The Western bubble
The dominant Western narrative today has the West fighting a battle against a dark world that represents authoritarianism and challenges the liberal post-war political world. It is summed up in the phrase “the West and the rest.”
The narrative has one basic problem: It contains no element of self-criticism. The West – that is, the United States – won the Cold War and at one point found itself without an opponent. It was a rare moment in history where the world essentially had one superpower, a single concentration of power. It didn’t last long – just over a decade and a half.
What did the US do with this strategic hegemony? They squandered it and at the same time flouted basic rules of the liberal new order they had preached. A prime example is the invasion of Iraq or the extremism in Afghanistan. No pretense was kept and the US functioned, unsuccessfully, like a good old Great Power of the 19th century, without respecting any rules. The same behaviors were repeated in Libya and in other cases. It was the moment of hubris for the – momentarily – single superpower. The arrogance toward the losers of the Cold War was impressive.
But it was preceded, several years before, by the illusion of American sovereignty through globalization. The US put China in the game thinking it would be able to sell American products in a huge market and use cheap labor to increase profits. It was a clever but shortsighted strategy.
The US today faces a very distrustful world. A significant majority of states do not accept the monopoly of Western truth and get angry when someone points the finger at them. The crisis in Gaza has exacerbated the global challenge to Western hegemony.
However, the West is also facing an internal crisis and challenge. Its opponents are using the quintessentially Western tools to destabilize it: freedom of expression and social media. But these destabilizing efforts would not have been so successful if they had not taken advantage of the unimaginable internal inequalities and problems. Former president Donald Trump did not emerge out of nowhere.
Nobody wants the West weakened and powerless. But no one can convince the rest of the world that it did everything right when it had no rival.
As long as the West does not engage in some self-criticism and doesn’t solve its own problems, it will continue to be confronted by non-Westerners who will get angry with the argument that the West is the most civilized and refined part of the world and the rest needs to be civilized. This is how former secretary of state and Democratic nominee in the 2016 presidential election Hillary Clinton dealt with the rest of the American voters and we saw what happened.
