There’s still time to save the West

When The Spectator asked me whether I would write an essay on ‘Why we 
need to strengthen the West’, I was delighted – and bemused. Why is this 
even up for debate? That we must explain and justify ‘the West’ at all 
indicates just how weak it has become. It would be better if it did not 
need strengthening at all but the truth is that the West has become an 
invalid.

What exactly, though, needs to be strengthened? The West is an idea, not 
a location. It is not a matter of geography, it is a way of life. The 
idea of the West rests on four pillars: Athens – where democracy was 
born. Rome – the cradle of the rule of law. Jerusalem – where 
Judeo-Christian values placed the inviolable dignity of the individual 
at the centre. And finally, the Enlightenment – whose great thinkers in 
London, Paris and Königsberg anchored humanism, individual civil 
liberties, the separation of powers and the division of church and state.

Herodotus observed a phenomenon after the fall of the Peisistratid 
tyranny which remains the most vital lesson in political philosophy to 
this day. The Athenians, he noted, had fought no better than their 
neighbours as long as they were ruled by tyrants. Yet the moment they 
threw off the yoke of tyranny, every individual was motivated to give 
his utmost, proving decisively stronger and more successful in battle. 
Why? Because he was now working for himself, not for a master. In that 
single observation Herodotus formulated the timeless argument in favour 
of self-determination and liberty – the core idea of the West.

This idea also shapes a view of humanity articulated by Immanuel Kant. 
Man is not perfect. Kant famously wrote that ‘out of the crooked timber 
of humanity, no straight thing was ever made’. In the western mind, the 
implication is: nor should it ever be.

Freedom’s most important word is ‘no’. Dissent is self-determination. It 
is liberating to say: ‘No, I see it differently.’ With ‘no’, the freedom 
to think and act begins. The freedom to say ‘no’ stands in stark 
contrast to the unfreedom of having to say ‘yes’. Democracies are 
no-saying societies, while dictatorships are yes-saying. Liberty is 
inherently critical of authority: it permits and encourages 
contradiction – precisely that which autocrats cannot abide. That is why 
dictators wish to weaken the West. And it begins, as so often, with words.

The word ‘West’ has become suspect and has long been cancelled in 
politically correct circles. The mandated terms in geopolitical 
discourse are now the ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global North’. For those 
using the phrase ‘Global South’, linking the West to colonial guilt is 
no accident – it is the very purpose of the narrative. UN 
Secretary-General António Guterres put it bluntly in 2020: ‘The Global 
North, specifically my own continent of Europe, imposed colonial rule on 
much of the Global South for centuries, through violence and coercion.’

The goal is to weaken the idea of the West through the association with 
guilt. Yet this new terminology is intellectually absurd. It possesses 
neither moral nor geographical logic: what does China have in common 
with Peru, Qatar with Haiti or Thailand with Sierra Leone? Where is the 
common denominator regarding human rights and the rule of law?

As a community of ideas, however, vastly different nations such as 
Japan, Singapore, New Zealand, the United States or those of Europe can 
readily identify with the concept of the West.

Yet in academia, ‘cancelling the West’ has become mainstream. Entire 
movements (‘epistemologies of the South’, ‘decolonising sociology’) rest 
on the claim that academic sociology’s focus on the modern ‘West’ is 
itself the problem. The West is asked within its own universities to 
apologise for its mere existence.

That the West – an open society based on liberty, the rule of law and 
human rights – is on the defensive is simply a fact. According to data 
gathered over decades by the thinktank Freedom House, global freedom 
declined in 2025 for the 20th consecutive year – deteriorating in 54 
countries while improving in only 35. The most damning finding is that a 
mere 21 per cent of the world’s population currently lives in countries 
classified as ‘free’, compared with 46 per cent two decades ago. The 
number of countries designated as ‘not free’ has risen over the course 
of 20 years from 45 to 59, and autocracies have grown more numerous, 
more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad.

The West is currently threatened and weakened from both without and 
within. Its three great external adversaries are China, Russia and 
Islamism – particularly Iran and its terrorist networks. China, Russia 
and Islamist dictatorships share a common objective: to divide the West 
in order to weaken it.

China is now the world’s second-largest economy. Its goal is to become 
the leading global economy by 2049 at the latest – the centenary of the 
People’s Republic. The combination of communist autocracy and 
turbo-charged state capitalism has proved remarkably effective, not 
least because the West made itself a useful idiot in this story of 
growth. In hindsight, admitting China as a full member of the World 
Trade Organisation in December 2001 was the single greatest blunder of 
western trade policy. The naivety or shortsightedness lay in granting 
membership to a major non-democratic state that was neither able nor 
willing to abide by the rules of free trade – while simultaneously 
blessing it with developing-nation status, thereby conferring all manner 
of exemptions and preferences. It was akin to giving the most ruthless 
bully in the playground special rights to beat up his playmates. It had 
little to do with fair competition. China was thus able to exploit the 
principle of free trade to further its rise to global economic 
prominence. In 2001, China accounted for just 3.9 per cent of global 
GDP. Twenty years later, that figure was 18.3 per cent. Over the same 
period, the US share fell from 31.4 per cent to 24.2 per cent, and that 
of the EU from 21.9 per cent to 17.8 per cent.

The outcome of this experiment was predictable: in the short term, it 
brought growth and prosperity to all parties; in the long term, it 
shifted the global balance of power, creating perilous dependencies in 
America and Europe. The most tragic example is the German automotive 
industry. For decades Germany’s industrial giants banked on cheap 
manufacturing and lucrative consumer markets in China. In doing so, they 
failed to grasp the difference between good business relations and 
strategic dependence. Friendly cooperation ended the moment China 
acquired the requisite know-how to launch a heavily subsidised assault 
on the German car industry, even as Chinese domestic markets were 
quietly closed off. A Chinese masterclass in expansive geopolitics 
carried out by capitalist means. Wandel durch Handel (‘change through 
trade’) – the naive hope of the 1990s – became distorted. Change 
occurred, but not towards greater freedom, rather towards greater 
unfreedom, to the detriment of the West.

This trajectory is now accelerated by the AI arms race between America 
and China. The US still holds the upper hand but China, through the 
surveillance of its population, enjoys vastly greater access to data, 
unencumbered as it is by regulatory or ethical constraints. Moreover, 
American platform operators report that China is actively fuelling 
AI-sceptical sentiment across western social media. Propaganda aimed at 
inducing anxiety and slowing down rivals is taking its toll. There are 
growing indications that America is becoming ever-more tech-sceptic and 
it is not impossible that the next presidential campaign will hinge 
partly on which party promises to better protect voters from AI. Beijing 
understands that whoever dominates artificial intelligence will dominate 
economically and politically. It seems only a matter of time before 
China leads in this area too.

While America has recognised this challenge and reacted with varying 
degrees of success, Europe continues to deny the bitter reality. Beneath 
the soothing bromides of the EU, the continent is gradually drifting 
towards becoming an amusement park for Asian tourists, offering high 
quality of life paired with diminishing productivity and value creation.

The global trend is clear. Democratic economies are becoming weaker, 
non-democratic ones stronger. In this significant shift, the 
implications for military power are routinely underestimated. China is 
still viewed by many as a militarily passive, purely economic power. 
That picture is false.

The Chinese military budget doubled from $145 billion in 2015 to $281 
billion in 2026 – fuelled by its economic growth. The ultimate test case 
will be Taiwan. Annexing this democratic, western-leaning island nation 
and integrating it into a monolithic communist republic is one of Xi 
Jinping’s central missions. China will strike as soon as the odds are 
high enough that America lacks the strength to intervene – perhaps 
because western resources have been depleted across the theatres of 
conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East. Should China achieve its 
objective without effective western resistance, the global order will be 
fundamentally altered.

Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine plays a remarkably helpful role in this 
strategy. Even if the war is far from a military success for Putin, he 
has achieved two vital objectives: dividing the West by driving the US 
and the EU further apart and exhausting American and European military 
stockpiles. Yet this war of aggression could have been the West’s finest 
hour. Putin underestimated Ukrainian resilience; had Nato members and 
the Ramstein Coalition seized the momentum of those early weeks to 
provide Ukraine with every conceivable resource to fight back, the 
domestic political pressure on Putin would have grown so immense that he 
could have been forced to order a swift retreat under flimsy propaganda 
pretences. Instead, the West remained half-hearted, allowed itself to be 
intimidated by flawed escalation scenarios and did too little. Putin – 
ever the student of western weakness – tested how far he could go, and 
went remarkably far. Now that Ukraine has proved to be the master of 
modern AI warfare, Putin is turning to a weaker target in the form of 
hybrid warfare against Germany and other EU nations which promise less 
resistance and greater prestige at home.

Putin finds ready allies in Iran and other Islamist-dominated regimes. 
Islamism hijacks religion for terrorist ends. The primary enemy of 
fanatical Islam is the world of those they deem godless – the 
Judeo-Christian West. Article 7 of the founding Hamas Charter of 1988 
explicitly states: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until 
Moslems fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. 
The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew 
behind me, come and kill him.’ The destruction of Israel and all Jews is 
merely the first step. The next is the weakening, infiltration and 
violent re-education of Europe, and ultimately America. The very same 
article of the charter notes: ‘Since Moslems who adopt the ways of the 
Islamic Resistance Movement are spread all over the world… the Movement 
is a universal one.’ Meeting the Islamist threat with a policy of 
appeasement is like feeding a crocodile in the hope that it eats you last.

It remains difficult to fathom that the genocidal attack on Israel by 
Hamas led not to a global wave of solidarity with Israel, but to a 
massive surge in anti-Semitism. The weakest justification is the claim 
that Israel’s retaliatory measures in Gaza after 7 October exceeded all 
bounds, or that its domestic and foreign policy are deeply questionable. 
Has the Israeli government made mistakes? Undoubtedly. Is that a reason 
to be anti-Semitic, transferring criticism of Israel onto all Jews? 
Absolutely not. Yet the trend persists. Anti-Semitism has become a 
pop-cultural zeitgeist, particularly among the young. Germany, of all 
nations, recorded 8,725 anti-Semitic incidents in 2025 – the highest 
figure among the seven countries examined by the 2026 Annual Report on 
Antisemitism, ahead of the US (6,274) and the UK (3,700). The trajectory 
is the key: from 2021 to 2025, incidents rose by 124 per cent in France, 
131 per cent in the US, and 215 per cent in Germany.

The primary cause of this development is a reckless, runaway migration 
policy. Islamist milieus – including strategically placed jihadists – 
have spent years undermining western societies and their foundational 
values. Pointing this out is not Islamophobic. True Islamophobia lies in 
failing to distinguish between those who wish to integrate peacefully 
into western societies and those who enter to abuse its systems and 
destroy its values. Under the guise of compassion and humanitarian 
relief, uncontrolled and frequently illegal immigration contributes not 
only to the West’s cultural self-abandonment, but fuels – by way of 
reaction – the rise of right- and left-wing populism and extremism.

Michel Houellebecq provided the dystopian vision for this in his 2015 
novel Submission. He describes a France where the Muslim Brotherhood has 
taken power: a frightened country where women wear progressively longer 
dresses and unsuccessful white men rejoice at enjoying multiple 
marriages with underage wives without interference and where news of 
Islamist terror attacks is eventually suppressed so as not to alarm the 
populace. The book depicts the exhaustion of western society. Reality 
appears to be mimicking fiction in the most gruesome fashion.

The woke movement has become the Trojan horse of this anti-westernism. 
It is the epitome of the anti-freedom triangle, seamlessly intertwining 
anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. It has brought 
about the inversion of western values with remarkable dexterity. Its 
stated goals bear the hallmark of good intentions: fighting racism, 
protecting sexual minorities, fighting climate change, questioning 
privilege and confronting colonial history. Its methods, however, are 
overwhelmingly authoritarian. Its self-loathing cultural relativism is 
toxic. The result is the inversion of almost every core value and 
objective of civilisation.

In the competition for victimhood status, the concepts of progress, 
competition, growth and prosperity have been eroded. In the West, being 
successful was once better than being unsuccessful. Wealth was better 
than poverty. Beauty was better than ugliness. Under woke ideology, all 
of this is reversed. It resembles a manual for western self-abolition, 
born out of the self-hatred of the privileged.

Even among America’s ‘Democratic Socialists’ – an offshoot of the woke 
movement – the strongest support does not come from the needy, the 
impoverished, or genuine victims. Its most passionate advocates are to 
be found among the daughters of the upper classes.

Is the West, rendered comfortable and tired, ultimately weakening itself 
out of a bad conscience? Will we realise what we stood to lose only once 
it is too late? Or is the crisis the West currently finds itself in the 
very stimulus required for its renewal? That would be the best-case 
scenario: that just in time we finally grasp what is at stake and 
realise that the alternatives are far worse. Why do we need to 
strengthen the West? Because otherwise, the tyrants win.


Mathias Döpfner