Donald Trump’s speech in Riyadh last week was noteworthy in a number of ways, including the fact that it ended with YMCA, the 1970s gay anthem he has adopted as a campaign song, blasting out to his Saudi audience. But the most remarkable moment came when he praised the cities and skyscrapers that stand as gleaming monuments to the triumph of commerce throughout the Arabian peninsula.
“And it’s crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from western interventionists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities,” he said.
“In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves. Peace, prosperity and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly.”
These words, which could have been spoken by a Chinese leader, were Trump’s most emphatic rejection to date of liberal interventionism and interference in the internal affairs of other countries. And they should banish any doubt that the United States, the architect and arbiter of the “rules-based international order”, has turned its back on it.
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Critics of that order, including many in the Global South, argue that it was never more than an instrument of American foreign policy and that its rules seldom bound the hegemon itself. But European policymakers are eager to keep it alive, fearing that the only alternative is great power rivalry, spheres of influence and the law of the jungle.
Trump’s threat to annex Greenland and his relaxed approach to the use of force to change internationally agreed borders reinforces such fears. And many Europeans see Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a potentially existential threat unless it can be kept in check.
Former British prime minister Gordon Brown is among those who have called for a new multilateralism, led by a “coalition of the willing”. Reacting to Trump’s humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office in February, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas had another idea. “Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge,” she said.
Without the US, what Kallas calls the free world is a greatly shrunken and less powerful coalition and the rest of the world does not recognise the EU as a moral leader. The contrast between the EU’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and to Israel’s actions in Gaza has done nothing to diminish this scepticism.
While Trump was trashing liberal interventionism in Riyadh, the EU delegation in Beijing was hosting a conference to mark the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and the EU.
In a world that is becoming more multipolar and less multilateral, the EU and China share an interest in defending multilateral co-operation and the United Nations system. But while the EU champions the “rules-based international order”, China advocates what it calls “true multilateralism”.
Beijing says it is committed to keeping the existing multilateral institutions centred on the UN but it wants to make them more representative and democratic. Much of the Global South shares China’s ambition to reform institutions that still reflect the balance of power at the end of the second world war, leaving Europe and the US massively over-represented. The EU is open to discussing such reforms, and it welcomes China’s regular expressions of loyalty to the UN Charter. The problem lies in their competing interpretations of the charter and the emphasis each places on various elements of it.
There is widespread and growing scepticism about the EU’s bona fides on human rights
At the heart of China’s foreign policy are the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence first formulated in an agreement with India in 1954. They are: mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual nonaggression; mutual noninterference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and co-operation for mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence. It is the third principle, of noninterference in each other’s internal affairs, that creates the sharpest tension between China and the EU, particularly in the area of human rights. China’s view, shared across much of the world and echoed by Trump in Riyadh last week, is that states should govern themselves more or less as they choose and other countries should mind their own business.
The EU, like the rest of the West, has always placed greater emphasis on civil and political rights than economic, social and cultural rights. When the EU published its human rights priorities for 2025, only one of its 48 sections dealt with economic, social and cultural rights.
For China, of course, the emphasis is the other way around with the main focus on economic and development rights and little more than lip service paid to civil and political rights. Elsewhere across the Global South the picture is differentiated but there is widespread and growing scepticism about the EU’s bona fides on human rights.
This is not only on account of the weaselly response to the atrocities in Gaza but because of the EU’s own treatment of people fleeing war, famine, oppression, destitution and the impact of climate change. Rather than protecting their human rights, the EU treats them as criminals, incarcerating thousands in detention centres along its borders and across the Mediterranean.
The EU’s commitment to defending the rights of minorities and political dissidents in countries such as China is commendable and important and should not be abandoned or weakened. But to be a more effective human rights champion, the EU must look more closely at its own record and rebalance its approach to take more account of economic, social and cultural rights.
Instead of clinging to the idea of a contest between democracies and autocracies, the EU should focus on strengthening the UN institutions, working with China as well as middle powers such as Brazil and South Africa to restore authority to the multilateral system. Making progress through consensus is a slow and frustrating process, but it may prove to be more effective than confrontation and condescension in raising human rights standards across the world.
