Abel Pli

Abel Pli is a specialist in international relations and populism issues. With a PhD in political science from the École nationale d’administration publique de Montréal, he shows how populist rhetoric in the West is impacting transatlantic relations. Populism brings with it a new worldview based on the defense of egocentric national interests, economic protectionism, unilateralism, bilateralism, and isolationism. Such a worldview runs counter to the values of the liberal international order.

His research argues that the questioning of liberal values such as collective identity, economic interdependence, and multilateralism, which are rejected by populist discourse, weakens NATO’s cohesion. By analyzing the rhetoric of Donald Trump since his first campaigns in 2016 and that of Marine Le Pen, the research tends to show that right-wing populism calls into question the existence of the transatlantic alliance.

From a constructivist perspective, his work responds to neo-realist authors who predicted the end of NATO due to the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact since the end of the Cold War. NATO did not collapse as predicted by the neo-realists because its member states share the values of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, with the arrival of a Democratic president in the White House between 2020 and 2024, we have seen a revitalization of the Alliance around the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Neo-realism therefore retains its theoretical explanatory validity with the new common Russian threat.