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Is ‘The West’ Playing Its Final Hand?
With a litany of domestic issues, an empty economic ideology, and sanction-happy foreign policy, are we witnessing the beginning of the end?
America thinks it is immune to the cycle of empires. A so-called democracy and ‘dynamic’ free-market economy was thought to be able to evolve, roll with the punches, and continue to ‘benevolently’ control every corner of the globe.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was thought to mark ‘the end of history.’ All textbooks from ’89 onwards were going to extoll to virtues of the freedom-loving ‘Westerners’ and their ‘innovative’ economic masters who, out of sheer love and goodwill, intervened in nations across the planet, bringing them democracy, free markets, and Coca Cola, the millions of innocent deaths and bombed-out hospitals minor collateral damage.
‘It was a small price to pay for freedom’ the textbooks would read.
Because we’re so virtuous and love to share our freedom, surely America and our European junior partners will be the rulers of the universe forever, no?
It’s beginning to look like that dream will not come to fruition. As with all empirical orders, this one too shall fall. And I think that end could come a lot sooner than we realize.
Media consumers in Europe and America would be surprised to hear that the world is not united behind ‘the West’ in its condemnation of Moscow over the Ukraine invasion.
Media consumers in ‘the West’ would be surprised to hear that the UN vote to condemn had five no-votes and thirty-five abstentions, which represents about half of the global population.
And ‘Western’ media consumers would also be surprised to hear that it isn’t viewed as quite a black and white issue in the Global South. How is that possible?
It turns out that decades of coups, color revolutions, natural resource theft, invasions, dictator support, exploitation, drones, sanctions, structural adjustment programs, and outright neocolonialism haven’t made many friends in the developing world.
And now while ‘the West’ is demanding that everyone fall in line to strangle the Russ!an economy, half the globe…
