Donald Trump and the End of the 'West'

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/world/2025-09-08-donald-trump-end-of-the-west/



In his meeting one week ago with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian President Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping called on them to integrate their economies with his and thereby form “an orderly multipolar world.” My initial reaction, as he was chiefly urging them to join him in creating an anti-American (or at least, non-American-centered) bloc, was that he really meant “a bipolar world.” Then I wondered if he’d avoided that word because in Chinese (which, alas, I do not speak), as in English, it might also mean manic-depressive (which at times is a fairly accurate description of international relations, too).

During the Cold War, of course, the world was indeed bipolar, sundered into two rival power blocs, the American-centered “West” and the Soviet-centered “East.” But within roughly a decade after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, the administration of George W. Bush began characterizing diverse hostile regimes as an “axis of evil,” and persuaded a number of traditional Western U.S. allies—chiefly, Tony Blair’s Britain—to join us in our Iraqi War, which, while not officially blessed by NATO, won levels of cooperation from a number of NATO members. And in the past 15 years, as both China and Russia transformed themselves into decidedly more authoritarian regimes, the dichotomy of West vs. East began bubbling up again. With last week’s gathering of presidents in Beijing, it has seemed to some commentators that we’re now officially bipolar again.

But if Xi really did mean “multipolar” rather than “bi,” I think he was on to something. To be sure, in the context of international and U.S.-China relations, “multi” sounds less aggressive than “bi,” which may have been reason enough for his word choice. But “multi” also seems more the mot juste to me than “bi,” not because it’s more diplomatic, or less confusable with “manic-depressive.” Rather, it’s a better description because it takes two to be bipolar, and I don’t think the West comprises a coherent bloc anymore. For all the imperfections and deviations that were part and parcel of the Cold War West, the West was bound together and adhered loosely to the fundamentals of capitalism and democracy, just as the East was rooted, albeit with its own imperfections and deviations, in communism and authoritarianism.

Today, Xi’s hoped-for alliance of China, Russia, and India has less coherence than the East of yore, even if all three suppress Muslim minorities within their borders. Modi’s regime, despite its increasing repression of India’s huge Muslim population, hasn’t adopted anything like the full-throated authoritarianism of the other two mega-nations, and has more of democratic heritage standing in the way of that transition than either Russia or China had.

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