Even Francis Fukuyama now accepts that his End of History thesis was incorrect, and that Sam Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations model is much more descriptive of the real world. But this clash is not, as this article states, a coming clash, it is an ongoing one.
It is often argued, mainly by those in the West, that the current geopolitical rivalries can’t be compared to the Cold War, because there is no clash of ideologies. Communism has been vanquished and capitalist triumph is eternal.
Their view is one of the ‘end of history’, as proclaimed by the scholar Francis Fukuyama. The problem is, Fukuyama proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy more than three decades ago. It’s fair to say the world has moved on a little bit since then.It is hard to deny that ideological competition is now making a comeback. And it looks as though in the coming decades the clash of ideologies will only become more intense. All three contemporary great powers – the United States, China, and Russia – are competing for more than material power. Representing distinct ideological faiths, they are also in competition for human souls. There is also a fourth competing ideology – radical Islamism – but it is now disembodied and lacks a ‘carrier state’ after the defeat of its most vociferous advocates.
The US now champions a liberal-progressivist ideology, which, in its most extreme version, is known as wokeness. In wokeness, the two main ideological strands of the modern West that have their origins in the European Enlightenment – liberalism and communism – finally reunite after a bitter internecine feud. When the opponents of wokeness compare it to radical Bolshevism, it is not without reason. In its fight against structural oppression, wokeness is ultimately about destroying social hierarchies for the sake of justice – and at the expense of order.
Taken to its extremes, this new Western ideological struggle for equity and equality leads to universal homogenization, inevitably destroying the diversity of social and even physical identities. In a novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, one of the characters, a fiery Bolshevik, was dreaming about a post-revolutionary world in which the borders come crashing down and people intermarry so there are no dominant and oppressed groups any more: “everyone’s appearance will be pleasantly brown – and everyone will be the same.” This Russian Bolshevik from the 1920s could join the woke squads in Seattle or Bristol in the 2020s.
China and Russia are often lumped together as ‘fellow autocracies’. But, in fact, Beijing and Moscow stand for very different ideological models. China’s is a synthesis of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism blended with traditional Chinese ways, such as Confucianism and legalism, all boosted by advanced digital technology. The West increasingly fears China not only due to the growth in Beijing’s economic and military power, but also because modern China’s hugely successful record of development seems to validate the CCP’s ideology….
Putin’s Russia has its ideals mainly in the past. That’s a major reason why the ideology of modern Russia appeals to many right-wing conservatives in Europe and North America who see Russia as the last major state that adheres to the values of what used to be European Christian civilization. Putin’s Russia has another advantage. Among the competing ideologies, it is the most appealing aesthetically. This may be because for Putin’s state, order is prioritised over justice.
This is a useful, and generally accurate summary of the current state of the civilizational clash. But what it leaves out is the religious and ethnic angles which actually delineate the lines of grand strategic conflict. Although it is now based in the US, the Western power is neither American nor liberal-progressive; it is not even Western, but actually a satanic shadow power in which the dominant ethnicity is Jewish and the ambitions are global. Russia is the Christian nationalist power, and China, under Xi and his Wangist ideology, is the virtuous pagan nationalist power.
This is why the Promethean-ruled US is already engaged in a virtual war with both nationalist powers and the other globalist power. The Prometheans are at war with China because China broke its alliance with them in 2015. They are at war with Russia because Russia, as a Christian nation, rejects their satanism and because Russia escaped their influence in 2000. And they are at war with their fellow globalists in the Dar al-Islam over the territory of Palestine in general and Jerusalem in particular, even as they use them to suppress Christian nationalism in Europe.
The reason Trump is so furiously hated is because he represented – however well or poorly – the Christian West’s attempt to break free of Promethean rule. Whether he failed or whether he is still engaged in some sort of secretive Q-like battle is irrelevant to understanding the shape of the overall situation; he is the West’s equivalent of Putin and Xi, ergo he represents the fundamental danger to the shadow power.
And the fundamental weakness of the Prometheans is that, unlike the other three powers, they do not represent a true civilization. They are not, technically, even civilized, as they have never progressed beyond tribalism. This is why they so reliably fail once they achieve enough power in a society to become responsible for it, as they do not know how to maintain a civilization, let alone build one. It is always much easier to destroy than to create.