Accept the White Man’s burden And your reward will always be the same: The curse of those you pity. The hatred of those you help. The complaint of those you lead (sadly slowly) to the light…
Rudyard Kipling
The White Man’s Burden has entered its final phase: The West began to decline at the very moment of its total triumph after 1945, when victorious liberal capitalism dissolved Tradition and transformed a once metaphysical civilization into a prosperous spatial distribution and spiritual desert. As the Atlantic elites invoke unity to maintain a declining order, the unipolar era is finally revealed as a brief, rather fruitless parenthesis, and Multipolarity emerges as the return of History, rather than its much-advertised “end”!
The applause at the recent Munich Security Conference came very quickly, almost reflexively. The officials rose from their seats with the automatic coordination of people long accustomed to signaling unity before reflection. When US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke of destiny, culture and the … “enduring bond” between Europe and the United States, the room responded with an applause that seemed prepared by decades of Atlantic habit. The language itself conveyed the glow of past centuries: shared heritage, moral responsibility and historic leadership. It was less a speech and more a reaffirmation of a dogma, the belief that the West remains the sure natural steward of the world order. Such confidence was once based on overwhelming power. Today it increasingly rests on a waning, porous legacy.
For generations, the Atlantic world has described its expansion as a moral duty. The British Empire, and then the US as its successor, appeared in the name of human progress. Conquest was introduced as development. Hierarchy was disguised as tutelage. Leadership was transformed into Authority. The narrative became so deeply embedded that it shaped the Western conception of the West itself: a power supposedly exercised in the service of humanity. Yet the records tell a starker story. The same civilization that proclaimed freedom created vast systems of slavery, transporting millions of people across oceans and calculating human lives measured solely by their economic utility. Entire regions were reorganized to serve distant markets. Western wealth rose on foundations that few modern lectures care to examine closely.
The Italian communist historian and philosopher Domenico Losurdo (1941–2018) once described the early United States as the first true “racial state,” a phrase intended more to provoke thought than anger. Whatever one may think of his phrase, the historical tension it identifies remains hard to ignore. Racial segregation continued into the second half of the twentieth century, and it was not until 1965 that the legal structure of equal citizenship finally took on a recognizable form. Even now, the social afterlife of those centuries persists. America holds some two million prisoners, and the demographic composition of that population continues to reflect a variety of unresolved chapters of its past as well as silenced physical realities.
However, in contemporary American political rhetoric, a different concern has prevailed. President Trump and the movement that has gathered around him often speak of a civilization under threat, a country whose white founders fear cultural eclipse. In the summer of 2025, Trump criticized various national museums for “focusing too much on the brutality of slavery,” suggesting that such depictions reduce American history to a list of wrongdoings. The comment revealed more than a dispute over historical interpretation: It revealed a deeper struggle for narrative dominance, a “Gramscian-like” concern for the formation of cognitive context. Nations, like individuals, seek coherence and consistency in their biographies.
In this context, the cheers at the recent “Security Conference” in Munich take on added meaning. The American Secretary reminded his audience of five centuries of shared Western expansion – white, Christian and, in his narrative, fundamentally constructive – interrupted only by the barren fascist spasms of the mid-twentieth century. After 1945, he argued, “godless communist revolutions,” anti-colonial uprisings, and the global spread of revolutionary symbols pushed the West on a path of decline, culminating in today’s migratory pressures. Europe and America therefore face a common task: the preservation of civilization itself, with the United States ready to act alone should its partners falter.
However, this diagnosis confuses the visible shocks of the partners with a deeper transformation. The decisive rupture occurred within the West at the height of its triumph, when liberal capitalism emerged from the war “unrivaled” and began, almost imperceptibly, to erode the inherited structures that had supported for centuries the Faustian spirit, the admirable and brazen successor to the Apollonian spirit.
In securing its total victory, liberal capitalism dissolved many of the textures that had once given Western life its vertical intensity. Faith waned, tradition fell into the dogma of perpetual development, and continuity between generations gave way to a frivolous “culture” organized around mobility and consumption. Society learned to measure itself by prosperity rather than permanence. What had been a culture shaped by ancestral connection, hierarchy, and destiny gradually hardened into a technical-accounting order dedicated to efficiency and convenience. The postwar West became richer than any civilization before it, while at the same time becoming spiritually lighter, its abundance masking a growing inner fatigue.
Seen through the scrutinizing prism of Oswald Spegler, the present moment reflects morphology, not accident. Civilizations rarely decline through conquest. They enter their winter after achieving full external form, when creative power succumbs to administration and triumphs ripen into decline. The modern West, technically unsurpassed and organizationally supreme, increasingly resembles the late imperial state: powerful, orderly, and yet internally diluted, like a landscape perfected for habitation after the animating spirit has receded.
From an advantageous multipolar position, the greatest danger never came from without. It arose when a civilization that once tended toward infinity chose instead the security of comfort. History is now redistributing its cosmogenic energies to those societies that still experience themselves as bearers of destiny, while the West, having fully reposed in the illusion of its supposed imperial integration, is slowly forgetting how it should be the world leader.
Rubio’s message combined complacency with a warning: US-European unity was presented as a legacy and a necessity. What made the… theatrical moment truly impressive was the servile willingness with which leading European “personalities” embraced it. The Foreign Minister and the leadership of the German Ministry of Defense were the first and warmest to applaud. Others followed. The viewer could sense the deep relief in the room, relief that the Atlantic structure still had a voice strong enough to invoke the old vocabulary of cohesion.
A year earlier, the American rhetoric at the same conference, at the previous Conference, had sounded more… subversive. National sovereignty, national revival, and ideological liberation had dominated the scene. European elites, many of whom were committed to global administrative frameworks, listened anxiously then. Now the tone favored restoration. The alliance would be renewed, the familiar structure based on multifaceted “give-and-take” would be maintained. Restoring the old stability is often the preferred strategy of systems that feel time accelerating around them. Restoration regardless of the cost, material or moral.
While Munich echoed with calls for a substantial NATO revival, another gathering unfolded much further south. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, representatives of the African Union considered the implications of officially characterizing colonialism as a crime against humanity. Ghana took on the task of promoting a resolution to that effect at the United Nations. Its president spoke with great moral clarity about the enslavement of millions of Africans during the nineteenth century, calling colonialism “the greatest injustice of modern history.” His words carried neither theatrical fury nor diplomatic gentleness. They simply reflected a continent that feels increasingly ready to formulate its own historical records.
The confrontation was almost symbolic. In one hemisphere, officials invoked a shared past as a basis for renewed leadership. In another, leaders examined the same past as a basis for legal confrontation. Two debates continued simultaneously, rarely intersecting.
This divergence marks more than a disagreement about a bygone era. It signals the maturation of a parallel historical consciousness. For centuries, world history has largely followed a Western script, immature and imperfect but certainly Western and timid about taking responsibility. Even resistance movements have often adopted the language of their opponents. But today nations speak with increasing interpretive autonomy. They reexamine conditions, borders, and economic structures through perspectives shaped by their own experience rather than by inherited frameworks. Multipolarity begins precisely at this point: When history ceases to be a narrative from a single point of view.
Western policymakers often assumed that globalization would bring about intellectual convergence. Markets would harmonize expectations, growth would standardize institutions, prosperity would align political values. Big mistake! Instead, economic growth has financed national independence. States once categorized as regional now cultivate diversified partnerships, build regional organizations, and reduce participation in ideological campaigns whose benefits seem unevenly distributed. The emerging order looks neither like chaos nor fragmentation. It looks simply like multiplicity.
This multiplicity complicates strategy because it replaces directives with negotiations. It requires recognizing that cultures have distinct trajectories, rather than occupying successive rungs on a global scale. From this perspective, the increasingly dramatic Western language of existential threat deserves careful interpretation. Civilizations confident in their own vitality rarely describe competition as imminent apocalypse. When rivalry itself becomes evidence of danger, the deeper concern is often the erosion of unchallenged authority.
The twentieth century ended with the Atlantic world in primacy. The twenty-first century ushers in relativity. Even the rhetoric of cultural survival reflects this adjustment. Discussions of demographics, migration, and social cohesion now permeate Western discourse. They reveal a growing awareness that the brief unipolar period after the Cold War may have been an exception rather than a destination. Alternatives that were expected to dissolve have instead become entrenched. Russia is asserting strategic independence despite ongoing pressures. China is building financial and technological institutions parallel to those once monopolized by Western capitals. India is successfully practicing a deliberate balance between competing poles. Across Africa, governments are negotiating with a widening circle of partners. The cartography of power is becoming more complex every year.
Faced with this transformation, the Atlantic alliance faces a decision that is rarely expressed clearly. It can interpret the diffusion of power as a disaster and try to preserve the previous configuration of dominance. Or it can recognize that distributed power does not necessarily imply disorder, but only the end of monopoly. For now, the instinct of preservation prevails. Military readiness is increasing. Economies are adapting to prolonged competition. Political narratives are sharpening, transforming into binary moral schemas.
However, declarations of “unity” too often illuminate the underlying tension. Differences in economic capacity, public opinion, and strategic tolerance are quietly testing the supposedly unshakable cohesion so “confidently” celebrated from the podiums of conferences. Power (which must in any case repeatedly assert itself) already converses with uncertainty.
At its core, the issue is philosophical. Liberal universalism has long assumed that its historical experience possessed absolute normative force for humanity as a whole. Modernization meant approaching the “Atlantic model.” Progress meant internalizing its institutional makeup. Multipolarity proposes a different premise: Civilizations are creators, not apprentice servants of the United States. Each brings with it priorities and metaphysical assumptions that resist standardization. Such a world would remain competitive (history offers no final harmony) but it would also be more symmetrical. Power would “circulate” rather than radiate from a single center, often incapable of institutionalizing and consolidating.
