We are watching the end of the end. We are in a geopolitical apocalypse. The war with Iran is the United States’ last gasp as a unipolar hegemon. The United States has thus far proven incapable of defeating the Iranian regime and cannot open the Strait of Hormuz. The only certain outcomes of this war are damage to the American and world economy. Plausible outcomes include a strengthened and emboldened Islamist regime in Iran, which could also move from being a regional pariah to being the regional hegemon. Another migration crisis seems likely, too.
As I said, it is the end. This feeling of the end of days is not, I think, linked to the return of Jesus Christ, the rise of antichrist, or some imminent nuclear war to end all civilization. Nevertheless, something significant is happening; we are living through a historical turning point. The foundations of our world order are shifting under our feet.
It is at these moments that we seek explanations for things that seem beyond our understanding. The reasons for the movement of history, the destinies of peoples, the rise and fall of nations and empires, can never be fully grasped. Yet some are willing to try and frame these moments, as fraught as that exercise can be.
One such thinker is Samuel Huntington, who published his classic Clash of Civilizations over three decades ago. The book was first and foremost an attempt to understand the shape of the post-Cold War world order. One of his fundamental claims is that future conflicts would be driven more by cultural difference than by political or economic ideology. As a part of his argument, which famously framed world politics in terms of “civilizations,” Huntington discussed the future of the West.
Huntington notes that the West has entered into a “mature” phase of history where the liberal American empire has taken shape in a system of regimes, federations and cooperative institutions that have created the conditions for peace and flourishing. However, Huntington’s analysis from the mid-90s was prescient and not optimistic. The period of peace under the United States’ hegemony, the pax Americana, was limited, lasting just over three decades. Unlike Francis Fukuyama, who claimed that the defeat of Communism meant the “end of history,” Huntington made no assumptions about liberal internationalism being the peak of political evolution. Rather, Huntington saw sentiments like Fukuyama’s as a sign of decadence and weakness. A similar parallel occurred in the late Soviet Union in the 1970s, under Leonid Brezhnev, where the communist leadership believed the revolution had triumphed and all that was left to do was enjoy the benefits.
Huntington’s analysis leans on the historian Arnold Toynbee, who’s most famous work was an epic world history that attempted to analyze and diagnose the rise and fall of civilizations. Toynbee theorizes the existence in history of “universal states”. These universal states “arise after, and not before, the breakdowns of the civilizations to whose bodies social they bring political unity.” Universal states are, then, not signs of life, but signs of decline. They try and gather up the decaying remains of once vital nations and continue their development in a new form.
Toynbee observes a similar pattern of malaise, decadence, and weakness that Huntington does in these “universal states.” His key example is the European powers in the nineteenth century. The formerly great powers, resplendent with empires and monarchies, long traditions and history, all fell from their pedestals and were replaced by a world power that was similar to them in some ways. This world power was the United States of America, now seen as the leader of the Western world. With the United States, there was the appearance of a continuation of “Western civilisation” or of “European civilisation.” Toynbee’s schema could apply to the emergence of the United States as a world-leading superpower, becoming a “universal state” in the mid-twentieth century, and eventually the global hegemon after 1990. The United States was, in Toynbee’s thinking, a uniting of the already collapsing European civilisation.
However, Toynbee warns that universal states are “not summers but ‘Indian Summers’, masking autumn and presaging winter.” They provide a false sense of security. They also, according to Toynbee, “are the products of dominant minorities,” or “once creative minorities that have lost their creative power.” If one puts a managerial elite, along the lines of James Burnham, into Toynbee’s analysis in the place of “creative minorities that have lost their creative power,” the picture looks eerily familiar. Toynbee further suggests that universal states are “a rally” in a “process of disintegration that works itself out in successive pulsations of lapse-and-rally followed by relapse.” Universal states are a last-ditch effort for a civilisation to right itself in the face of decline and malignant external forces. They are marked by being “uncreative and ephemeral.” They are “by-products of social disintegration.”
Furthermore, those living in a Universal State often live in a condition of denial. “Why is it,” asks Toynbee, that “such citizens of a universal state are prone to regard it, not as a night’s shelter in the wilderness, but as the Promised Land, the goal of human endeavours? How is it possible for them to mistake this mundane institution for the Civitas Dei itself?” He calls this the “mirage of immortality,” where the inhabitants, and especially the elites, think they have reached paradise. Toynbee sees evidence of this in late nineteenth-century Europe and America.
At the close of the nineteenth century even a German middle class … was of the same mind as its North American and English ‘opposite numbers’ in its workaday sober senses. In these three provinces of a post-Modern Western World an unprecedentedly prosperous and comfortable Western middle class was taking it as a matter of course that the end of one civilization’s history was the end of History itself … They were imagining that, for their benefit, a sane, safe, satisfactory Modern Life had miraculously come to stay as a timeless present.
But history does not work like that, and it is striking that Fukuyama’s thinking was critiqued by Toynbee before his time. Huntington says on this that “societies that assume that their history has ended … are usually societies whose history is about to decline.” Over and over, throughout history, and around the entire world, peoples and civilizations have believed that they would last, that the party would continue, that things would just go on as they currently are. Civilizations have a normalcy bias. However, history shows that things are rarely normal, and that nations, peoples, and civilizations do not continue eternally, that Toynbee’s “mirage of immortality” is exactly that; a mirage.
In the 1990s, while some were forecasting the end of history through the “mirage of immortality,” others were more sober and, in hindsight, more prescient. Huntington, using the insights of the historian Carroll Quigley, argued that the West had entered a mature stage of development, as it had no more internal enemies or rivals, and had created a security zone which allowed for trade and prosperity to continue in a stable fashion. However, the pattern of history shows that this stage of civilisation is a “late stage”, one where the golden age ushers in an age of decadence, sloth, and then internal disintegration along with invasion from the outside.
Essentially, the West had, according to Huntington, reached the stage where it had won the day, was comfortable in its wealth and living standards, and was beginning to outsource the hard work of making things to other countries. At the same time, the fertility rate declined rapidly. In other words, the victors celebrated by sipping lattes and wine, and enjoying nice holidays, whilst reducing their population. “Civilizations decline when they stop the ‘application of surplus to new ways of doing things’ … This happens because the social groups controlling the surplus have a vested interest in using it for ‘nonproductive but ego-satisfying purposes’.” In other words, people have been living “off their capital and the civilization moves from the stage of the universal state to the stage of decay.”
We are quickly moving from decay to the next stage: the stage of invasion. This is because we have no internal energy and no willingness to defend ourselves. Huntington, in 1996, asked whether the West could reverse the cycle of decay and renew itself. The answer seems clear today: there has been no renewal, and all that seems to have happened is a deepening of decay, evidenced by increasing crime, drug use, the decay of the family, huge immigration surges from non-Western countries, weakening of civic life, declining productivity, and a decline in education standards and attainment.
The closing of the Strait of Hormuz, and the United States’ inability to reopen it, is a symptom of something worse. The failure to defeat Iran and displace the Islamist regime points to a bigger problem. Perhaps we are at a turning point that has finally been unveiled in full color. We are experiencing a literal apocalypse. The United States is in decline, yes. But the United States is also a sign of decline. Western civilization has become lazy, unproductive, and decadent. It is disintegrating internally. Our countries are run by bureaucrats and managers, not directed by leaders of men. The United States is a Universal State, a last gasp of Western Civilization. That gasp is coming to its strained end in the Strait of Hormuz.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
