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?

Mitchell Peterson
10 min readMar 21, 2022
A Hermit 1664. Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

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.

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Mitchell Peterson

Freelance writer who spent nine years outside the US, currently in rural America writing the Substack bestseller 18 Uncles.