When the Victim Narrative Becomes Geopolitics
On Resonance, Coalitions, and the Repositioning of the United States
The war in Iran is not merely an isolated foreign policy crisis. It also offers an opportunity to analyze and make visible the internal tensions within the political coalition that has formed around Donald Trump, as well as the narrative logic that has contributed to its cohesion. At the intersection of domestic political mobilization and foreign policy practice, a dynamic emerges in which stories of injustice and loss not only shape voters’ self-understanding but also reinterpret the role of the United States in the world.
Resonance Without Self-Perceived Victimhood
A common view is that Trump’s election as U.S. president rests on a form of populism appealing to a voter base marked by a sense of marginalization. Yet this explanation captures only part of the phenomenon. More central is a cultural backlash—a reaction against the progressive shift in values that has characterized elite institutions in recent decades. One might even speak of a radicalization of the elite, whose values have distanced it from a more conservative and traditionally minded “silent majority.”
This backlash does not necessarily rest on a personal sense of victimhood. Instead, it may take the form of indirect identification: a perception that one’s own reference group—defined culturally, socially, or nationally—is losing status and influence in a society where norms and institutions are changing without broad public legitimacy .
Trump’s portrayal of himself as unfairly treated then functions as a symbolic mirror. Attacks on him become attacks on a broader collective. In this way, a victim narrative gains traction even among voters who do not themselves experience direct victimization.
This resonance is reinforced by structural value divides that align with education, geography, and professional environments. In media, academia, the entertainment industry, and parts of the public sector, progressive norms—often summarized as DEI and contemporary perspectives on identity and gender—are perceived not merely as dominant, but as informal conditions for legitimacy.
Traditional Masculine Values Under Pressure
A key driver of this cultural backlash is the perception that traditionally masculine modes of thought—competition, stoicism, and merit-based hierarchy—have been displaced in favor of a feminization of institutions, where cancel culture and demands for emotional correctness penalize what were once seen as normal masculine expressions. This feminization contributes to a broader sense that the rules of the game have changed unilaterally.
This development was symbolically embodied in the two presidential elections in which Trump defeated progressive female opponents—Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024. Both candidates strongly represented the new normative paradigm, with an emphasis on inclusion, ethics of care, and gender identity issues. This, in turn, helped mobilize voters who perceived a cultural shift in which the previously dominant cultural mainstream—particularly its masculine component—was losing status and influence.
A Heterogeneous Coalition
Against this background, Trump’s political project emerges as a form of populist synthesis. Slogans such as “America First” function less as a coherent program than as open signifiers within which different forms of discontent can be articulated. Economic nationalism, cultural conservatism, and institutional distrust can thus coexist without being fully integrated into a unified ideology.
This means that the movement should not be understood as ideologically homogeneous, but rather as a coalition of partially conflicting projects. Loyalty to Trump, in this context, can be understood not only as an expression of conviction or fear of punishment, but also as a form of strategic investment. Different factions signal loyalty in the hope of influencing political direction.
When such expectations are not fulfilled—for example in questions concerning military engagement in the Middle East—this does not necessarily lead to abrupt disengagement, but rather to a more conditional and selective form of support.
Iran as a Stress Test
The war in Iran has made these internal tensions visible. It functions as a stress test for the heterogeneous coalition that Trump has constructed. For the economically nationalist America First faction, engagement appears as a departure from promises to avoid new “forever wars” and costly foreign entanglements. At the same time, strong voices—particularly within dispensationalist evangelicalism—interpret the conflict through a prophetic lens: support for Israel, and thus military action against Iran, is seen as a biblical imperative linked to apocalyptic prophecy. For these groups, active U.S. engagement in the Middle East may appear both legitimate and desirable.
Here, the core of the coalition is revealed: cohesion rests less on unified policy positions than on a shared orientation against a perceived establishment—the urban, cosmopolitan elite that promotes “woke” norms domestically and globalist structures abroad. When this orientation confronts concrete policy choices—such as access to bases in Spain or burden-sharing within NATO—underlying tensions become visible: between cultural backlash and competing forms of sovereignty nationalism, protectionism, and religious prophecy.
From Alliance to Transaction
The Iran conflict has also brought into focus a shifting relationship between the United States and its traditional allies. When several NATO member states declined to support the war—and in the case of Spain, to provide access to bases—this was met with sharp criticism. In this rhetoric, alliance relations are reinterpreted in terms of economic utility rather than long-term security commitments.
At the same time, distinctions between different forms of international cooperation begin to blur. In American conservative tradition, support for NATO has long coexisted with skepticism toward more far-reaching supranational structures such as the European Union. In a more transactional discourse, however, this distinction tends to weaken. References to “Brussels” as a symbol of bureaucratic supranationalism contribute to a more generalized distrust of international institutions.
This reorientation becomes particularly visible in concrete prioritization decisions. During the war in Iran, the United States has announced that previously agreed arms deliveries to European allies—including Finland and the Baltic states—are being paused as resources are redirected to the Middle East. At the same time, the war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have triggered acute disruptions in global energy flows. In order to secure global oil supply—and to dampen domestic fuel prices—the United States has eased restrictions on Russian oil exports. This unfolds in parallel with Ukrainian drone strikes against Russian oil ports in the Gulf of Finland, aimed at disrupting the very flows that Washington has chosen to tolerate.
These decisions illustrate how a more transactional and situational foreign policy not only reshapes the rhetoric of alliances, but also affects their practical functioning. For European states—encouraged to increase purchases of American military equipment—this raises questions about the predictability of U.S. commitments.
A Dual Victim Narrative
The narrative structure that characterizes Trump’s political project can be understood as dual in direction. On the one hand, it is directed outward, toward the international system. Here, the United States is portrayed as an actor systematically disadvantaged by trade arrangements, security commitments, and multilateral institutions. Allies are described as free riders, and international agreements as expressions of an order in which the United States bears disproportionate costs.
On the other hand, the narrative is directed inward, toward the domestic political sphere. Trump appears as an outsider, subjected to what is often described as a coordinated campaign by political, media, and institutional elites. Yet in this framing, it is not primarily Trump as an individual who stands at the center, but the collective he claims to represent. Attacks on him are thus reinterpreted as attacks on his voters.
It is in the interplay between these two levels that the narrative gains its force. The idea of external exploitation mirrors the image of an internal establishment working against Trump, who is portrayed as defending American interests and the American people.
Converging Skepticism Toward the Multilateral Order
Within this framework, different intellectual currents converge in a shared reinterpretation of the United States’ global role. Skepticism toward international law, rooted in common law traditions and a strong emphasis on national sovereignty, intersects with economic critiques of globalization. In parts of the American industrial heartland—the “Rust Belt”—protectionism appears as a means of restoring social and economic balance.
This economic nationalism overlaps with more principled forms of political nationalism, in which multilateral commitments are viewed with suspicion. At the same time, religiously inflected interpretive frameworks persist, in which international organizations such as the United Nations and the EU are given broader, sometimes even eschatological meaning.
What unites these perspectives is not a shared theory, but a shared direction: a shift away from multilateral arrangements toward a more explicitly sovereignty-oriented stance. Within this configuration, the narrative of Trump as an exceptional dealmaker plays a central role. The belief that complex institutional arrangements can be replaced by bilateral agreements helps legitimize a more selective and transactional foreign policy.
A Reconfigured Global Role
This reorientation has consequences that extend beyond domestic political mobilization. As international relations are increasingly understood in terms of short-term utility and renegotiation, the long-term predictability of the U.S. alliance system risks weakening. This does not necessarily imply immediate isolation, but it may create space for other actors—particularly China—to strengthen their position in an emerging multipolar world.
The primarily domestic narrative of injustice and restoration thus produces effects far beyond U.S. borders. The narrative logic that enables the unification of a heterogeneous coalition—by directing attention toward a perceived establishment and promising renegotiation—also reshapes the country’s relationship to the outside world.
It is not a coherent ideology, but a shared narrative of loss and injustice that holds the Trumpian coalition together—and it is precisely this narrative, when translated into foreign policy, that contributes to weakening the institutional structures that have long sustained U.S. global leadership. The war in Iran thus emerges as a clarifying moment: a point at which domestic narrative formation and geopolitical practice intersect—and where the consequences of that narrative become clearly visible.