-azerbaijan)\n- [Azerbaijan Asserts Itself as a Regional Power — Le Monde](https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/04/24/azerbaijan-asserts-itself-as-a-regional-power_6669367_4.html)\n- [The UAE in Africa: Power, Influence and Conflict — Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-07-08/the-uae-in-africa-power-influence-and-conflict)\n\n" url: https://homefronts.pub/article/the-new-war-hawks-western-liberals-defense-spending.md canonical: https://homefronts.pub/article/the-new-war-hawks-western-liberals-defense-spending datePublished: 2026-06-03 dateModified: 2026-06-03 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://homefronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: HomeFronts image: "https://media.homefronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/mPilMdL-3lI/hero.jpg" type: Article contentHash: ff2b9977711b7c028393f2111a432eb75b8bbe77b5cc3679355627eee1c0166c tokens: 10158 summaryUrl: https://homefronts.pub/article/the-new-war-hawks-western-liberals-defense-spending.md.summary.md --- It is a tale as old as modern democracy. After years of social spending and reform at home, and years of starry-eyed diplomacy abroad, voters decide that the softer, more idealistic wing of their political class has had its turn. The world is getting unpredictable, foreign adversaries are starting to get a little too bold, and the national right is here to deliver. Step aside, the message runs, and make way for the party of defense, ready to lay down the law. Or so the story used to go, played out again and again across Europe and North America, election cycle after election cycle. Over the span of the last decade, that calculus has been reversed. A wave of Western liberal leaders has advocated for military expansion, European rearmament, and massive spending on weapons of war. At the same time, much of the Western right has started doing precisely the opposite: arguing for isolation, defending the far cheaper status quo, and pushing their nations away from any talk of actually using their militaries for anything beyond explicit homeland defense. The reasons for the shift come from all across the world, and the story of how this grand reversal on defense came to be is, ultimately, the story of a rapidly changing global order. This is an account of how rising threats, the breakdown of an old set of rules, domestic political realignment, and a string of unwelcome shocks combined to make hawks out of the very people who once campaigned against them. ## Key Takeaways - Over the past decade, Western liberal leaders have become the leading advocates for rearmament and higher defense spending, while large parts of the Western right have moved toward isolationism and a cheaper, defense-only posture. - The turning point can be traced to February 2014, when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv during the Maidan Uprising, setting in motion Russia's seizure of Crimea, the Donbas insurgency, and the full-scale invasion of 2022. - A wider breakdown of the rules-based international order — challenged by the very powerful nations meant to enforce it — has emboldened middle and minor powers to test what they can get away with, from Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh to the Houthis in the Red Sea. - Partisan attitudes toward Russia flipped after 2016, with American Republicans warming and Democrats cooling, a divide that hardened into a defining feature of Western politics and pushed liberals to define themselves against authoritarian strongmen. - For pro-globalist leaders, defense spending is framed less as an end in itself than as the price of protecting an interconnected, stable world that they believe makes nations safer, richer, and more influential. - Western liberals were pushed toward rearmament as much as pulled: by the loss of traditional conservatives as a defense constituency, by a world that no longer plays nice, and by Washington's blunt warning that European security can no longer be outsourced to the United States. - The result is the largest rearmament effort across the West in many decades, with leaders such as Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Donald Tusk, and Mark Carney spearheading the European drive. ## A Single Day That Changed the Calculus Sometimes a seismic shift in international politics can be traced to a single year, a single week, or even a single day. The grand movement of Western liberals into their new role as war hawks arguably began on February 21, 2014. On that day, at the height of the Maidan Uprising, the Russia-backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv in secret, one day before he was officially stripped of his presidency by the Ukrainian parliament. The flight of Yanukovych, and with it the success of the Maidan, was only the latest domino to fall in Eastern Europe. But it was the one that committed Ukraine, Russia, the continent, and the wider world to a sequence of events that now looks practically inevitable. Within days, Russia began its invasion of Crimea. Not long after, it turned its attention to the Donbas. After more than half a decade of escalation, agitation, and Machiavellian manipulation, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. To say simply that Western liberals became hawks because Russia invaded Ukraine would not be inaccurate, but it would capture only a narrow slice of the full story. The flight of Yanukovych is better understood as the moment when a series of scattered disruptions to the post-Cold War order solidified into something more coherent and far more durable. And that change did not happen only within Russia's sphere of influence. It happened everywhere, in ways the West noticed but was slow to answer. ## A Decade of Global Upheaval The history matters here, so it is worth bringing the blur of the last decade into focus. In Eastern Europe, Russia was the major disruptor — first by seizing Crimea, then by inflaming, supporting, and to a large extent running the long insurgency in the Donbas. Perhaps most consequential was Russia's decision to stonewall an early Ukrainian advance that might otherwise have ended the crisis, forcing Kyiv to accept that the Donbas separatists were under Russian protection. Elsewhere, Moscow intervened in direct support of Syria and began seeding shadowy paramilitary groups across the globe. China, meanwhile, gathered power rapidly. It chipped away at Hong Kong for years before functionally eliminating the "One Country, Two Systems" framework in 2020, and dredged up an unprecedented number of artificial islands to cement its maritime claims. The United States, for its part, formed close alliances with Kurdish paramilitaries in Syria and then turned its back on them. It struck a nuclear deal with Iran and then walked out of it. It drew out a painful occupation of Afghanistan that ended about as badly as anyone could have imagined. And the rise of Donald Trump kicked off a global resurgence of the hard right, disrupting a social foundation that establishment leaders in many countries had assumed was stable. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring curdled from a hopeful movement of pro-democracy liberation into a series of bitter, multidimensional, and intractable conflicts that left hundreds of thousands dead. In Syria, Libya, and especially Yemen, humanitarian crises spiraled dramatically out of control. The world bore witness, but its response fell far short of what observers at the time might have expected. The Islamic State shocked the world with new levels of public, gleefully advertised brutality and established a short-lived but fearsome caliphate across much of Iraq and Syria. Turkey unilaterally seized a chunk of Syrian territory and then fought Kurdish paramilitaries its NATO allies had only just been supporting. Israel expanded settlements across the West Bank and normalized relations with several important regional players. Qatar spent years under a blockade that the world still rarely discusses. ## When All Bets Came Off Beyond the Middle East, the picture was no better. The government of Myanmar carried out a genocide against its Rohingya Muslim population and, despite international condemnation, largely got away with it until a military coup overthrew the government. India saw the rise of Narendra Modi and a steady drift away from its longstanding policy of strategic non-alignment, while a wave of coups installed powerful military regimes across Africa. Armenia and Azerbaijan went to war again. Several leaders who first gained power during the Arab Spring made authoritarian grabs to keep it, and the Taliban took Afghanistan by force. Figures from Jair Bolsonaro to Rodrigo Duterte left indelible marks on the nations they ruled, while the world watched, transfixed but unable to act, as Russia massed an invasion force on Ukraine's border and then attempted to conquer its neighbor outright in 2022. From that point on, it has felt as though all bets are off. Russia formally annexed four Ukrainian oblasts and has fed staggering numbers of men, rubles, and military hardware into a war far more complicated than anyone anticipated. Armenia and Azerbaijan fought again, this time decisively, with Azerbaijan completing a major territorial capture. Finland and Sweden joined NATO. Sudan's military regime went to war with its own paramilitary counterpart, and China sharply escalated tensions in the South China Sea. The October 7 attacks led to a ruinous war in Gaza, the destruction of Hezbollah, deeply alarming exchanges between Israel and Iran, and a trade blockade against Red Sea shipping by Yemen's Houthi rebels. Haiti, Sudan, and the African Sahel descended into nightmare; the Wagner Group wrote its name into the history books in its enemies' blood and its own; and Bashar al-Assad fell from power in Syria at the very moment his war had seemed won. India and Pakistan recently fought an undeclared war; Israel and Iran did much the same; and a combination of Chinese investment, American dealmaking, and Russian mercenary forces now appears to be carving up the globe in real time. This is not a churn that looks likely to stop anytime soon. Two overlapping conclusions follow from running through all this recent history at once. First, only by looking at these changes together can one really grasp how the world has shifted. The situation has become far more chaotic; major, regional, and minor powers have grown emboldened to do as they please without fear of consequences; and the pace of upheaval keeps accelerating. Wars of expansion are back, the unipolar order of the post-Cold War years has been turned on its head, and global competition for wealth and resources is nowhere near as cut-and-dried as it once was. Second, it is the sum of these changes that has produced the reversal at the heart of this story: Western liberals acquiring a new taste for major defense initiatives, at the very moment the traditional big spenders on defense — Western conservatives — have had a change of heart in the opposite direction. Change begets change, and the world's shifting attitude toward defense is a direct response to shifts in how the world itself now functions. ## The Old Rules and Their Breakdown It helps to be specific about the change at hand rather than retreating into bold pronouncements. A phrase that has been done to death over the last decade captures the underlying shift: the breakdown of the rules-based international order. On its face, the concept is straightforward. Countries are bound by diplomatic treaties, economic agreements, and international organizations — a global set of expectations about good behavior that the most powerful or wealthy nations are supposed to enforce so that everyone else follows along. Since World War II, that is roughly how the world has worked, even through most of the Cold War. It has also been the defining achievement of generations of leaders, who hammered a messy, complicated world into a relatively orderly set of patterns that kept most nations in line most of the time. But Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China's maritime takeover, and the United States' disregard for its own treaties and agreements are all direct challenges to that order — and they come from the very powers meant to be enforcing it. It is one thing for a weaker nation to flout the rules while the powerful agree on a response, as with NATO's intervention in Kosovo. Even where the world failed to intervene quickly, as in the Rwandan genocide, perpetrators faced real consequences for years afterward. Now, however, the nations with the power and influence to lead enforcement are the same ones trying to get away with their own funny business. American leaders may not approve of India pulling out of a landmark water-sharing agreement with Pakistan, but those same leaders want no repercussions for having walked away from Iran's nuclear deal years earlier. Once this dynamic takes hold, knock-on effects follow, falling broadly into two categories: powerful nations passing the buck, and less powerful nations testing what they can get away with. Among the powerful, there is no longer a clear answer to who will step in and restore order — not in Sudan, where hundreds of thousands may have died in recent years, nor in the Red Sea, where airstrikes have not stopped the Houthis from lobbing ordnance at shipping. The answer used to be that the United States would lead an international coalition, predominantly through NATO, or that Russia would deploy a peacekeeping force. Neither holds anymore. Instead, when crises emerge and worsen, the world's four most powerful geopolitical forces sit on the sidelines and invite one another to act first. The US reiterates that it is done with foreign wars; China maintains a classically risk-averse posture; Russia keeps invading Ukraine; and Europe, after decades of inaction on defense, simply lacks the means to respond. Seeing this, smaller nations begin to probe the limits. Azerbaijan invades Armenia and captures Nagorno-Karabakh, ignoring the Russian peacekeepers meant to deter exactly that. The United Arab Emirates sends weapons to brutal partners while importing vast quantities of smuggled African gold and passing it off as its own. India and Pakistan trade four days of fire rather than letting the international community help draw down tensions. The list goes on, and each example chips away further at the credibility of the old rules. ## Drawing Lines in the Sand Through this lens, the swing of Western liberals toward defense can be read as an attempt to play catch-up — to gather the strength needed to make the rules-based order mean something again. That order was once the shared project of mainstream liberals and conservatives alike. But that consensus is fracturing fast, as a surging hard right dismisses those ideas in favor of isolationist policies that swear off large-scale foreign involvement in pursuit of narrow national self-interest. This brand of conservatism may relish the trappings of military might as a way to command pride and rally support at home, yet in its ideal world those militaries are for parades and homeland defense, not for upholding a global system. So it is Western liberal leaders who have taken up the mantle of the rules-based order, and right now that order cannot be reasserted without a degree of military strength. It is too late to rapidly reverse today's state of affairs or undo the damage already done, but these nations can start drawing their lines in the sand and make sure they are ready to enforce them when adversaries inevitably test them. In NATO, that means the vast effort to rearm and prepare for the possibility of war that leaders such as Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Donald Tusk, and Mark Carney are spearheading. In the Indo-Pacific, it has meant the United States, under President Biden, strengthening an interlocking web of alliances around China — a geopolitical net designed to constrain further expansion of Beijing's authority. Under this view, defense spending is not the goal in itself but a means to two ends: preventing the West's adversaries from exploiting weak international systems even more than they already have, and beginning the long, decades-long work of rebuilding those systems. It is a posture defined less by appetite for conflict than by a sober calculation about what it now costs to keep the world from sliding further into disorder. ## The Political Push and Pull There is also a domestic political angle, best understood through the shifting triangle of three forces: the leaders of Russia, the American right, and the American left. The world may have been stunned by the favor Donald Trump showed Russia at the outset of his second term — before a sudden about-face whose durability remains an open question — but the broader drift of American Republicans toward Vladimir Putin's Russia has been underway for years. In the early 2000s, after the Soviet collapse, Americans broadly regarded Russia as a friend on the world stage. That changed rapidly, especially on the right, after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Then something shifted again in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election: Republican opinion on Russia swung sharply positive while Democratic opinion swung even further negative. Russia had not done anything new to cause that change. It had been throwing its weight around in the Donbas for years, and its conduct in late 2016 was not unusual compared with the two years prior. What had changed was that, inside the United States, Russia had become synonymous with the question of election interference. In 2016, Moscow was accused of putting a thumb on the scales to help Trump win. To take a somewhat cynical read, the realignment is not hard to explain. People who wanted Trump to lose, and for whom a foreign-interference scandal would have been advantageous, developed sharply more negative views of Russia. People who wanted Trump to win, and for whom such a scandal would have been inconvenient, grew more receptive to the idea that Russia had not interfered at all. In the years since, the partisan divide only deepened. Grassroots Republican activists, social-media personalities, and others spent half a decade or more minimizing or defending Russia's actions in Ukraine while amplifying concerns about Ukrainian corruption well past the severity most Western governments would recognize. Only in the last year or so has Republican political leadership fully aligned with Trump's approach, but the undercurrents were there all along. ## Europe's Mirror and the Liberal Reaction A similar cycle played out in Europe, where in country after country hard-right movements ran into accusations of Russian collusion and faced varying consequences. In France and Germany, the accusations did not prevent historic surges in the far right's power. Elsewhere, they proved a greater barrier — sometimes to the point that liberal governments, in trying to constrain the far right, ended up martyring it. Consider Romania, where the results of a first-round presidential election were thrown out after a hard-right populist, alleged to have surged on the back of a Russian influence campaign, finished first. Across the continent, populist movements are growing closer not only to Russia but to other right-leaning and increasingly authoritarian states led by their respective strongmen: Hungary under Viktor Orban, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Brazil under Bolsonaro, India under Modi. Even China is enjoying a growing sense of alignment with the European far right, at the very moment it bids to become the principal superpower standing across from the United States. All of these shifts on the right help explain a corresponding movement on the left. In a world where the political right grows closer to leaders the left perceives as adversarial, it follows that the left would seek to distance itself — partly as pure reaction, partly to offer a sharp political contrast and rally its own base, and partly because a marriage between an empowered right and these global adversaries would create cascading problems for liberal factions. If, say, a German government under Alice Weidel grew very close to Russia and China, German policy might drift in directions Moscow and Beijing would find agreeable: a diminished military, greater economic compliance, less willingness to interfere in their affairs. So for Western liberals, flooding money into defense proactively interrupts right-wing ambition in several ways at once. It can boost their own political fortunes through a stronger military, greater global influence, and the economic boom that a well-executed pivot to defense procurement can bring. It lets them take a firmer stand against perceived adversaries while making a more compelling case to their own people — that these adversaries are both worth standing up to and within reach of being stood up to. When a nation like Russia or China appears to pose a clear and existential threat, liberal leaders can point to their procurement efforts and say, in effect, "we can stand against them, so do not resign yourselves to defeat." Where a majority already believes a nearby Russia or China is a threat, a liberal push on arms creates a powerful contrast: we will protect our sovereignty; they will sell us out. ## Return of the Globalists From domestic politics, the argument turns to geopolitics, where a rules-based order does far more than preserve the status quo. If one accepts that this order is something Western liberal leaders generally like and want to live within, then it is worth emphasizing how its parts fit together. A more secure world — one with a lower risk of conflict and a greater capacity among powerful nations to enforce peace and stability — is a world that can cooperate far more efficiently. Greater stability means more trade deals, more investment, more commerce, and more exchange of ideas and goals. Simply put, it means globalism. And with the United States no longer a reliable guarantor of globalist principles, and a range of actors getting in the way, the burden of asserting that stability falls on other Western leaders if they intend to benefit from it. That holds for the United States under liberal leadership just as it does anywhere else. It is not hard to see how greater military spending by pro-globalist leaders would carry attractive incentives for both their nations and their own political fortunes. If the central premise holds — that nations generally grow safer, richer, and more influential in an interconnected world — then investing in the tools to create and protect that world is entirely reasonable. The point here has less to do with whether the globalist vision ultimately bears fruit than with the belief that it can and should. Because if that is the premise these leaders operate under, then the ability to act as a strong security guarantor becomes inseparable from their larger vision. Even the present moment suggests a globalist approach would work better had Western militaries been ready sooner. A more efficient naval and air campaign to protect Red Sea shipping would have spared the world much of the trouble the Houthis have caused. A West more able to act as a security guarantor in Africa would have left less room for nations to turn to Russian paramilitaries who extract enormous resources and place them beyond Western reach. One could go further back and argue that a more fearless Western response to the breakdown of order in Syria, Yemen, the Congo, Venezuela, or the Sahel might have kept the global migration crisis from reaching its current extremes — and that a stronger West might have deterred Russia from attempting to seize its neighbor by force, sparing the world a vast sanctions regime and a broader divorce of the European and Russian economies. None of this is a promise that such rosy outcomes would actually have materialized. It is only to insist that there is real connective tissue between the perceived potential of an interconnected world and the value of far stronger militaries than most Western nations have built. ## The Cost of Decades of Delay It is too late to undo any of those past decisions, but that does not mean Western liberal leaders cannot learn from their mistakes and prepare to step into the gap when the defense of their vision is demanded. Rearmament — in Europe, Asia, North America, or anywhere else — is a process of decades, not weeks or months. As frustrating as it is to delay gratification that long, a failure to engage in the long process carries serious costs. It is precisely because Europe did not invest in itself militarily two decades ago that it now faces the real possibility of a Russian assault on NATO. It is because nations such as Japan and Australia took a sluggish approach to building defense capacity — even allowing for Japan's unique constitutional limits — that only the United States can lead a Pacific defense against China if one ever becomes necessary. And it is because of the many failures of nations like France in places like Africa that France has lost the trust of so many states that have since pushed it out. The decisions of policymakers two decades ago are being managed by the policymakers of today; and perhaps, if today's leaders act, the policymakers of two decades hence will inherit a less precarious position. That is the implicit wager behind the entire rearmament drive: pay now, in money and political capital, so that successors are not forced to pay far more later, in blood and lost sovereignty. ## Movement by Force Western liberals have been pushed into becoming hawks as much as they have been pulled by political or national interest. For years, Europe chose to hide behind American power rather than build the capabilities to stand on its own. Yet however ham-fisted and needlessly abrasive the manner, the second Trump administration delivered Europe an extraordinary kick in the pants on rearmament — to the point that the continent now looks as though it might finally get its act together. As stunned as European leaders and publics were by the suggestion that the United States might abandon its NATO commitment to collective defense, the warning had an enormous effect. But there has not been just one kick. Western liberal leaders have been ushered down a long line of rebukes, pausing at each just long enough to receive a swift correction before moving on to the next. For each nation, it starts at home. As conventional conservatives have either been absorbed into hard-right politics or fled toward the liberal old guard, liberal and centrist leaders have lost the convenient cover of the hawkish establishment that once pushed them into military initiatives while letting them preserve alignment with a defense-averse base. Now these factions cannot rely on traditional conservatives either to pass military expansions during their own time in power or to supply the political pressure that once forced liberal governments into hard spending. No one is coming to save these leaders, not in the way they once were saved. Then there is the uncomfortable reality that the rest of the world no longer sees any reason to play nice. Ambitious major powers and feisty middle powers know full well that the international order lacks real means of enforcement. With that comes a hard truth: the world is about to change fast, no matter what Western leaders want. The new rules of the global game are rougher, more cutthroat, and driven far more by greed and gain than by any veneer of international goodwill. It is a game Western leaders can either learn to play or resign themselves to losing catastrophically. In this version of the game, a nation like Russia or China needs only two things to conquer a neighbor or capture a new vassal: the will to do it and the strength to back it up. In that world, Russian tanks eventually do roll across NATO's eastern borders — maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day. These nations can be ready to fight or ready to lay down; the choice is theirs. ## A Searing Indictment and an Opportunity Finally, there is the kick from voters themselves, who have made clear in recent years that they regard their leaders' approach to governance as a failure. The rise of the hard right across the Western world has driven liberal leaders to take defense into their own hands, but it is more than that. If a ruling coalition has governed for ten, twenty, or thirty years and is then upended by a political revolution that succeeds precisely because it promises to overturn everything that coalition built, that is a searing indictment of both its leadership and its larger promise to its people. Leaders such as Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Weidel, and Giorgia Meloni are not accidents. They are products of the moment that produced them, a moment defined by widespread discontent with the status quo. Here lies one final reason for the liberal pivot on defense. The pivot might prove a great idea; it might end in failure. But to stay the course — to keep praising an approach to the world that constituents believe is broken — is a foolish endeavor, practically destined to come apart. If the rise of the Western hard right has handed its opponents any political gift, it was the decision to advocate a more favorable view of leaders such as Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, and Xi Jinping — figures whom a large share of Western citizens still distrust and, in some cases, still consider an existential threat. Now, more than ever, Western liberal leaders have an opportunity to claim what has been a conservative promise for decades: we will protect you, we will ensure our sovereignty, and we will stand up for this nation's prosperity, its values, and above all its people, against those we regard as our adversaries. So how did Western liberals become the new war hawks? All of the above: rising global threats, the breakdown of an old order, domestic political change, the loss of others to do the job for them, and one kick in the pants after another. Taken together, that tangle of factors has pushed Western leaders to the cusp of the largest rearmament effort in many decades. The geopolitical rules of the entire world are being rewritten — and the new war hawks are rewriting the rulebook to match. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What does it mean that Western liberals became the "new war hawks"? It means a reversal of a long-standing pattern. For decades, Western conservatives were the party of defense spending and assertive foreign policy, while liberals favored social spending and diplomacy. Over the past decade, that flipped: liberal leaders now champion military expansion and rearmament, while much of the Western right argues for isolationism and a cheaper, homeland-defense-only posture. ### What event is identified as the turning point for this shift? February 21, 2014, when Russia-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv during the Maidan Uprising, one day before parliament stripped him of the presidency. That flight set off Russia's seizure of Crimea, the long Donbas insurgency, and ultimately the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In retrospect, it marked the moment scattered disruptions to the post-Cold War order solidified into a coherent and durable change. ### What is the "rules-based international order," and why is its breakdown significant? It is the post-World War II system in which countries are bound by treaties, economic agreements, and international organizations, with the most powerful nations expected to enforce good behavior. Its breakdown is significant because the challenges now come from the very powers meant to enforce it — Russia invading Ukraine, China's maritime expansion, and the United States disregarding its own agreements — which encourages smaller nations to test what they can get away with. ### Why did partisan attitudes toward Russia flip in the United States? Before 2016, Americans broadly viewed Russia more favorably, with opinion souring on the right after the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Around the 2016 election, Russia became synonymous with the question of election interference. Those who wanted Trump to lose grew more negative on Russia, while those who wanted him to win became more receptive to the idea that Russia had not interfered — hardening a partisan divide that deepened for years. ### How is defense spending connected to globalism? For pro-globalist leaders, a secure and stable world enables more trade, investment, and cooperation — the foundations of globalism. With the United States no longer a reliable guarantor of those principles, other Western leaders see military strength as the means to protect the interconnected world they believe makes nations safer, richer, and more influential. Defense spending becomes the price of sustaining that vision. ### Why is rearmament described as a process of decades rather than months? Building serious military capacity — shipyards, air power, industrial bases, trained forces, and alliances — takes many years. The argument is that Europe faces a possible Russian threat today precisely because it failed to invest two decades ago, and that only sustained, long-term spending can prepare nations for crises that may not arrive for years. The decisions of today's policymakers will shape the options available to their successors. ### How did the United States push Europe toward rearmament? The second Trump administration, in a blunt and abrasive manner, signaled that the United States might not honor its NATO commitment to collective defense. 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