The Decline of the West: An American Story
Michael Kimmage
2012-2013 paper series
No. 4
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The Decline of the West: An American Story
Transatlantic Academy Paper Series
June 2013
Michael Kimmage1
Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Constituency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Cold War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
After the Cold War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Conclusion: A World with Less West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16
Michael Kimmage is an associate professor of history at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of two books,
The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Harvard, 2009) and In
History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (Stanford University Press, 2012).
1
Executive Summary
I
n order for the Western liberal order to have
a future, there must first of all be a West.
The survival of the West in its 20th-century
outlines cannot be taken for granted. Limited to
the status of the West within the United States,
this paper focuses on the shrinking of the West as
a community of values. It begins with the premise
that “the West” was never static in meaning but
has encompassed multiple definitions, some of
them mutually exclusive. Nor has the West as a
community of values ever had anything resembling
popular support in the United States: the
construction of this community was by definition
the project of highly educated elites. As such, the
West had its bi-partisan heyday from Truman to
Kennedy. After the Vietnam War, an affiliation
with the West acquired conservative connotations
in the United States, and Ronald Reagan gladly
rhapsodized about U.S. leadership of the West.
In the 1990s, the West was salient as a debating
point and less so as a point of orientation for U.S.
foreign policy. It was about the West that Francis
Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington had their
stimulating disagreement in the 1990s. Fukuyama
contended that the Western template was becoming
a global template, while Huntington argued that
the West is a discreet and embattled civilization.
Though Huntington’s theses were revisited after
September 11, 2001, by then there was only a small
constituency invested in the West. Left-leaning
opinion furthered a multiculturalism that could
have anti-Western undercurrents. Conservative
opinion, when George W. Bush was the leader
of it, upheld a democratic universalism on the
assumption that all cultures have a natural leaning
toward democracy. The Euro-U.S. relationship has
not markedly declined in the last 20 years, but it
is less and less to be understood as describing or
being described by the West. Reagan was the last
president to speak with warmth about a Euro-U.S.
West. The few European leaders who continue to
speak enthusiastically about the West in 2013 do
not necessarily have the European-U.S. relationship
in mind. Within the Obama administration, the
West is not an entity to be rejected or transcended.
It does not matter much. Obama and his generation
were not educated to believe in the West, and a
defense of the West is not obviously suited to the
foreign-policy exigencies of the 21st century. The
decline of the West has encouraged Obama in his
“pivot to Asia.”
The Decline of the West
1
1
Definitions
A
Only in exceptional
moments has
the West played
a noticeable role
in U.S. politics.
s a nation on the periphery of the traditional
West — the core nations of Western Europe
— Americans have tended to approach
the West less as indelible heritage than as a set
of abstractions. There are at least five relevant
aspects of Western culture, of the abstraction
called the West, within the United States. The first
is classical antiquity, a reservoir of learning, taste,
historical example, and political wisdom. Neoclassicism is the style of much public architecture
in the United States and has remained so long
after it fell from architectural vogue.1 Classical
references are crucial to the Federalist Papers and
to the thought of Thomas Jefferson, as they were
to the founding of the republic generally. From
the 17th to the 19th centuries, an education in the
classics, in the ancient texts and languages, was the
lifeblood of U.S. higher education. Institutions like
the American Academy in Rome, founded in 1893,
were meant to unite Americans with a classical
heritage that was presumably theirs to claim.
Secondly, the West has evoked Christendom for
many Americans. This West is contiguous with
the geography of Latin Christianity, the territories
of Catholic and Protestant Europe or with the
empires of Catholic and Protestant Europe (French,
British, and Spanish) that initiated the European
settlement of the United States. Thirdly, the West
can be the lands of the Enlightenment, with the U.S.
Enlightenment as a bridge to England, Scotland,
France, and Germany — some combination of
rights, learning, literacy, and progress, with the
ideal political order as un-theocratic.2 Relatedly,
the West can function as a metaphor for liberty
or for the love of liberty. The trope of Hellenic
liberties and Asiatic despotism has a pedigree as
old as Herodotus’s Histories. Americans — George
Kennan for one — have gladly incorporated it into
their national sensibility. After their revolution,
many Americans worked their republic into the
narrative of Western liberty, a beacon of NewWorld liberty within the West and no less a beacon
of liberty to the non-West. Finally, many Americans
have seen the West as their ancestral homeland, an
attachment that long determined U.S. immigration
policy, leading Americans to limit immigration
from the South and East of Europe in the 1920s
and to build a bias toward Western and Northern
Europe into their pre-1965 immigration policy.
These multiple aspects of the West cannot be
reduced to any singular essence. The West as
Christendom and the West as Enlightenment or
as Hellenism can be antithetical. Nor are these
five aspects — classical antiquity, Christendom,
the Enlightenment, a narrative of political liberty,
the motif of Europe as homeland — necessarily
tethered to the Euro-U.S. West in U.S. life and
letters. Each has an integrity indigenous to U.S.
history. Fluidity of definition has not made the
West’s U.S. career any less interesting, but it does
make the United States’ West difficult to pin down.
Its very value can lie in the haze of meaning around
this unstable word. Only in exceptional moments
has the West played a noticeable role in U.S.
politics. The longest such moment was the Cold
War.
On the classics in early the United States, see Caroline
Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome
in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002). On the Enlightenment as a
connecting link between the United States and Europe, see
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity: The British, French
and American Enlightenments (New York: Knopf, 2004).
2
A good example is the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington,
DC, flamboyantly neoclassical and utterly defiant of its
architectural era. It was built between 1990 and 1998.
1
2
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2
Constituency
T
he United States’ constituency for the
West has never been large. The West is the
province of elites, and two generalizations
follow from this statement of fact. One is the great
importance of schools and especially of universities
in producing citizens of the West. These are the
fundamental institutions of the West in U.S.
society. The other generalization is that debates
about the West elude domestic U.S. politics. The
academic commitment to the West has been long
and varied. From the beginning, there was a love
of classical antiquity in most U.S. universities. At
the best U.S. universities, it was hardly possible
to study U.S. history and culture until the 20th
century, so powerful was the association of
Europe, and of European antiquity, with higher
learning. At the same time, “the West” as such was
discovered only in the 20th century.3 Columbia
University was the first to offer courses in Western
civilization, starting around the time of World War
I. Columbia’s professors sought to educate soldiers
in the values for which they were fighting and also
to compensate for the elimination of Greek and
Latin language requirements. The West could be
encountered in translation, a boon to publically
educated children of immigrants who were just
then entering the Ivy League. Columbia was a
model across U.S. academia, inspiring great books
(great Western books) curricula at the University
of Chicago and elsewhere. The golden age of the
West in U.S. higher education coincided with the
first two decades of the Cold War, when it was
impossible to avoid discussions of the West, of
its past and of its perennially troubled future. In
these years, U.S. universities were mass producing
enthusiasts of Western culture. The United States
may no longer have been Europe’s student by mid-
century, but it was very much Europe’s partner.
Thousands of refugee scholars, fleeing to the
United States from Hitler’s Europe, refashioned
literature, history, philosophy, art history, and other
disciplines in the image of Central Europe. One of
them was Leo Strauss, whose students would do
much to enliven the connection among classical
antiquity, the West, and the United States.4
Though the infatuation with the West was
enduring, it did not last forever. When U.S.
universities became the cradle of the anti-war
movement in the late 1960s, the West was put
on trial. Was talk of the West a smokescreen for
Cold War Realpolitik? Was the United States’
zeal for the West a sign that the United States
had adopted the Western heritage of empire, the
United States as the Roman empire, or the British
empire redux? Was the West a contributing factor
in the racism that had festered for so long in U.S.
history, a coded term for all things white, for a
neo-classicism, and gentility reminiscent of the
antebellum South? Was the West of so many
college curricula an impediment to the realization
of the United States’ multicultural destiny? Over
time, these questions would be absorbed into
U.S. academia, issuing in the culture wars of the
1980s.5 The culture wars were decided, for the most
part, against the West, an educational affiliation
On Leo Strauss in the United States, see Anne Norton, Leo
Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004) and Steven Smith, Reading Leo Strauss:
Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006). An important point of reference for Americans
thinking about the West was Spengler’s famous book, first
published in the United States in the mid-1920s. See Oswald
Spengler, The Decline of the West, translated by Charles Francis
Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1926).
4
The book around which the culture wars crystallized was
Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher
Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of
Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Bloom
was a student of Leo Strauss and nothing if not a product of the
University of Chicago’s great books curriculum.
5
On this discovery, see Gilbert Allardyce, “The Rise and Fall
of the Western Civilization Course,” The American Historical
Review vol. 87 no. 3 (June 1982) and Daniel Segal, “’Western
Civ’ and the Staging of History in American Higher Education,”
The American Historical Review vol. 105 no. 3 (June 2000).
3
The Decline of the West
3
The golden age of
the West in U.S.
higher education
coincided with
the first two
decades of the
Cold War, when it
was impossible to
avoid discussions
of the West, of
its past and of
its perennially
troubled future.
If an American
is not collegeeducated, does
not have some
cultural tie to the
Northeast, or is
not particularly
interested in
foreign policy, he
or she will not be
confronted with
questions of the
United States
and the West.
deemed retrograde, repressive, and un-American
by the 1990s. Elements of the old educational
mission were confined to a few institutions or to
a few departments (classics) and to educational
institutions that were avowedly conservative or
religious. Since the 1980s, U.S. universities have not
been creating a constituency for the West. Rather,
they have been creating elite constituencies that are
at best skeptical about it, if they have any emotional
connection to the West at all.
Debates about the West have never figured in U.S.
presidential or congressional campaigns. In this, the
United States does not resemble Turkey or Russia.
Neither Turkey nor Russia is a core European
country. Like the United States, they stand on the
edge of the West, but unlike the United States,
they are riven by internal conflict over the West.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and
Russian President Vladimir Putin are sensitive to
these conflicts, both acutely aware of the valence
“Western” or “non-Western” or “anti-Western”
ideas can have in their respective countries. Both
have adopted Western models of development,
if these models can still be called Western in the
21st century, without locating their countries in
the West. Putin and Erdoğan refuse to bow down
to the West, to be subjected to Western notions of
human rights (Putin), to be cajoled into the West’s
support for Israel (Erdoğan), to see themselves as
somehow “behind” the West and obligated to catch
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up. Sensing this, critics in Russia and in Turkey
have often stylized themselves as the advocates of
a pro-Western Turkey or a pro-Western Russia.
No such dynamic can be observed in U.S. political
life. In domestic U.S. politics, the United States is
the measure of all things. Mention can be made of
foreign countries, European and otherwise, but no
other country or constellation of countries implies
an alternate model of political evolution. U.S. voters
have no West to idolize and none to demonize.
The ensuing indifference to the West, among most
Americans, keeps the West a concern of the highly
educated. It also limits the West to foreign affairs.
George Kennan worried ceaselessly about the West;
Senator Joseph McCarthy did not worry about
it at all.6 If an American is not college-educated,
does not have some cultural tie to the Northeast,
or is not particularly interested in foreign policy,
he or she will not be confronted with questions of
the United States and the West. This claim can be
further qualified. If one attended college after the
1960s, then one might be highly educated and still
uninterested in, or possibly hostile to, the West. The
constituency for the West was always small. In the
past 50 years, it has grown considerably smaller.
The longevity and intensity of Kennan’s relationship to things
Western can be traced in John Gaddis’s great biography, George
F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011).
6
3
The Cold War
B
efore the Cold War, the multiple definitions
of the West were resistant to synthesis.
After all, fascism was a movement
within the West, a Western impulse, however it
would come to be labeled after the war.7 Once
continental Europe was in fascist hands, it made
little sense for Americans to champion the West.
Accordingly, Churchill and Roosevelt accented
the friendship among English-speaking peoples,
signing an Atlantic Charter that planted the
seeds of NATO, though not in ways that could
have been anticipated at the time. In addition, an
indispensable wartime ally was the Soviet Union of
Joseph Stalin, “Genghis Kahn with a telephone,” as
he was sometimes referred to in Russia. The Soviet
Union had its own infatuation with the West, which
Stalin had subdued into socialism in one country.
Yet the Soviet Union was not regarded by most
British and Americans as a Western country or as a
Western power. A community of values including
the U.K., the United States, and the U.S.S.R. was a
cynical wartime joke. A marriage of convenience
was the best that could be managed — government
propaganda to the contrary. Christendom, the
Enlightenment, the Western narrative of liberty,
the fasces (a symbol from antiquity, from which
the word fascism was derived): the Second World
War placed enormous strain on each pillar of the
West. If a worthwhile West might resurface, there
was not much to show for it in the early 1940s, with
Western countries devouring one another for the
second time in recent memory. Later revelations
about the Holocaust withdrew many of the values
from the Western community. Candidly analyzed,
the Holocaust was a European, and not just a
German, crime. The West’s moral and physical
Heinrich August Winkler’s magisterial history of modern
Germany characterizes Nazism as Germany’s final deviation
from the democratic telos of Western history. See Germany, the
Long Road West, in two volumes, translated by Alexander Sager
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006-2007).
disarray in 1945, and for many years into the
postwar period, cannot be exaggerated.8
Whatever history illustrated, the Cold War
demanded a West to oppose the Soviet East.
The East-West binary of the Cold War had
geographic, strategic, and cultural dimensions.
The geography was straightforward, in Europe
at least. The Red Army drove to Berlin from the
East. Britain, Canada, and the United States battled
Nazi Germany from the West. This practical
circumstance would translate into Eastern and
Western spheres of influence, which eventually
became the Eastern Bloc, a network of Soviet
satellite states in Eastern Europe, and the NATO
alliance, formally a grouping of northern states but
in spirit a Western alliance. The East-West divide
cut through the center of Berlin, the maintenance of
West Berlin being a fulcrum U.S. Cold War strategy,
one part national interest and one part symbolism.
The Cold War would end, impressionistically and
in actual fact, when residents of East Berlin crossed
over to the West, when East no longer signified the
Soviet sector. In many ways, Cold War geography
was accidental, even arbitrary. Prague might lie to
the West of Vienna on Europe’s map, but Prague
was East and Vienna West, as no one ever doubted.
A complicating factor of Cold War geography was
its global scope. Of the Cold War’s hot conflicts,
two were in Asia — Korea and Vietnam — conflicts
that ran along a North-South rather than an
East-West axis. If Japan was “West” and China
“East,” this did not do much to clarify the spatial
alignment of power and ideology in Cold War Asia.
In the Cold War, the United States’ strategic
priority was the West. For all the hard liners’ talk
of roll-back, of mounting an invasion of Eastern
7
On the Holocaust as the key to 20th-century European history,
see Tony Judt’s Epilogue, “From the House of the Dead: An
Essay on Modern European Memory,” to Postwar: A History of
Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005).
8
The Decline of the West
5
Whatever history
illustrated,
the Cold War
demanded a
West to oppose
the Soviet East.
If Europeans
enjoyed U.S.
popular culture,
and if only they
could see the
glories of U.S. high
culture, they would
more comfortably
participate in a
U.S.-led security
alliance.
Europe, or of militarily aiding the Hungarian
uprising in 1956, U.S. policymakers accepted Soviet
domination of Eastern Europe. They were adamant,
however, about preventing Soviet encroachment in
Western Europe. The United States’ commitment
to this was military, the presence of U.S. troops,
the building of bases, the active cooperation with
Western European militaries. NATO formalized
these transatlantic ties, placing the Western
European nations under the U.S. nuclear umbrella.
The United States’ Western commitment was
as much political as it was military. In Italy, for
example, the CIA did what it could to inhibit the
Italian Communist Party from coming to power,
and the CIA devoted itself to fostering pro-U.S.
sentiment in Western Europe or, conversely, to
tarnishing the appeal of Soviet communism.
Finally, the United States’ commitment to Western
Europe was financial. Though offered to the East,
the Marshall Plan was implemented in the West.
Not only did Washington try to restart the engines
of capitalism in Western Europe after the war, U.S.
policymakers enmeshed the Western European
economy in the U.S. economy and the U.S.
economy in the Western European one. This would
bind Western Europe to the West, conceived in the
Cold War as the United States plus Western Europe.
A strong Euro-U.S. West would advance long-term
U.S. interests, and, distasteful as this construct
might have been to some European intellectuals,
it was mostly accepted, in ways that varied from
nation to nation, by Western Europe’s politicians.
The cultural Cold War was sharpest in the Cold
War’s first two decades, when the United States
and the Soviet Union were competing for Europe’s
allegiance. The United States’ efforts to win
Europe’s affection involved cultural diplomacy
and (less visibly) the CIA. The State Department
expended substantial resources on the promotion
of U.S. values within Europe, for example on the
building of America Houses in Germany. By doing
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so, it hoped to make a case for U.S. foreign policy.
If Europeans enjoyed U.S. popular culture, and if
only they could see the glories of U.S. high culture,
they would more comfortably participate in a U.S.led security alliance. Various programs brought
European artists and intellectuals to the United
States, initiatives that rested on a particular idea of
the West, a West endowed with political liberty, a
West that was culturally alive and a West that could
justly administer its affluence. Retrospectively,
the State Department’s efforts can be declared
a success. Washington’s idea of the West was
broadcast throughout Western Europe. If pockets
of anti-Americanism remained, they were hard to
organize into movements. The CIA aided the State
Department by funding conferences and magazines
that promoted an anti-communist West.9 Cause
for scandal in the late 1960s, the CIA was, like the
State Department, succeeding by its own criteria,
and official programs dovetailed with unofficial
realities. Intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic
labored independently to resuscitate the West after
World War II. Among them were Hannah Arendt,
Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Arthur Koeslter, George
Orwell, Friedrich Hayek, Czeslaw Milosz, Thomas
Mann, Karl Jaspers, and William F. Buckley, Jr.
They were acutely aware of similar striving — to
lend prestige and prominence to the East — among
communists everywhere and especially within the
Soviet sphere of influence.10
On this, see Frances Stonor Sanders, The Cultural Cold War:
The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New
Press, 2000).
9
On the cultural Cold War, see (among many titles) Reinhold
Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The
Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the
Second World War, translated by Diana Wolf (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1994); David Caute, The
Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during
the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003);
and Victoria de Grazia Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance
through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2005).
10
In the early Cold War, enthusiasm for the West was
broad. Within the United States, it could be felt
in both the Democratic and Republican parties,
in the strategies of Truman and Eisenhower alike.
Eisenhower may even have run for president in
1952 because he feared a resurgence of isolationism
among Republicans.11 Pro-Western intellectuals
could be found on the Left and on the Right. Such
widespread, almost uncontroversial support was
not destined to survive the 1960s. The Vietnam
War introduced several key ruptures. It detached
the United States from Western Europe, where
criticism of U.S. conduct grew intense during the
Vietnam War, and it fostered divisions within the
United States, especially among the educated — the
West’s only U.S. constituency. In Europe, Vietnamera criticism of the United States was loudest on
the radical Left, which flirted with Mao’s China,
with Castro’s Cuba, and with a revisionist approach
to Soviet communism. Anti-U.S. sentiment could
also be detected on the European Right and among
the politically moderate. All in all, Vietnam did
immeasurable damage to the United States’ moral
prestige in Western Europe.
This damage did not spur Europeans to leave
NATO, to forge alliances with great powers
other than the United States, or to contemplate a
foreign policy explicitly at odds with U.S. foreign
policy. Yet it did alter the attitudes of Western
Europeans. Criticism of the United States was most
powerful for Western Europe’s young people, for
the generation that had come of age after the war.
Culturally Americanized perhaps, these Europeans
would aspire to a West defined more by Europe
alone and less by the Euro-U.S. relationship. This
West was the European Union, and its coming of
age, its departure from U.S. foreign policy, occurred
shortly after September 11, 2001. The distancing,
On Eisenhower’s internationalism, see Colin Dueck, Hard
Line: The Republican Party and U.S. Foreign Policy since World
War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
11
which is still ongoing, does not mandate animosity
or the inability to cooperate with the United States,
only a strong sense that the United States’ way is
not necessarily Europe’s.12
Vietnam’s consequences were more profound in
the United States, where the war had intimate
connections to the West, as Americans understood
this term. During the war, many Americans lost
confidence in their country’s capacity to lead the
West. The justification for U.S. leadership had never
been purely strategic: its proper foundation was
moral and cultural. If the United States’ mistakes in
Vietnam were errors of judgment, if U.S. conduct
of the war was morally reprehensible, then what
right did the United States have to lead the nations
of Western Europe or to represent the values of the
West globally? How was the United States superior
to the Soviet East, such superiority having been the
easy assumption in the 1940s and 1950s? In Robert
McNamara’s biography, ones see the dramatic arc of
these questions: the hubris of the 1950s, the disaster
of Vietnam, a loss of faith in his own powers of
discernment and much doubt, later in life, about
the United States’ moral standing in the world.13
If McNamara’s path from confidence to doubt
was representative, the New Left and the anti-war
movement exceeded McNamara in their doubts
about U.S. virtue.
A recent meditation on the West, written by Jürgen Habermas
and Jacques Derrida, is addressed to the Iraq War but reads as
a summation of European skepticism about U.S. foreign policy
(and political economy) since the Vietnam War: The Divided
West, translated by Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2006). An excellent study of the 1960s generation and
September 11 is Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists: or, the
Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath (New York: Soft
Scull Press, 2005).
12
McNamara’s story is best told in the documentary film The
Fog of War, made by Errol Morris and released in 2003. Peter
Beinart analyzes a recurrent pattern of hubris-isolationismhubris in U.S. foreign policy in The Icarus Syndrome: A History
of American Hubris (New York: Harper, 2010).
13
The Decline of the West
7
All in all, Vietnam
did immeasurable
damage to the
United States’
moral prestige in
Western Europe.
The United States
was the West,
the New Left
concluded in the
1960s and 1970s,
and this was
the tragedy of a
republic betrayed.
During the Vietnam War, the United States showed
itself the proper leader of the West, the New Left
argued, in that the United States had shed its
republican identity and put on the cloak of Western
imperialism. The British and French empires had
once stretched into Asia and the Middle East.
After World War II and more viscerally after the
Suez crisis, the British and French were forced to
acknowledge the loss of empire. Into the vacuum
rushed the United States, itself an imperial power
since the late 19th century. In Vietnam, the United
States took up exactly where the French had left
off, and across the Middle East, the United States
was doing the work once done by the French and
the British. European powers muscled their way
into lucrative oil contracts in the Middle East, and
the United States was no different. Like a classic
imperial power, it extracted resources, made
security demands and exploited an ideology of
empire, confusingly intertwined in the U.S. case
with the word democracy. The United States was
the West, the New Left concluded in the 1960s
and 1970s, and this was the tragedy of a republic
betrayed.
The United States’ affiliation with the West did
not disappear with humiliation in Vietnam. It
attenuated into a conservative cause. The West was
a rallying cry for the gathering neoconservative
movement of the 1970s, its members among
the intellectual architects of the Cold War West.
The New Left rejected the moral legitimacy
of U.S. leadership, weaving U.S. history into a
larger fabric of Western aggression. Edward Said
published Orientalism in 1978, a decisive text
for those inclined to see the United States as an
evil empire. The neoconservatives passionately
disagreed. They saw the United States as morally
legitimate and believed fervently in the United
States’ anti-communist security commitments.
They continued to appreciate the cultural treasures
of the West over the cultural catastrophe of the
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Transatlantic Academy
Soviet East and over the antinomian furies of the
Western counterculture. (A frustration of the
neoconservatives was the unwillingness of most
Western European intellectuals post-Vietnam
to think and write about the West as they did.)
The neoconservatives asked the United States to
defend the West, because the West was in need of
defense and because its defense was a good idea.
They found their hero in Ronald Reagan, who
consistently referenced Western culture, Western
civilization, and Western freedoms, as did his
opposite number in London, Margaret Thatcher.
Reagan’s vocabulary of the West was in fact the
vocabulary of JFK.14 After Vietnam, however, it was
a vocabulary with a provocative context. Having
assimilated it from reading National Review and
Commentary, Reagan’s affection for the West felt
conservative to his audiences. William F. Buckley
Jr. and Norman Podhoretz delighted in it, while
others equated Reagan’s appeals to Western liberty
with imperialist appetite, a sign that he had learned
nothing from Vietnam.
Reagan’s legacy emboldened conservatives, who
viewed the revolutions of 1989 as Reagan’s victory
and simultaneously as evidence of Western
superiority. The Soviet East had collapsed under the
weight of its own incompetence. Once it collapsed,
imprisoned Easterners rushed over to the West,
not just those who waltzed over the Berlin Wall
when it “came down” in November 1989 but those
charged with the creation of a post-communist
political order in Eastern Europe. What was wanted
in Eastern Europe was democracy and capitalism,
the keystones of political Americanism. What
was wanted was membership in NATO. What was
wanted was membership in the West, the world’s
The Western connotations of JFK’s 1963 speech in Berlin
could not have been more pronounced: “Two thousand
years ago the proudest boast was ‘civis Romanus sum.’ Today,
in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is, “Ich bin
ein Berliner.” See http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/
oEX2uqSQGEGIdTYgd_JL_Q.aspx.
14
best and most exclusive club. How could these
self-evident wants not amount to a ratification of
the West’s legitimacy and a validation therefore of
U.S. leadership? In the view of U.S. conservatives,
Reagan won the Cold War for the West.
The problem, for such conservatives, was that their
worldview was not very widely shared. In Western
Europe, it was uncommon to see Reagan as the
Cold War victor. Gorbachev was often credited
with playing the more important role, or the EU
was the protagonist of the story. In addition, on the
Right and the Left in Europe, Reagan’s presidency
did not erase the darker chapters of Cold War
history. If anything, Reagan was thought to project
the recklessness that had drawn the United States
into Vietnam in the first place. The errors of the
past had not been corrected: they were still being
made. With no Soviet Union to hold the United
States in check, hubris might well shape the future
of hyperpuissance United States. In the United
States, Reagan would eventually gather around
him an aura of Cold War majesty, although his
was a divisive presidency. Reagan did not join the
divisions that had opened during the Vietnam War.
In many ways, Reagan made the wounds more
vivid and visible. The West had fragmented before
Reagan came to power, and it did not rally around
his memory in 1989.15
A splendid book on the Reagan era, organized around the
motif of fragmentation, is Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
15
The Decline of the West
9
4
After the Cold War
S
Non-Western or
semi-Western
powers that
provoked the
West fared poorly
in the 1990s.
uperficially, the 1990s witnessed the
ascendancy of the West, the United States
the pre-eminent power, Europe rigorously
de-Sovietizing itself and European integration
moving at magical speed. Together, Europe and
the United States occupied the wealthiest, most
dynamic corner of the global economy. The global
economy could seem a Euro-U.S. joint venture in
the 1990s, consistent with early modern history
when Europe’s empires were pioneering networks
of global commercial exchange — the rise of the
West par excellence. Non-Western or semi-Western
powers that provoked the West fared poorly in the
1990s. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq crossed the line of
Western tolerance and was turned back by a U.S.led invasion. Technological disparities between the
West and the non-West were glaring in this unusual
war. When it defied Western norms in Kosovo,
Serbia met with similar punishment, despite
the irony that, in their own eyes, the Serbs were
defending the West by expelling the Muslims from
Kosovo.
The foreign-policy thinker who most memorably
channeled the mood of Western ascendancy was
Francis Fukuyama. In a 1989 National Interest essay
and then in a 1992 book, Fukuyama announced
the end of history.16 The triumph of the Western
political and economic model was impeccable.
There was no viable counter-argument to the
arguments of and for the West: the Soviet counterargument had failed definitively, and Iran’s antiWestern revolution had no chance of sweeping the
globe and little chance of keeping a long-term hold
on Iran. Fukuyama concluded his book with the
image of pioneers moving westward across the U.S.
continent, a metaphor for the global scene in the
1990s. Just as pioneers had realized their nation’s
manifest destiny, the manifest destiny of Western Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National
Interest (Summer 1989); and Francis Fukuyama, The End of
History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
16
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Transatlantic Academy
style liberalism would be realized internationally
now that the Cold War had ended on the United
States’ terms. One need not believe in the West, as
so many intellectuals had after World War II, their
eyes trained on the rubble. Believe in it or not, the
forward march of the West was written in the stars.
Nevertheless, the Clinton era showed many cracks
in the West. One was sociological and a more
visible crack was grounded in political economy.
Clinton brought a new generation to Washington,
DC, and those entering into high office in the
1990s did not endorse Noam Chomsky’s or Edward
Said’s claims about Western rapacity. Clinton’s
peers celebrated U.S. power and deployed it when
they thought necessary, as in the Kosovo War. Yet
when U.S. power was unleashed and U.S. alliances
calculated, it was not with the West in mind. The
West was not a hallowed idea for Clinton and his
political generation. When they worried about
the West at all, they were likely to think of it as
behind the curve of contemporary concern. For
this reason, Clinton was self-consciously global in
his political vision, a continuity between his time in
office and the work he has been doing ever since.
It was George Kennan and John Foster Dulles
and Ronald Reagan, the ancient Cold Warriors,
who spoke ponderously about the West. Now was
another time. Clinton’s task was to address the
technological and economic revolutions uniting
the globe. The United States, its population
decreasingly European in the 1990s, was the locus
classicus of globalization, the font of global popular
culture, the site of global cities like New York and
Los Angeles, the home to global institutions like the
U.N., the World Bank, and the IMF, the protector
of human rights that were global in nature — not
Western liberties, delimited as these were by history
and tradition, but human rights in all their limitless
grandeur. Clinton spoke a new non-Western
political language.
The other crack in the West, the one rooted in
political economy, involved globalization as well.
It was the rise of the market, and in honoring the
market, Left and Right merged somewhat in the
1990s. Reagan had balanced libertarianism with
social conservatism, but without the Cold War,
libertarianism surged on the Right, flowing into a
new-found appreciation for markets on the Left,
the Third-Way thinking of Tony Blair, Gerhard
Schröder, and Bill Clinton. The hi-tech innovations
of the 1990s added luster to a market ethos. The
heart of international politics was economic
growth, and where growth was concerned, talk
of the West, of culture, of civilization — the kind
of talk that had characterized the early Cold
War — was either irrelevant or obtrusive. The
ideologues and the intellectuals were in retreat
in the 1990s, en route to their contemporary low
position in the public sphere (in the United States
and Europe). In their place came the economists
and the entrepreneurs, Larry Summers on the one
hand and Bill Gates on the other. The constituency
for the West was growing smaller and smaller.
After the 1980s, U.S. students were no longer
educated in Western culture, though they were
likely to be educated in the priorities and processes
of globalization. Globalization brought forth a
new set of challenges, and Clinton implied that
globalization’s problems could best be solved by
technical means. If Americans devoted themselves
energetically to technological change, to education
and to the opportunities of cross-border commerce
(NAFTA, for example) they might just meet the
demands of the future. If they failed to do these
things, they would fall behind — to Europe or to
the Asian tigers or even to China. China had turned
its back on Western-style political reform in the
spring of 1989, when the West was at its apparent
apex, and strangely enough China was prospering.
Here was a riddle not to be solved by Cold War
habits of thought.
The foreign policy thinker who most convincingly
expressed anxiety about the West in the 1990s was
Fukuyama’s former teacher, Samuel Huntington.
His 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations, based
on a 1993 Foreign Affairs essay, was a response
to Fukuyama’s The End of History.17 Fukuyama is
sometimes falsely read as a naive optimist. He was
an optimist about the West’s future, though beneath
the optimism was a persistent note of concern.
The full title of his book is The End of History and
the Last Man. Fukuyama imagined that, under
conditions of unrivaled triumph, the West might
lose its vigor, its capacity to argue with itself, the
life-giving tensions that had been there before
history’s improbable end.
Huntington arrayed multiple pessimisms against
Fukuyama. For one, Huntington did not see the
West as ascendant. It was one of many civilizations.
The Cold War’s vanishing had eased the threat of
ideological conflict: this much Huntington would
grant Fukuyama. But the relaxation of ideological
competition would only increase the global trend
toward civilizational competition, Huntington felt.
Globalization was an illusion or a delusion. The
world was not meeting at some harmonious point
of prosperity, technology, and communication
— not even at the annual gathering in Davos,
Switzerland. It was diverging into civilizational
patterns that pre-dated the Cold War, and it was
on the borders between these civilizations that
the new conflicts would explode. Huntington
did not believe that China, Russia, and a more
amorphous Islamic world would coalesce into a
blandly global civilization, however sophisticated
technology became or however much wealth the
global economy was able to generate. The nonWest had religious, historical, and cultural reasons
Samuel Huntington, The clash of Civilizations” Foreign Affairs
(1993) and Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations
and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1996).
17
The Decline of the West
11
After the 1980s,
U.S. students
were no longer
educated in
Western culture,
though they
were likely to be
educated in the
priorities and
processes of
globalization.
A Western-oriented
anti-terror alliance
was among Bush’s
options after
September 11.
for pursuing its own agendas. If history was any
indication, one or several of these civilizations
might rise up above the West, which was in decline
in the 1990s, not in its aggregate riches and power,
but in its will to defend itself, in its will to see
itself as a civilization worth defending or even
perpetuating. Academia’s abandonment of the
West was the canary in the mine for Huntington
the Harvard professor, an ill omen for future
civilizational conflicts.18
George W. Bush
George W. Bush revered Ronald Reagan and
wanted to be Reaganesque in his foreign policy.
Even so, Bush did not share Reagan’s commitment
to the West. Nor when Bush first arrived in the
White House, in the winter of 2001, was he being
asked by Americans or Europeans to lead the
West. Clinton’s technocratic globalism seemed
a reasonable foreign-policy recipe. It had led to
economic growth and to a greater sense of global
connectedness. Countries dedicated to other
scenarios, like Serbia, would have to face the West’s
preponderance of power. Bush’s campaign-trail
rhetoric about U.S. humility suggested a lowlevel isolationism, a step away from the liberal
internationalism that had informed the Kosovo
War. As many noted at the time, this rhetoric
was among the casualties of September 11. In the
aftermath of the attacks, Bush had several options.
One was to recall the Cold War when the West
was some combination of Christendom and the
Enlightenment. In 2001, the West was Europe and
the United States, with Europe somewhat larger
than it had been during the Cold War. This was the
precise geography — from Vienna to Andalusia
to Manhattan — that al Qaeda was targeting.
Subsequent bombings in Madrid and London
The prospect of a self-defeating West was one Huntington
explored in greater detail in Who Are We? The Challenge to
America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster,
2004).
18
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Transatlantic Academy
reinforced the connection between Europe and the
United States, the West of bin Laden’s invective.
The NATO alliance offered an excellent vehicle for
combatting terrorism, with the resources to menace
terrorist networks and the states that supported
them. In addition, Europe expressed sincere and
vocal concern for the United States immediately
after September 11. If the twin towers did not fall
on European soil, they cast a long shadow over
Europe, and the United States’ solidarity with
Europe could have been couched as a shared
commitment to Western values. A Westernoriented anti-terror alliance was among Bush’s
options after September 11.
It was not the option that he chose. Bush did make
one reference to Christendom after September 11,
mentioning a “crusade” five days after September
11, a figure of speech quickly retracted by the Bush
White House. The course that Bush chose conveyed
a cultural universalism at odds with Western
liberty. Time and again, in the months after
September 11, Bush emphasized the need to change
course. The United States’ overall policy toward
the Middle East, toward the Arab/Muslim world,
had been wrong. It had too rashly accommodated
the status quo. If it had been designed to satisfy
Cold War needs and to guarantee the cheap flow of
oil, it had also led to the September 11 attacks, in
Bush’s estimation. Too often the United States had
stood on the side of tyranny. Now was the time to
stand, as the United States knew it should, on the
side of democracy. What made this the right choice
philosophically was nothing less than human
nature. All people everywhere wanted to live in
a democracy. The Iraqis had nothing intractable
in their religion, their culture, or their history to
thwart their innate hunger for liberty. In an irony
of the Iraq War, its critics often saw the war as
Western imperialism — U.S. viceroys running Iraq,
the British back in Basra — while in its own eyes
the Bush administration was transcending the very
notion of the West. It was activating the Iraqis’ love
of liberty in order to activate the love of liberty
across the Middle East. There was wishful thinking
and hypocrisy beneath Bush’s universalist rhetoric,
and the man’s real motivations are not easy to
fathom, but his rhetoric was not window dressing.
It was one of the catalysts for the war.19
Bush’s decision to invade Iraq angered many of the
United States’ traditional Western allies. Support
for the United States’ war was deepest in Eastern
Europe, because the nations of Eastern Europe
cherished the United States as a counterweight
to Russia and because the liberation of Iraq
might replicate the liberation of Eastern Europe,
accomplished in the opinion of many Eastern
Europeans by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan. Poland’s unembarrassed endorsement
of George W. Bush prompted Jacques Chirac to
declare the Poles “badly brought up.” Whatever
these words said about Poland, they said a great
deal about France and by extension about Germany.
Political maturity demanded opposition to Bush.
On this point Western European elites and mass
opinion agreed.
Germany’s Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer,
confessed to Donald Rumsfeld, at the Munich
security conference in February 2003, that he was
unconvinced by Rumsfeld’s case for invading Iraq.
Fischer was articulating a mainstream European
skepticism. Behind Fischer’s measured words, an
escalation of anti-U.S. sentiment was audible in
Europe, starting in 2003 and dissipating to some
degree after 2008. An escalation of anti-European
sentiment was audible in the United States in 2003,
most vehemently on the Right, in the pages of the
New York Post and the monologues of talk-radio
hosts. Cold War alliances did not remain dominant
One of the most cogent studies of George W. Bush’s foreign
policy remains James Mann’s Rise of the Vulcans: The History of
Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004).
19
in public memory. Oddly, World War II memories
seemed closer at hand: the French penchant for
surrender, the Germany sympathy for dictatorship,
a pan-European kinship for appeasement. On
neither side of the Atlantic was there a workable
notion of the West to smooth the tensions, making
it easier to press the nationalist buttons or to
present Americans as the residents of one planet
(Mars) and the Europeans of another (Venus)
in the wake of this terrible event.20 Euro-U.S.
disagreements over Iraq have since slipped into the
past, possibly more latent than terminated.
There is one other way in which the West weakened
under George W. Bush. In the final months of
Bush’s presidency, a financial crisis emanated out
from the United States. Its effects were serious in
Asia, Latin America, and Russia, but they were
most acute in Europe. The United States’ public
indebtedness soared in 2008 and 2009. With the
overall contraction of credit, the EU appeared less
the wave of the future — its self-conception in the
1990s — and more a confused assembly of nation
states without the political will to resolve their
shared economic problems. Behind the economic
crisis lies the fact of demographic decline in both
the EU member states and to a lesser extent in the
United States. The West is no longer ascendant and
may be in decline, a decline that can be measured
against the data from the BRIC states (Brazil,
Russia, China, and India), each with its complicated
See Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe
in the New World Order (New York: Knopf, 2003). Kagan first
explored his ideas in a June 2002 essay for Policy Review. The
first sentence of this essay encapsulates the growing space
between Europe and the United States: “It is time to stop
pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common
view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world.”
See http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/
article/7107
20
The Decline of the West
13
Political maturity
demanded
opposition to
Bush. On this
point Western
European elites
and mass
opinion agreed.
It was one thing
for the West
to promote its
preferred method
of globalism
in the 1990s.
It is entirely
another for an
unchosen pattern
of globalization
to be imposed
upon the West.
relation to the West.21 Of these Brazil, China, and
India are experiencing simultaneous economic
and demographic growth. The indebtedness of the
United States to China recalls the indebtedness of
the Soviet Union to the United States in the 1980s.
In international relations, power can be inseparable
from the perception of power: the economic crisis
in the United States and the EU, with growth
slowing, stagnating, or in free fall, abruptly revised
the perception of Western power, while China is
perceived to be more and more powerful by the
year. The West of 2000 is not the West of 2008 or
of 2013. It was one thing for the West to promote
its preferred method of globalism in the 1990s.
It is entirely another for an unchosen pattern of
globalization to be imposed upon the West.
Barack Obama
Two developments have intersected in the Obama
presidency. One is Washington’s need to manage
the rise of multiple non-Western nations, which is
a fundamental shift in the global arrangement of
power. The other is the presence in Washington of a
political elite unconcerned with the West. What was
old-fashioned to the Clintonites is immaterial to the
Obamians. These two developments have distanced
the United States from the foreign-policy positions
elaborated in the Cold War. The decline of the
West is a global prospect, one of several possible
outcomes. Within the West, it is a willed reality.
Obama does not intone U.S. or Western decline.
He was at first greatly popular in Western Europe,
though his European popularity has shown itself
to be thin. If Obama is not anti-British, as is
sometimes alleged on the Right, neither does he
participate in the cult of Churchill that preoccupied
The National Intelligence Council report, “Global Trends 2030:
Alternative Worlds,” is dedicated to the rise of the BRIC states
and the decline of the West. See http://www.dni.gov/index.
php/about/organization/national-intelligence-council-globaltrends.
21
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Transatlantic Academy
the White House of George W. Bush.22 Obama has
simply not put Europe at the center of his foreign
policy. His “pivot to Asia” does not characterize U.S.
sentiments, which remain basically pro-European,
but it does indicate that Asia is the major area of
concern, the focus of attention, the new cockpit
of history. Europe happens to find itself, for the
first time in centuries, in a more provincial place.
The Atlantic is ceding its stature to the Pacific,
just as the Mediterranean ceded its stature at
the beginning of the modern era to the Atlantic.
Obama’s foreign policy is Huntingtonian: there is
too much counterevidence to sign on to Fukuyama’s
claim that the non-Western world is marching, and
will march, to a Western drummer. It therefore
makes sense to lead from behind in Libya, to let the
Arab Spring find its own trajectory, to stay out of
the Syrian civil war, and to treat China and Russia
as esteemed partners rather than as semi-rogue
states that need to be made more democratic, more
respectful of human rights, or, put differently, to
be made more Western. A turn to nation building
at home follows from the same logic. What right
does a country hemmed in by its by its own
fiscal irresponsibility have to engage in nation
building abroad? The wintry sobriety of Obama’s
first inaugural address — taken at the time as a
commentary on domestic politics — foreshadowed
the modest, moderate, and cautious foreign policy
of the Obama administration. The United States
can succeed by avoiding missteps like the Iraq War.
Beyond this, the United States cannot will much
into being beyond U.S. borders.
Within U.S. borders, the decline of the West is
almost complete, having traced cultural patterns
that go back to Columbia University and its first
On the transition from Bush to Obama, including the
Churchill bust placed by Bush in the Oval Office and then
removed by Obama, see James Mann, The Obamians: The
Struggle inside the White House to Redefine American Power
(New York: Viking), 2012.
22
forays into Western civilization. Political elites
are born in universities. The political elite that
stewarded the United States through the Cold War
was studying in the teens and in the 1920s, when
the West was the beau ideal of U.S. intellectual life.
The political elite to which Obama and his closest
advisers belong was in college in the 1980s, when
the West was being banished from the humanities.23
The spirit of this elite is multicultural, and its
political moment requires knowledge of the world
beyond the United States and Europe. Advocacy of
human rights has its origins in the Enlightenment,
but its appeal is its universalism, and the
contemporary Euro-U.S. elite is far more enamored
of human rights than it is of the West. The business
elite has much to gain from globalization and not
much to gain from a romantic attachment to the
West. The world’s greatest markets are as likely to
be in Asia or Latin America as in Europe or the
United States, and the business elite has a vested
interest in the education of undergraduates in its
priorities. For different reasons, academia’s business
schools and its humanities departments envision
global citizens in their U.S. students and not the
future communicants of Western culture. Without
the backing of the elite, or of an elite, the West
will fade from view. What remnants of a Western
sensibility still reside in the U.S. elite are not much
more than remnants. In ten or twenty years they
will probably be gone.
Current Constituencies
The West does still have a few U.S. constituencies.
One is among conservative intellectuals who feel
themselves organically a part of the West, who
savor the European past, and who find in the West
a necessary alliance and a community of values.
A rhetoric of Western civilization remains on
the books in the United States’ religious schools
and universities and in a number of conservative
educational ventures. A qualifying point, though,
is the anti-European populism on the Right, which
was cultivated by the administration of George
W. Bush, in the talk-radio emotions of the Iraq
War, and most recently by Mitt Romney, whose
campaign references to Europe were uniformly
negative — warnings that if Obama were reelected
the United States would go the way of Greece or
Spain. A politically diffuse constituency for the
West resides in the think tanks of Washington, DC,
which regularly take on questions about the West.
In this world, many intellectuals have an Atlanticist
bent, many were active during the Cold War, many
travel frequently between Europe and the United
States. They are the cosmopolitan cadres on which
the United States’ tie to the West has typically
depended. Of those concerned with security
questions, many are also interested in NATO and
in the particulars of the geopolitical relationship
between the United States and the EU member
states. Washington, DC’s privately funded think
tanks are insulated from trends in the academic
world. That the West has been eviscerated in U.S.
academia does not necessarily mean anything to
the debates, discussions, and research sponsored by
the think tanks, many of which, like the German
Marshall Fund, have long and extensive links to
Europe. The think-tank landscape of Washington,
DC would feel less Western in tone if more of
its funding came from Asia, the Middle East, or
Russia.
On Obama’s own university education, see “The Education
of Barack Obama” in James Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama:
Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2011).
23
The Decline of the West
15
What remnants
of a Western
sensibility still
reside in the
U.S. elite are
not much more
than remnants.
In ten or twenty
years they will
probably be gone.
5
Conclusion: A World with Less West
A
Current U.S. and
European foreign
policy is shapeless
or rudderless
because the
narrative of
Western liberty
has been removed
from it and no
comparable
narrative found
to take its place.
world with less West offers several
advantages. Ideals of the West have
historically harbored both chauvinism and
determinism. One believed in the West because
it was good and perhaps because it was better
than the rest. During the Cold War, the United
States could not lead the West without taking
upon itself the history of European imperialism.
Each Cold War president wrestled with the
dilemma of a republic not wishing to be an empire,
while accepting greater and greater overseas
responsibility, and none was able to resolve it.
Political proximity to Britain and France did not
help the United States to persuade non-Europeans
that it was anti-imperial in intent. Diminishing
or abandoning the West allows the United
States to free itself from this historical tangle.
Demographically, the United States is less European
in the 21st century than it was in the 20th. It is also
a Pacific as well as an Atlantic power. In sum, the
United States is well positioned to form alliances
and to seek out areas of constructive engagement
in Asia. It would be less well positioned if it
were to insist noisily on its Western identity.
The determinism of the Western ideal suggested
that the West — Europe — was the place where
history happened. This is what Hegel meant
when he declared that Africa has no history. Such
determinism may always have been a delusion.
In 2013, it is a self-evident delusion. No credible
foreign policy thinker or policymaker today could
focus exclusively on the Euro-U.S. West. There is
formidable insight to be gained from expertise in
the dynamism of the non-Western world.
A world with less West offers problems as well,
problems made worse by the utopian glow around
globalization and social media. One problem
is that culture, civilization, and tradition, the
tangible specificities of the “we” and the “our,”
will not be given their due. The brave new world
has rendered them obsolete. Contemporary
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Transatlantic Academy
utopias vacillate between the empowered “I,”
the individual given voice and agency by the
internet, and a global conversation so vibrant, so
near-at-hand, so enticing that no state or regime,
however authoritarian, can keep it at bay. The
narrative of Western liberty runs, alas, in the other
direction. It is liberty tied down by history: the
laboratory of ancient history in which the authors
of the Federalist Papers did their research; the
political history of 17th-century England and of
the constraints placed on the English monarch in
this century of rampant fanaticism; the twinned
occurrence of the French and U.S. revolutions, with
their rival programs for the democratic future; the
battle for a color-blind democracy in the United
States from the 19th to the 20th century; the life-anddeath battle against fascism and communism in
20th-century Europe; and all of this history haunted
by the history of empire, by the West’s practice of
dominion over non-Western peoples. The Western
narrative of liberty, checkered as it was, lent
coherence to modern history. It helped to mobilize
people, whether it was Truman trying to mobilize
a war-weary population in the late 1940s or
Solidarity trying to mobilize the Polish population
against the Soviet occupation. It made democracy
promotion a matter of the past, and not just of the
present and the future. Current U.S. and European
foreign policy is shapeless or rudderless because
the narrative of Western liberty has been removed
from it and no comparable narrative found to take
its place.
The rise of the non-West, poised to be the narrative
of the 21st century, may well revive interest in the
Euro-U.S. West. A concept as abstract as the West
demands threats to make it palpable. These threats
may come from within, as was the case with fascism
and communism, but their impact is greatest when
they come from the outside. Islamist terrorism was
one such threat, but it has proved too eccentric,
too episodic, and ultimately too ineffective to
restore anything on par with the West of the 1940s
and 1950s, when it was made large by the nuclear
threat lodged in the Soviet East. Of all the possible
candidates, China is the most likely country to
resemble the Soviet Union of the early Cold War,
though China, the United States, and the EU have
no motivation to erect iron curtains or Berlin walls,
and there is no territorial problem set comparable
to postwar Europe to induce mutual paranoia and
mistrust.
Twentieth-century history conjures one final
difference between past and present. When the
Cold War began, the United States’ educated
elites had been happily reading themselves into
the West for decades. For the past 30 years, the
United States’ educated elites have been happily
reading themselves out of the West. A constituency
for the West cannot be created by threats alone.
These constituencies are created by institutions, by
texts, and by bonds of imagination and emotion.
The decline of the West is a U.S. story to the
degree that the United States no longer has proWestern educational institutions. Either the West
is now Europe, or it is an idea that has outlived its
historical purpose.
The Decline of the West
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