Upon the collapse of the USSR, the USA remained as the sole and undisputed hegemonic power in the international arena. America’s dominance led many people of the West to adopt a worldview in which a substantial threat to their accustomed western way of life, culture, or freedom was unimaginable. Most of the West was a sleeping giant while existential threats took form.
Even when western leaders speak of the threats, most give no sign of having examined the dangers realistically and comprehensively. Their vision is narrow. They examine the situation as it stands, without seriously considering the efforts at undermining and weakening society from within; and they certainly are unready to consider far-reaching decisions that involve paying a price.
In contrast with the western slumber, the enemies of the West are working shrewdly according to a long-term plan designed to damage and eventually replace American hegemony and the liberal democratic culture that it oversees. Those enemies are working inside the world’s countries, including the western countries themselves, to take assets and power away and to weaken and undermine the regimes. Their efforts, despite an imbalance of capabilities that still appears significant on the surface, have succeeded more than once in disrupting the foundations of US power. Examination of the current situation suggests that the imbalance is not as large as many of us would like to think, and the threat is more powerful than ever. In fact, there are spheres in which the West no longer holds the initiative. For example, according to reports at the end of July, the cyber war between China and the USA has tipped in China’s favor.
It seems that in recent years not only are hostile nations challenging the American-led world order one by one but an anti-western bloc is consolidating, gathering strength, coordinating, and cooperating in its efforts. The anti-western bloc is led by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. In addition to those hostile states, the Muslim Brotherhood also deserves mention. Alongside the states whose leadership represents the Muslim Brotherhood — that is, Qatar and Turkey — the movement poses a much broader threat. In dozens of states around the world, both Arab and western, it is working quietly and methodically to expand its power and achieve its goal —building up the Islamic nation and making Islam the world’s dominant religion. The Brotherhood’s leaders at the global level guide and coordinate the activities of the various branches. Essentially, this is a broad-based global movement with long-term abilities of planning, integration, and performance; but the West has not yet had the presence of mind to treat it as an enemy. The Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology, like that of the Islamic revolution in Iran, seeks not to live in peace as equals alongside the Western regimes but rather to replace them and rule in their stead.
The anti-western states and organizations are widely separated ideologically, they even compete with one another, and sometimes they carry long-standing mutual grudges. For example, Russia and China are disputing territory and resources, and between the Shiite Islam of the revolution and the Sunni Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood there are theological differences which they consider enormous and there are many centuries of extreme hostility. Those tensions are very comforting to many a western analyst who believes (or wishes to believe) that they will prevent the anti-westerners from cooperating as well as possible and dealing significant damage to the West in the long term. Possibly. But as I’ve found myself telling western leaders many times in recent years — hoping is not a policy. True leadership is not content merely to hope for the best. It prepares for the worst.
Moreover, reality has proven that despite their differences, the anti-western players are in ever-closer cooperation, in spheres that involve, among other things, the infliction of strategic damage — successfully — on the West. An excellent example is the establishment of SPFS, a Russian system that bypasses the SWIFT system used by America for transmitting financial instructions. The Russians began developing their system after the Americans threatened, as long ago as 2014, to use SWIFT for retaliation. Today many hundreds of financial institutions have joined the SPFS network. In my opinion, this episode should have sent wake-up tremors through the USA and the entire West, since it weakens the USA considerably in the international arena of finance, depriving the West of its monopoly and, together with that, of a palpable fraction of its influence.
Another instance that should have deeply rattled the West is China’s demand that Saudi Arabia accept payment for energy in Chinese currency (yuan). That demand was received in March 2022, around the time Russia detached itself from SWIFT. Previously the US dollar had held a near-monopoly over energy transactions, but its power is steadily weakening. Naturally the more transactions are performed in other currencies, the more the dollar’s clout is altered in the international marketplace — and together with the dollar’s clout, the clout of the USA. China, as the world’s largest oil importer, may significantly influence the balance with its purchasing power. In addition to buying oil from Saudi Arabia, China buys large quantities from Iran in violation of American sanctions.
Besides cooperating economically, creating detours around dependency on the USA, and making the USA weaker, the anti-western countries are also cooperating militarily. Such cooperation has increased significantly in the recent years following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For example, the Russians are purchasing enormous quantities of drones and missiles from the Iranians. The Iranians are requesting air defense technology from the Russians. North Korea is apparently contributing greatly to military efforts in both Russia and Iran, in projects involving missiles and, in the case of Iran, possibly nuclear weapons as well.
Still the West remains unaware that a new war is brewing between the two blocs. Its enemies are cooperating against it, while profiting from connections with it to the extent that it allows. The West, for its part, is bogged down at an earlier stage where, for the most part, it refrains from defining who the enemy is and certainly from undertaking firm countermeasures. The West is essentially allowing the countries of the world to play on both teams. A country will work with SWIFT on the one hand, for example, but also with Russia’s SPSF as convenient. It isn’t surprising that the West doesn’t demand that other countries choose a side, when the West’s indecisive behavior resembles their own.
Consider Iran for example. The West, including strategic allies of the USA such as the UK and France, continues trading with Iran on a large scale. The USA has not enforced sanctions against Iran in recent years, and it has even unfrozen large sums of money for Iran. Trade with China continues to be very significant for the entire western world, as does cooperation in other areas, perhaps the oddest of them being the renewal of funding for the laboratory in Wuhan that apparently spawned the Covid-19 epidemic. Countries such as Turkey and Qatar are not penalized for being run by Islamist ideologies or for supporting terrorist organizations.
In Israel, the war that broke out on October 7 has been widely termed a war by Iran and its proxies against Israel and its western allies, although all the western countries insist on trying to restrict the conflict terminologically to a local war between Israel and Hamas — even though American forces and assets are attacked frequently in Syria and Iraq, and though growing numbers of American soldiers have been hit. And even though maritime trade, the economy, and the world order under America’s aegis have been severely harmed by Houthi attacks, the West still refuses to call a spade a spade. The Americans are doing all they can to prevent the war from continuing and expanding. They are willing to pay any price, especially if Israel pays it. The current American government’s interest in stopping the war, and in continuing to belittle it by misdefinition, is clear; but it derives, once more, from a narrow perspective that considers nothing but short-term benefit. A strategic view of the threat would impel the USA to take more significant action for the world to see. The enemies of the West are watching developments and drawing important conclusions — for example, regarding how reliable a friend the USA is, especially as a supporter of Israel, which is considered one of its most significant allies. And can American assets and soldiers be targeted at no great cost? And how far can America be made to stretch its appeasement? There are further implications for the world order in the wake of this war; for example, China has been the big winner from the crisis that the Houthi attacks engendered in the Red Sea. Although the USA did form a coalition to attack the Houthis in Yemen, the Houthis continued nonetheless to enforce their de facto blockade in one of the world’s most important sea straits.
In conclusion, I must note that it would be wrong to call the USA blind to all those threats. There is a certain movement in a favorable direction. For some years already, there has been an attempt to investigate banning the sale of dual-purpose technologies to countries that are not close US allies. There is a deeper understanding of the competition from China, including the economic aspects and of course the threat against Taiwan. With regard to Russia, of course there has been very significant progress since the invasion of Ukraine. But the West is still hesitates to adopt difficult decisions and to pay a price in the short term. Its leaders aren’t telling their public about the scope of the threat — particularly the threat of an emerging anti-western bloc. And therefore, the public is unaware and almost no measures are being taken yet against subversion inside the western nations themselves. The West still largely prefers appeasement to confrontation and believes that appeasement can bring peace and coexistence. But the more strength its opponent gathers, the less easy — or even the less possible — withstanding that opponent will be.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the movement
