The West faces barbarous new threats—not all of which are arrayed outside our gates. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are neither purely regional conflicts nor mere proxy battles in a great-power competition for global hegemony. They are part of a wider war pitting the West against a triumvirate of revisionist powers—China, Russia, and Iran—over power, resources, and ways of life: what it means to be civilized and human. It isn’t a “clash of civilizations,” as the American political scientist Samuel Huntington first argued in 1993, but a battle for civilization that runs both between and within geopolitical and geoeconomic blocs.
“The US-led Western bloc … has largely lost sight of its own civilizational coordinates.”
The US-led Western bloc isn’t well-positioned to navigate the world created by these trends, however, because it has largely lost sight of its own civilizational coordinates. Indeed, the West is beset by anti-civilizational forces emanating from within its frontiers—forces that not only undermine its own sources of pride, solidarity, and humaneness, but stoke justified suspicion and resentment among other peoples.
On the one hand, an ultra-progressive creed that demonizes Western civilization as the source of all evil is taking hold of the collective mind of the Western elite, jeopardizing the very idea of civilized life. On the other, the adherents of a still-ferocious neoconservative tendency are bent on “solving” these internal contradictions by way of mindless military aggression and pure technological dominance.