The death of the West?

On 24 February, the United States joined Russia to vote against a UN General Assembly resolution condemning its war of aggression against Ukraine. It was a significant moment. The US had effectively broken with its long-standing transatlantic and NATO partners to align with the aggressor in the Ukraine war.

The UN vote came shortly after US president Donald Trump had turned publicly against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. He called him a ‘dictator’ and demanded the Ukrainians cede territory to the Russian occupiers. A week later, the Trump administration engaged in a now notorious attack on Zelensky in front of the world’s media. Washington’s turn against Ukraine suggests that the principle of national self-determination, so long a staple of the US-led postwar order, is now of little consequence to the White House.

In the midst of these momentous diplomatic moves, Trump has had time to escalate his threats to impose 25 per cent tariffs on imports from the European Union. He has castigated Brussels by claiming, not entirely accurately, that ‘the European Union was formed in order to screw the United States’. A few days later, he implemented pre-announced tariffs on America’s two closest trade partners, Canada and Mexico – now partially paused again – and upped those on China by another 10 per cent.

‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen’, said Vladimir Lenin. But the globalised world order collapsing within the space of weeks would be momentous even by the Bolshevik leader’s standards.

This is certainly what many international politics watchers think is happening. Bronwen Maddox, director of the Chatham House think-tank, has said that the concept of the West as an alliance of liberal democracies is ‘probably’ over. Michael Clarke, a former director general of the Royal United Services Institute, has been more forthright. ‘The West is dead’, he said. Meanwhile Marc Chandler, chief strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex, has said that Trump’s policies will ‘end globalisation’.

Western politicians have been following suit. UK prime minister Keir Starmer claims we are now at the ‘crossroads of history’. Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, announced that Europe must achieve ‘independence’ from the US.

The problem with these obituaries to the West, these valedictions to the world order and to globalisation, is that they assume that a decisive transition has taken place in recent weeks and that we are about to enter a new world.

But this is not what is happening. In truth, the geopolitical and economic shifts and fractures that Trump has brought to the fore over the past few weeks have been taking place for years. And whatever formation is now emerging, it won’t mark a complete break with the past. The present and the future always incorporate elements of continuity. Previous sources of strain and discord do not just evaporate. They continue to play a role in the future, too.

Moreover, the emergence of declinist views and predictions of ‘the end’ among our elites do not simply reflect objective reality. Rather, they primarily reflect the fears, uncertainties and doubts percolating within elite circles.

Indeed, in First World War: Still No End in Sight, sociologist Frank Furedi shows that Western ruling elites have been suffering from an existential crisis for well over a century. The devastating impact of the First World War set in motion a crisis of elite self-belief which has ebbed and flowed ever since. This has fuelled a never-ending cycle of geopolitical obituaries, from Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West in 1917 to Patrick Buchanan’ s The Death of the West in 2001.

Similarly, the death of globalisation has been announced many times over recent decades. As early as 2000, the late international business scholar, Alan Rugman, penned The End of Globalisation. It was followed more recently by the late Finbarr Livesey’s From Global to Local: The Making of Things and the End of Globalisation in 2017, geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan’s Mapping the Collapse of Globalisation in 2022, and Elisabeth Braw’s Goodbye Globalisation: The Return of a Divided World, published early last year.

But the fact remains that the current appreciation of the hazardous moral, geopolitical and economic state of the West has been a long time in the making.

If we want to pinpoint a truly decisive moment in this story, it is the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. For as long as the Cold War lasted, Western political leaders still had one big prop sustaining their sense of legitimacy. They could rely on the negative supposition that at least ‘their’ capitalism was morally and economically better than its authoritarian and inefficient Soviet ‘socialist’ alternative.

The events of 1989 and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union removed that source of legitimacy. Rather than confirming Western capitalism’s superiority, the ‘End of History’, as it was dubbed, prompted a deeper self-questioning. Western leaders were aware that the end of the Cold War had deprived them of purpose, but most lacked the capacity and the courage to address this.

Foreign-policy specialists were among the first to point to a loss of strategic clarity. With the Soviet Union gone, Western powers lacked a clear enemy. This made it difficult to define and pursue coherent foreign-policy objectives. The Cold War’s bipolar structure had forced united cooperation between Western allies to counter the Soviet Union. Following the Soviet collapse, there was less to keep the Western-led order together. With Western leaders in limbo, the world has been fracturing ever since, both geopolitically and economically.

Elite anxiety has been further fuelled, in more recent years, by the populist revolt. Public support for anti-establishment parties and movements has played on elites’ lurking awareness of their lack of legitimacy and political purpose.

The re-election of Trump, with an even clearer electoral mandate than he received the first time around, really has made Western elites feel as if their world is ending. They now know, beyond doubt, that substantial parts of the populace don’t want them to carry on as they have been. People have had enough of the status quo. They’ve had enough of being ignored or patronised by an out-of-touch political establishment.

A series of other events have dealt significant blows to the establishment’s dwindling self-assurance. Before the 2008 financial crash, some Western leaders had deluded themselves into thinking they had ‘ended boom and bust’. So the crash then shattered their confidence in their ability to direct the economy. This was then followed by a recession and an unusually lacklustre recovery. In Europe, the storms continued with the Eurozone debt crisis.

After a tumultuous 2010s, battered global elites then had a global pandemic to deal with from 2020 until well into 2022. During the pandemic, they imposed lockdowns that severely disrupted global supply chains. From that point on, the interdependency between countries, which was intrinsic to globalisation, was suddenly deemed a risk to everything, from medicines to foodstuffs to parts for their industries. Western elites started talking about the importance of national ‘resilience’, an implicit rejection of the globalism they had once embraced.

After the crash and the pandemic lockdowns, Russia embarked on its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which exacerbated an already-existing energy crisis.

The unravelling of elite delusions about permanent peace and prosperity, combined with the emergence of a mass of rebellious voters, has had a profound effect on the elites’ consciousness. Their protective wall of complacency has been stripped away. And so we’re now back with terminal talk of the ‘end of the West’ and the ‘death of globalisation’.

Something really has ended, however. Geopolitically, the brief post-Cold War period of US unipolarity after the collapse of the Soviet Union is no more. And despite the prophets of US economic exceptionalism, it is unlikely to return. Even in economic terms, the US share of world GDP (using purchasing power parity) fell from first place at 22 per cent in 1990 to second place in 2016. The US share is now below 15 per cent, with China moving ahead to 19 per cent.

The US, with its large military machine, and the dollar still operating as the world’s reserve currency, remains the biggest player in the world. But it is now a player alongside many others.

The list goes far beyond China, although it is the US’s main economic and technological challenger. We have the archaic, bygone powers of Europe. The EU may be divided and disunited over everything from migration to Net Zero to the Ukraine war. But individual European countries still have pretensions as world actors, especially Britain, France and Germany. Japan, too, a late-20th-century industrial powerhouse, continues to be a nation with some clout. And to these we can add a revanchist Russia.

Then there’s the ‘rise of the rest’, an assortment of middle-level countries with various amounts of geopolitical influence, especially within their regions. The most active and most economically muscular, with interests beyond their national borders, include India, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Israel, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia. That’s quite a mix of interests.

The drawback of talking about a ‘bipolar’ or even a ‘multipolar’ world is that it endows today’s disorder with a bit too much constancy and durability. Today’s world of nations is a volatile, fluid and frequently changing set of international combinations and groupings. This inconstancy would be there even without a capricious White House.

We can expect a varying pattern of mostly informal, sometimes formal, compacts between nations around different issues. We have seen this already with different groupings forming around the struggles for national sovereignty and survival in Israel and Ukraine. We also see it in the uneven attendances, discords and blurred objectives of many existing multinational bodies, from the G7 to the BRICS. The key absences, and the lack of consensus, at the recent G20 finance meeting in South Africa in February shows how unstable existing international orderings tend to be.

Moreover, the world economy is already ruptured. The Global Trade Alert (GTA) is the most-referenced independent trade-policy-monitoring organisation. It was launched in June 2009 after concerns that national governments were adopting beggar-thy-neighbour protectionist policies in the fallout from the financial crisis.

The GTA has shown that the average annual number of harmful interventions impacting trade tripled between 2009-11 (252 per annum) and 2017-19 (724 per annum). In the most recent three-year period (2022-24), the amount of protectionist activity has rocketed again, to an average of 2,260 interventions a year. That’s a near 10-fold increase since the global financial crisis. These international frictions are bound to grow as Western governments try to revive their atrophied economies.

Globalisation has certainly become more troubled and fragmented. Differences over economic policies and frictions between countries, not least within the old Western bloc, have become sharper. Yet the death of globalisation is most certainly being exaggerated. There has been no collapse in international trade or investment to substantiate claims of ‘deglobalisation’. Both trade flows and foreign investment stocks continue to grow, even if not as quickly as in some earlier spells. The amount of foreign direct investment relative to world output has risen pretty consistently over the past three decades despite all the economic shocks: from 10 per cent in 1990 to 32 per cent on the eve of the financial crisis to 40 per cent the year before the pandemic and to 43 per cent in 2023.

Cross-border linkages took a long time to establish and become embedded. They will also take time to change, whether by economic pressures or political edicts.

Global, regional and national supply chains are not built within a few months. They are complex and have been established over years, and often decades. Even when political pressure is applied to ‘reshore’ or ‘nearshore’ production and supply chains, as we have seen from successive US administrations, this isn’t like flicking a switch. As the US Council on Foreign Relations explains: ‘Far-reaching state ambitions – such as developing strategic industries and shifting supply chains – will take years to achieve, even if interventions are wildly successful.’

A particular firm can make an expensive decision to re-establish some of its production operations in the US, just as Apple or Caterpillar have done. But that doesn’t mean the company has shed its substantial investments abroad, or that it is immune from overseas supply chains. This shows that complete national self-sufficiency in production, and all the required components, is a chimera. No country has been fully self-sufficient since the development of world markets. Trade, capital and financial flows will simply continue to adapt to this more volatile world.

The existing economic trends towards regionalisation will continue, maybe at a slightly faster pace. Protectionist policies – including subsidies, regulatory barriers as well as tariffs – can reshape cross-border economic interactions. But this does not necessarily mean there will be less trade overall. It may simply lead to different patterns of trade.

So we haven’t moved into a ‘new era’. And escalating tariffs won’t on their own set us on an inexorable path to the next world war, either. But this is a more perilous world, not least because Western leaders are so perplexed about what is happening, and don’t yet know how to assess and pursue their national interests.

The Trump Derangement Syndrome of the elites does not help. It stops policymakers from seeing the wood for the trees. Commentators warning about the risk of Trump initiating a trade war should take a breather and look at the data. They would see that he’s continuing a trend of escalating protectionism that began under President Barack Obama. Indeed, between 2009 and 2024, the US applied more harmful trade measures than any other nation.

Obsessively despairing over Donald Trump’s White House is a waste of time. It relieves policymakers of the hard task of thinking more deeply and creatively – both about how to understand this more fluid world and, more importantly, how to shape it for the better.

Phil Mullan’s Beyond Confrontation: Globalists, Nationalists and Their Discontents is published by Emerald Publishing. Order it from Amazon (UK)