As regular readers will have noticed, I have often dissented from the widespread view, generally uttered with a rather irritating attitude of resignation, that the West is in decline. It is clear that the United States, which, whether the West generally appreciates the fact or not, chiefly determines the direction and state of political and social health of the entire West, is not in decline. The enfeebled and corrupt coalition of the American far Left, the irretrievably woke, the Muslim and African-American radicals, and the gullible or maladjusted bearers of the Great Liberal Death Wish, barely managed to rig the 2020 election to elevate the totally unfeasible Joe Biden to the White House. After four death-defying years, that coalition has been so completely defeated, congressional inquiries are underway into the cover-up of the former president’s cognitive state, and the former CIA and FBI directors are under criminal investigation.
The Trump administration’s closing of the borders to illegal entry, plunging crime rate, mass deportation of convicted felons who entered illegally, the legal suppression of the political perversion of the intelligence services and the FBI, the roll-back of official payola for the lackeys of the old regime that amounted to outright vote-buying, and the embrace of a meritocratic, free market, job-creating strategy, all sustained by public opinion, are a comprehensive anti-decline, growth-and-pride agenda. This is replicated in foreign policy, where the freeloading mockery of NATO as an “alliance of the willing”, is being replaced by an alliance of kindred democracies paying their way and vastly transcending the ludicrous rivalry of floundering Russia and the thoroughly chastised totalitarian pseudo-theocracy of Iran.
This is not only indicative of a broad public spirit of national renewal and resentment of the previous policy of national division and self-criticism. Even the unprecedented resistance to the revolutionary newcomer Donald Trump, the only president in American history who had never previously held or sought any public office or high military command, a total outsider, shows that the apostles and architects of decline were full of misplaced energy. The decadent bi-partisan throttling of the American state in the interregnum between Reagan and Trump, gave us George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War and the elevation of Hamas and Hezbollah, and Barack Obama’s green zealotry, a battering ram against capitalism in the name of saving the planet, and his destructive obsession with race, and the senescent corruption and defeatism of Biden. Yet they all fought Trump tooth and nail, corrupting the justice system and suborning the national political media so thoroughly that they largely destroyed public confidence in the free press. This was a severe challenge to the guardrails of American constitutional democracy, and though it was all in defence of declinism, it was yet carried out with an energy that did not indicate decline.
We appear to be close to a decisive turn in the Middle East, whose elements include a markedly less belligerent posture by a chastened but not necessarily reformed Iran, normalised relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria, and a less disruptive posture from Turkey. The bracing if not entirely spontaneous rise of Western Europe and Canada to the challenges of full participation in a purposeful Western Alliance, and the relatively robust response of most of the European powers to the Russian threat in Ukraine, are fine auguries that Europe may be shaking off its lengthy torpor.
Europe has been afflicted by a collapsed birth rate, a flaccid, spiritual inertia, and virtual economic stagnation produced by self-destructive energy policies and a guaranteed income for minimal work to its historically volatile working and agrarian classes. The rise of the sensible Right in Germany, France and Italy indicate possible change. It would be impetuous to declare a revival of European vitality, but there is room for hope that an over-regulated European Union striving for a federalism that most of its constituent populations have not actually approved, indicate that the former rigid pursuit of a Davos-like world of authoritarian, soft socialism and bureaucratic government with merely a ceremonial nod to democratic niceties, is being reconsidered.
The unfortunate fate of the octogenarian Klaus Schwab, a good man and author of a howling success in building up the dismal town of Davos into a world crossroads (World Economic Forum) that anesthetised much of the West, especially since the illegitimate political exploitation of the Covid pandemic, though a personal sadness, is perhaps a harbinger. Mr. Schwab deserves better than to be pushed out by his directors. But he aspired to too much and attempted to transform a conference into an intercontinental ruling ideology. His ambitions were admirable, but his policy preferences were Swiss socialistic parochialism with no ultimate application to a mighty and vital spontaneous society such as the United States and the many nations that follow it, intentionally or otherwise.
The West is not in decline and the United States is focusing its full attention upon China. A rivalry impends, with almost no chance of military combat, but with all indications that the American example will prevail more swiftly than it did under previous more sinister challenges from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
It remains a good time to be in the West.
NATO retains a splendid future, could even go worldwide