Stephen Sefton, November 16th 2025
In almost all the tragedies of ancient Greek theater, the protagonist has committed a fatal moral offense which leads them to a deadly outcome, almost always facilitated by their overweening arrogance. In the case of the progressive collapse of the collective West, one is dealing with five centuries of countless crimes of genocidal conquest and slavery. But their hateful culture of arrogance does not allow Western leaders to admit that they owe the wealth and political-military power of their countries to this genocidal criminality. This arrogance in the face of the collective West’s decline gets expressed in diplomatic bad faith and unilateral aggression, exacerbating the lack of cooperation and trust that characterizes the current international crisis.
At the domestic level, the aggressive foreign policy of the collective West is reflected in militarism and political and economic repression against its own populations. Everyone has witnessed the way the governments of the collective West repress and criminalize legitimate protest against the genocide of the Zionist regime against the Palestinian people. Even so, they continue to pretend that they are morally and culturally superior and wonder why the majority world no longer responds to their orders and demands as before. Thus, contemporary history highlights the inability of North American and European societies to understand, much less overcome, the consequences of their historical imperialist arrogance.
The Western ruling classes did not understand the correct meaning of the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 and the consequent end of the Cold War. As always, they misinterpreted the goodwill of their antagonists as irremediable weakness and took advantage to impose the tyranny of their neoliberal ideology at the international level. The short-sighted fascist US business and financial elite and their European servants applied their political-military power around the world to serve their business interests through extortionist globalization. The triumphalist mentality of the Western governments belittled the gradual sovereign advances of the economy of the People's Republic of China.
It also categorically ruled out any possible recovery of the Russian economy or a possible resurgence of anti-imperialism in Latin America. The European Union made the fatal decision to subject its unequal sovereign peoples to progressively more centralized integration and the straitjacket of a common currency. The governments of the African countries remained subject to neocolonial structures of trade and finance. The collective West assumed that Asian countries were going to align themselves more and more closely under Western leadership. And it was assumed that the brutal coercive measures against Iran wpuld sooner or later going bring about regime change in the country to ensure Israel's intimidating regional dominance of West Asia.
Gradually, all these assumptions were proven wrong. In 1999, Russia rejected NATO's illegal war of aggression against Serbia. With enormous sacrifice, Cuba overcame the acute crisis caused by the end of the Soviet Union. Comandante Hugo Chávez won the presidency of Venezuela and with other new anti-imperialist governments in Latin America defeated the US attempt to impose a neoliberal free trade agreement across the continent. Western efforts to subdue Democratic Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran also failed. In 2000, Hezbollah expelled the Zionist forces from Lebanon and in 2006 defeated Israel again, strengthening the Axis of Resistance against the Zionist occupation of Palestine.
China consolidated its leading role in the regional development of Central and South-East Asia. Russia maintained its close strategic relationship with Central Asia and India. The development of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS group of countries opened up new options for the human development of the peoples of the majority world, especially the peoples of Africa. In 2008 and 2009 the collapse of the Western financial system was a decisive moment leading to increasing Western aggression against the expressions of sovereign independence by the peoples of the majority world while the US and EU economies have been stuck in a long period of low economic growth and depression.
The lack of competitiveness of Western economies and the growing domestic crisis of impoverishment and inequality is also due to the excessive arrogance of the Western ruling elites. The destructive anti-social nature of Western capitalism drives a ruthless class war in which the losses of big business are socialized, while the profits accrue to the fascist elites. As the famous financial speculator Warren Buffet has said, 'It is true that there is a class war, but it is my class, the rich class, that is waging the war, and we are winning.'
Basically, the current crisis in Western societies is due to the accumulation of negative effects from the persistent lack of reasoned democratic planning. The ideological victory of fascist neoliberalism during the 1980s and 1990s provoked neglect of a healthy culture of public administration necessary to ensure socio-economic stability. The false free market ideology provoked contempt for the public sector and an ill-advised centralization of public policy planning in the hands of the corporate financial sector, which naturally prioritizes corporate profits over the needs and aspirations of their countries’ populations.
In international relations, after the dissolution of the USSR, the North American and European elites got used to a global dominance which diminished the importance of sound planning to ensure essential economic factors. They thought they would always be able to demand and get whatever they wanted to extract from the majority world however and whenever they wanted. Now, not being able to do so as before, they find that they cannot get everything they need and have not planned for this situation. This reality was emphatically demonstrated when China, thanks to its effective monopoly of products derived from rare earths, forced the Donald Trump administration to remove its exaggerated tariffs against Chinese products.
The governments of the majority of the world recognize that the future of the human development of their peoples depends on greater commercial and financial relations with the Eurasian countries, if possible without losing the benefits of access to the North American and European markets. This reality has many important negative consequences in Western economies that did not foresee the disadvantaged situation they are in now. Among other things, these are the lack of affordable housing for most families, the inability of their public health systems to protect populations from pandemics like Covid-19, technological backwardness in several crucial areas such as nuclear energy or the lack of capacity for sufficient suitable sources of renewable energy.
In the case of European countries, as a result of having cut off their relations with Russia, they no longer have the energy security they had before based on safe and cheap Russian gas and oil that previously constituted 40% of the European energy market. Now European industries and households depend for their energy on constant swings in the volatile global energy markets. The decision by Europe’s ruling elites to politicize energy supplies means that their countries are more and more subject to geopolitical and geo-economic pressures from energy resource producers and intermediary countries.
In its May newsletter this year, the European Central Bank stated that global trade and energy policies are changing to promote greater resilience and security rather than liberalization and efficiency. But it is precisely the policies of European governments that have destroyed the resilience and security of their energy supply for domestic industry enabling competitive foreign trade. Related to the issue of the politicization of the international energy market is the market for raw materials necessary for the green economy, especially electric vehicles. The European Central Bank reports that the manufacture of electric vehicles requires six times more special mineral inputs than conventional cars.
The concern of the collective West to diminish the vulnerabilities of its energy and industrial supply chains essentially means they do not intend to peacefully assimilate the new structures and patterns of international relations. Their counterproductive aspiration to reduce risks clashes with the imperative to promote trade. Their aspiration to achieve satisfactory levels of competitiveness depends on a significant increase in investment and access to sufficient skilled labor.
However, Sputnik reports that foreign direct investment into the European Union economy in 2025 has fallen to the lowest level in 10 years. Despite that, Western elites have tried to exclude successful Chinese companies such as Huawei or ZTE from domestic markets and have gone to the extreme of applying expropriations. Under US pressure the Dutch government expropriated the Chinese-owned company Nexperia. Now it has had to backtrack, because the measure led to drastic under supply of key electronics chips for the international automobile industry.
With the insane abandonment of the cheap and safe Russian energy, deindustrialization in Europe has accelerated. Germany’s manufacturing industry, which accounts for 21% of the national economy, now pays three times more for its energy than its US competitors. Since 2020, this sector in Germany has lost more than 250,000 jobs. Similarly, as in Europe, US manufacturing industry is also in decline. In 2020, US production of industrial machinery was 41% less than the world average. In 2021, the country lagged behind in density of industrial robots, ranking only eighth in the world.
The US magazine Fortune quotes the chief executive of the automotive company Ford, "We are in trouble in our country... We have more than a million vacancies in critical jobs, emergency services, trucks, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen. It's a very serious thing." Nor does significant foreign direct investment in the U.S. economy imply new productive activity because almost all this investment consists of acquisitions of existing companies. Studies indicate that more than half of the loss of millions of jobs in the North American manufacturing sector over the last ten tears years results from loss of global market share.
In all the countries of the collective West, a lack of tax revenues is projected precisely at a time that requires greater social spending. Higher unemployment, greater inequality, greater discontent and greater unrest are projected. A successful society would have planned to ensure a secure and cheap energy supply, greater investment and greater innovation in industry and energy, together with adequate social and fiscal policies. The arrogance and greed of the US and European ruling elites is destroying the future prosperity of their populations, betraying the hopes of their youth and denying the legitimate aspirations of their peoples to work, peace and security.