The collapse of the postwar order
Since 1945, several pillars of Western life have been taken as given. First, that Western armies can more or less have their way with lesser powers and that guerrilla resistance is all they can expect to face. Second, that immigration means greater cultural diversity and therefore represents a net positive for the nations on the receiving end. Third, that nearly any country can become a liberal democracy, for it is a universal good that everyone aspires to and is capable of achieving.
Now, however, all these pillars of the postwar order are collapsing at once, and largely in the same theater. The American-Israeli war in Iran, the ongoing migrant crisis at Ceuta, the dismantling of Hamas’s hold on Gaza — it’s easy to imagine these are discrete events. But they aren’t. They are the load-bearing assumptions of the postwar settlement giving way altogether. When empires are ready to collapse, the gods of history have a way of creating splintering geopolitical emergencies that push toward entropy. The Dow Jones might hit 60,000, and the world might soon have its first tech-trillionaires, but on some level we all know these signs of progress and stability are just mutually agreed-upon fiction. What we’re living through now is the Great Unspooling of the postwar liberal order.
The postwar order began with the Holocaust. The discovery of the Nazi death camps completely remade the Western moral imagination. Thereafter, any sustained suggestion that ethnicities or religious groups differ in their readiness for Western institutions became taboo. Out of that hesitation to acknowledge the reality of profound cultural differences came the belief that nations must henceforth be “ideas” rather than long-fought inheritances. Along the way, the West promised that Jews would never be left to the mercy of antisemitism — a vow that took institutional form in the state of Israel. For 80 years, these vows held. But now they’re breaking down, with the war in Iran and the attempted dismantling of Hamas.
To that extent, Marx got it wrong. It wasn’t class-conflict, exactly, but immigration and a dependence on population growth, that are the great “contradictions” of liberal capitalism. The West has become a system dependent not only on cancer-like growth to survive, but also on population enlargement, for which it must have ever-increasing markets and thus ever-increasing populations capable of supplying them. Insert mass immigration from non-European origins to societies with mostly European ancestry, wrap it all in a narrative of innocence in which every migrant merely seeks a “better life” — with no ancillary consequences whatsoever — and you have liberal capitalism’s core contradiction, its timer set to explode.
Over the last decade, it’s become increasingly popular among the more cynical portions of the online Right to believe that the West will “fall” as a result of mass migration from non-European societies. Even the anti-populist Right suspects, as Jonah Goldberg argued in The Suicide of the West, that Western culture is in the midst of an extended self-immolation. Certainly, the ground-swell of resistance to mass migration explains President Trump’s rise as much, if not more, than any other factor. Ten years ago, in that fateful GOP primary loaded with more than a dozen “serious” candidates, Trump was the only one to realize the fervor of the resistance against immigration boiling up from the American demos.
And now, a decade later, with Covid and the Biden presidency intervening just to extend the fun, we’re still living through the same dilemmas, except now the immigration issue is more prevalent in Europe, and it all could come to a head with Trump’s ill-fated decision to launch a war in Iran.
Every US president since Jimmy Carter would have liked to launch a regime-change war against the mullahs. Yet when looking at the practicalities, they decided the chances of prevailing without astronomical financial costs, not to mention loss of life, were simply not viable. The result was funding Saddam Hussein, the Iran-Iraq War, then two separate military campaigns to remove Hussein from power and of course a two-decade-long occupation of that intractable nation on Iran’s eastern border. Nearly $7 trillion later, here we are: the Middle East less stable than ever, and Iran able to hold the global economy hostage by choking off free passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
Insert a chief executive without a sophisticated understanding of either international politics or the tenuous nature of the postwar order, and now we’re six months into a kiss-and-kick battle where even conservative outlets are questioning the sanity of Trump’s decision-making. A rational mind would accept that there are truly only two options left at this point. Either admit defeat and leave with our tails between our legs — just like we did in Saigon in 1975 and Afghanistan in 2021, and are now quietly starting with our bases in Iraq — or else “fully committing” as Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and a coterie of others on the Right keep suggesting. That latter approach would likely mean an all-out bombing campaign against Iranian electrical grids and water treatment plants, perhaps even with lower-threshold “tactical” nuclear weapons.
The fact that Trump hasn’t yet pulled the metaphorical trigger, and indeed seems reluctant to do so, is chock-full of irony. After all, the kind of no-holds-barred military approach Trump continues to threaten is precisely the one used by the Allies against both Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan. And while there are plenty of reasons to have qualms about the bombing of civilian targets in Germany and Japan, it’s also hard not to conclude that the ruthlessness of that effort motivated their unconditional surrender, paving the way for the very postwar order now threatened by Trump’s quixotic refusal to go all-in.
All the while, the President’s own Penelopean method of dealing with Iran — weaving by day, unraveling by night — proves that the United States, and the broader Western world whose helm it still commands, no longer has the stomach to defend its own interests to the actual death. Perhaps it’s simply that in an age where internet-connected video cameras sit in the palms of even the poor and destitute, no Western leader, not even Trump, can green-light the killing of tens of thousands of civilians overnight.
Benjamin Netanyahu, of course, is not so squeamish. And his willingness to be despised — by West and East alike — exposes a fault line the postwar order was built to conceal. The Holocaust may be the origin point of contemporary Western liberalism, but the modern State of Israel has never mistaken itself for a member in full standing, bound by the same pieties and constraints. In the West, as the notorious GOP operative Lee Atwater understood, “perception is reality” — yet Israel, almost alone among nations, has decided it can live without the West’s good opinion. That indifference is the tell. Even if the Israelis are ultimately correct in their assessment of what needs to be done, their indifference to perception will have consequences.
The “Judeo-Christian tradition,” it turns out, was always a hyphen doing the work of a treaty — another tenuous invention of the post-1945 settlement. It is now failing like the rest of this dying edifice. From the Israeli perspective, the country is trapped in an existential battle for survival. October 7 proved their enemies will stop at nothing — not even if the result is their own annihilation — to undermine the Israeli “settler colonialists.” In many ways, Hamas’s atrocity was the moral grand finale of the suicide bomber. It proved there are no boundaries of barbarity the Islamists will not cross, while Israel itself clearly cannot constrain itself by the niceties of the Geneva Convention and the make-believe agreements of international law.
It’s hard, here, to argue that Israeli resolve is wrong-headed. Notice, though, that none of our inherited categories can hold during this war. All through the postwar period, it was easy for America to cast its enemies, whether Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh or Saddam Hussein, as the “next Hitler,” or anyway, something close. But whatever its many cruelties, Hamas is certainly not a threat on that scale, and neither is its ally Iran. With the absence of viable communist and fascist movements, the great tension of world politics, as Benjamin Barber so aptly put it 30 years ago, has become “Jihad vs. McWorld.” Two monoliths of cultural excess, both lacking self-reflection, much less true spiritual or intellectual growth: one neoliberal, the other neofeudal.
It’s a cliche to say that Islam never had something like the Protestant Reformation — and, as Reformation historians like to point out, the cliche gets it backwards. Modern Islamism arguably is Islam’s Reformation, what with its scriptural literalism, its iconoclastic fury, its millenarian certainty. But what Islam has arguably never had is what came after: the cultural exhaustion that provided the space for a genuine liberalism to come about. Perhaps, it will eventually get there. Perhaps it won’t. One thing, though, is certain — neither the United States’ military, nor Israel’s, can force any realization upon it.
Yet if the settlement can’t be imposed abroad at gunpoint, it will not come from naively believing that all who seek residence in the West come with a willingness to respect its core tenets of tolerance and individual responsibility.
The broader illiberal treatment of women by some non-Western immigrants to Europe is a ticking time bomb. While many of the abusers were only Muslim in culture — they are far from practicing — that only intensifies the point of conflict. As people from Islamic countries dissipate across the globe, tensions are likely to continue rising, especially as Western populations continue to reject mass immigration at every electoral opportunity. Western leaders, of course, are more eager to prove their cosmopolitan bona fides and dedication to postwar liberal principles.
Eventually, this divergence between what most of the population wants and what leaders prefer will bring down governments across Britain and the Continent, whatever liberal stalwarts like Andy Burnham might do in the short term. Meanwhile, as evidenced by Abdul El-Sayed’s triumph in Michigan’s Senate primary last week — overcoming the party establishment and a record $65 million in outside money — the Democratic Party is living through a takeover by an internal youth faction for whom the entire idea of border integrity is suspect. El-Sayed has previously favored not only abolishing ICE but making Michigan a “sanctuary” state for illegal and undocumented immigrants.
Which brings us to something that’s rarely discussed, in the US anyway, about the war in Iran: it has the direct potential to destabilize not just the Middle East, but the whole of Europe too. Whether MAGA were really involved in constructing the crisis or not, what the nearly 70,000 migrants who stormed Ceuta over recent weeks prove is that, in the blink of an eye, mass migration could destabilize nearly any European nation. Or else there’s 2015, when Angela Merkel decided it was a fantastic idea to allow 1.5 million migrants fleeing the war in Syria — some of whom were merely pretending to have been displaced — into Germany.
Within a decade, Germany, even in its most urban and populated areas, went from a safe nation with high levels of social trust and generous social safety nets, to something rather different. Some 25 years ago, I studied in Germany on a student visa. In the land of the autobahn and Dunkelweizen beer, the concept of ungovernably dangerous areas was simply unheard of. Not anymore. Germany’s a different place now. The change might irreversible. And, depending on how the war in Iran goes, Europe’s political and social problems surrounding immigration could become even more intractable. If the Iranian regime does indeed eventually collapse, Western Europe and the UK would face an immigration crisis unlike anything since, you guessed it, the Second World War.
At the last war’s conclusion, with Hitler dead in his bunker, more than 10 million ethnic Germans were expelled from East Prussia and across Eastern Europe — many from lands which had been German-speaking for centuries. Few know anything about these expulsions, because to recognize German trauma in any way is to risk association with Nazi sympathies. In the postwar liberal era, we treat as the greatest error in all human history the belief that ethnicity and culture have anything to do with a nation’s aptitude for democratic life, which explains the great contradiction of sustaining the modern liberal order. The West built its dominance on precisely that conviction of its own superiority — then amputated that part of its thinking, with the missing limb now functioning like a phantom appendage, tormenting every political faction with an itch it cannot find a way to scratch.
The West — including very much so the Anglosphere — was not always so polite. From the American Revolution to 1945, most Anglo-American elites — Left and Right — believed the capacity for democracy was a biological trait, available only to what were once complacently called Anglo-Saxons. Supposedly, democracy was invented by ancient Germanic tribes, then carried to Britain by the 5th-century Saxons, perfected by the Glorious Revolution and then perfected again by the United States. This “germ theory” of democracy’s origins was no fringe folklore. Everyone from Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt advanced it, and Woodrow Wilson taught it — his textbook The State tracing the origin of self-government exclusively to “Aryan” racial stock.
The idea of democracy being limited by Saxon biology was, of course, absurd. Japan and South Korea run more functional democracies than either the US or the UK. The mythical Saxon tribes Wilson revered were in fact illiterate raiders who had never seen, much less cast, a ballot. The point here isn’t that their orthodoxy was correct. The point is that the men who built the America we know believed wholesale in what you might call “ethnopolitical” thinking right up until 1945 made voicing that perspective out of the question.
In the end, though, the discoveries of the Nazi death camps made every link between peoplehood and political inclinations verboten. For the next 50 years, nearly everyone in the English-speaking humanities pretended the Anglo-supremacist paradigm never existed, or else quickly filed it away as little more than a curiosity within the catch-all term of “white supremacism.”
The taboo against ethnopolitical thinking produced a strange two-way traffic across the Atlantic. Western Europeans looked to America for models of flourishing multiculturalism — importing, in effect, that American civic-creedal idea that a nation is an “idea” rather than an inheritance. Meanwhile, American academics imported the Frankfurt School, German Marxist exiles who managed the neat conceptual trick of outsourcing blame for the Third Reich onto the “authoritarian personality” of intolerant commoners — this from an intellectual Left whose predecessors had written the Weimar Republic constitution, held the Reichstag during the entirety of its life until 1933, and still failed to stop Hitler. Hannah Arendt’s harder lesson, that modern evil becomes banal because bureaucracy strips agency from nearly everyone, sat poorly with progressives and Left-liberals in love with bureaucratic re-engineering, so the Frankfurt version won. Ever since, the transatlantic Left has agreed on a few core principles: the people are the problem, borders represent prejudice, and anyone can be made a good liberal citizen.
The postwar taboo of ethnopolitical thinking produced a soft-skulled liberalism that can no longer say who belongs. Why? Because belonging is for “everyone.” It’s kind, in a way, to treat every border as a prejudice. But it’s the brand of kindness a 5-year-old offers to strangers whom they should probably not trust. This, to be clear, isn’t to embrace blood-and-soil nationalism, but rather a full-throated embrace of cultural differences and making decisions based on an accurate understanding of them. Iran was always going to fight their “Great Satan” to the death, something Trump both failed to anticipate and seems reluctant to do himself.
The last irony of the Great Unspooling belongs to Donald Trump: the arch anti-immigrationist, who would happily restore the norms of a world before 1945, may yet be the one who finishes off the Anglo-American, postwar order. Not by tearing up its treaties or even by mocking its pieties, but by refusing to back down in Iran merely to save face, but then excusing this action as what’s necessary to “save Israel.” Thus, unleashing upon Europe precisely the migration wave that its post-Holocaust morality cannot repel and its populations are incapable of absorbing. The further irony may be that doing anything less may put Iran and thus, eventually, Hamas, in a stronger position than it occupied not only prior to the war, but prior to Oct. 7 itself.
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