José Goulão
The so-called collective West has entered an existential tailspin that could drag the world into chaos.
The so-called collective West has entered an existential tailspin that could drag the world into chaos and a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, because the only antidote it knows is war - the method of a permanent colonial mentality and its ultimate expression: imperialism.
The West, western strategists tell us, is "our civilisation". A concept rooted in self-convincing notions of racial superiority, of an alleged right to define unique civilisational and human principles - "our values" - and to claim ownership of the world's wealth through a kind of divine entitlement. And when necessary, it rests upon religious supremacy too: the crusading spirit. The war against Iran and the atrocities in Palestine are examples enough.
Yet the collective West is fragmenting.
In simplistic terms, the fracture first appeared across the Atlantic, triggered by the Trump earthquake: an emperor with something of Nero about him, placing his psychopathic narcissism above everything else, especially human life.
Trump, however, is not a phenomenon that emerged from nowhere, as though history had simply malfunctioned. He is the product of the decay and dysfunction into which the engine of money - the force driving the collective West and underwriting all its supposed superiorities - has descended. Capitalism has entered the decisive phase of its existential crisis.
Having reached the stage of neoliberal anarchy and finding that even this can no longer sustain the pretence of representing democracy, freedom, humanism and human rights, the system is now skidding towards an even more extreme form of despair: fascism.
That is where we stand, although fascism arrives in differing guises - from Trump's careless bluntness to the more elaborately packaged versions, still draped in the fading trappings of democracy, represented by figures such as Merz, in a Germany once again baring its teeth; Starmer, Montenegro in alliance with the far right, Zelensky, Modi, Macron, Meloni, and others besides.
The collective West has fractured across the Atlantic, between the United States and Europe, but the disintegration does not stop there. Within Europe itself, the European Union is collapsing into an anguish of abandonment, as Trump appears serious about withdrawing the military guardianship on which it has long depended.
The United States and Israel, in a symbiosis that operationally embodies imperial-Zionism in military terms, are concentrating on the Middle East in an attempt to secure strategic and natural resources while reinforcing the policing role of the Zionist state.
Trump has effectively left the European Union - at a moment when NATO itself scarcely knows what direction it is taking - with the task of dealing with Russia and, for the time being, sustaining Zelensky's increasingly authoritarian order until its final breath. The European Union can at least take comfort in the fact that Russia is not a genuine military threat. But if it continues to insist otherwise, the consequences may become dangerously unpredictable.
The collective West has fragmented, yet in every one of its enclaves the only survival strategy it recognises is war. That is what is driving us towards chaos and, perhaps, catastrophe.
These are the death throes of capitalism, firing wildly in every direction while wielding fascism as its instrument. Yet the struggle must continue until the peoples of the world awaken and attempt to prevent the desperation of capitalist anarchy from leading the planet towards the extermination of life as we know it.