Spengler and the declining powers of the West.

Introduction

More than a century after Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West, the questions he posed have returned with renewed urgency. Not because his morphology of history can simply be applied as prophecy, nor because the present can be reduced to the repetition of Roman or any other analogies, but because he compelled his readers to ask whether civilizations first decay outwardly or inwardly: in institutions, in symbols, in self-understanding, and in the relation between power and form (Spengler, 1926; Hughes, 1991; Farrenkopf, 2001). The issue today is not whether one must accept Spengler’s determinism in full. It is whether his distinction between living culture and late civilization still illuminates a West that retains immense technical, military, and financial capacities, yet appears increasingly uncertain of its own meaning, hierarchy of ends, and civilizational confidence (Spengler, 1926; Engels, 2021).
The meaning of the West is becoming less self-evident as the world ceases to revolve around a single center of power. The United States and Europe are both being drawn into a process of redefinition, compelled to reconsider what they are, what they still represent, and what place they can realistically claim in a geopolitical landscape that is growing more fractured, more competitive, and more openly multipolar. The Atlantic certainties that shaped the late twentieth century have not vanished, but they no longer structure political reality with the same ease or authority. The language remains familiar, yet its content is increasingly unstable. Democracy, sovereignty, security, and international order are still invoked as if their meaning were obvious, but they now conceal widening divergences in political instinct and strategic purpose. In the United States, the tension is increasingly visible between democracy as procedure and democracy as collective self-government; in Europe, between universal norms and structural dependence. A similar ambiguity runs through foreign policy. The same Atlantic order that continues to speak in the language of rights, legality, and collective security has in recent years supported or enabled wars whose strategic logic appears ever harder to reconcile with any coherent universal principle. The handling of Israel’s wars, the broader confrontation with Iran, and the hesitant, divided European response all suggest that the West has entered a period in which its inherited vocabulary still survives, but the political world that once gave that vocabulary coherence is being steadily transformed (Spengler, 1926; Mearsheimer, 2001; Manners, 2002).

The Declining Powers of the West

The meaning of the West is becoming less self-evident as the world ceases to revolve around a single center of power. The United States and Europe are both being drawn into a process of redefinition, compelled to reconsider what they are, what they still represent, and what place they can realistically claim in a geopolitical landscape that is growing more fractured, more competitive, and more openly multipolar. The Atlantic certainties that shaped the late twentieth century have not vanished, but they no longer structure political reality with the same ease or authority. The language remains familiar, yet its content is increasingly unstable. Democracy, sovereignty, security, and international order are still invoked as if their meaning were obvious, but they now conceal widening divergences in political instinct and strategic purpose. In the United States, the tension is increasingly visible between democracy as procedure and democracy as collective self-government; in Europe, between universal norms and structural dependence. A similar ambiguity runs through foreign policy. The same Atlantic order that continues to speak in the language of rights, legality, and collective security has in recent years supported or enabled wars whose strategic logic appears ever harder to reconcile with any coherent universal principle. The handling of Israel’s wars, the broader confrontation with Iran, and the hesitant, divided European response all suggest that the West has entered a period in which its inherited vocabulary still survives, but the political world that once gave that vocabulary coherence is being steadily transformed. (Spengler, 1926)

The crisis of the West is therefore not merely the crisis of a single, homogeneous power bloc, but of a civilizational space that no longer knows with certainty what it is, what it wants, what limits it still recognizes, or whether it possesses the cohesion required to endure. Behind the word “West” stand different historical experiences, geopolitical interests, and political instincts. The United States, continental Europe, and the wider Anglo-American world still speak, at least rhetorically, in the name of one shared project, yet they increasingly give that project very different meanings. What is becoming visible today in the tension between Washington and the European capitals, in the war in Ukraine, in the long destabilization of the Middle East, in the slow and often hesitant response to China’s industrial rise, and in the internal polarization of Western societies is therefore not simply a policy crisis. It is also, and perhaps more deeply, a crisis of self-definition.
If the word “West” is to mean anything more than a vague polemical label, it must be named historically. It once described a singular, partly accidental convergence: Greek rationality, Roman law, Biblical ethics, the medieval and papal reshaping of authority, and the liberal-democratic revolutions of modernity. Yet in recent decades the operative meaning of “the West” has narrowed. Increasingly, it has come to coincide above all with the liberal-democratic revolutions of modernity and their universalist political language, while the older layers of inheritance are relativized, hollowed out, or treated as embarrassing residues rather than constitutive sources. The result is a civilization that still invokes its name but has weakened its own memory. (Spengler, 1926; Engels, 2021)

The crisis is not new. The long destabilization of the Middle East, for example, cannot be reduced to a recent loss of Western capacity to impose order. The problem runs much deeper. The erosion of the Ottoman order, the colonial partition of Arab lands, the imperial management of routes and resources, the Anglo-American coup in Iran in 1953, the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Cold War competition for regional clients, the privileging of pliant monarchies over independent republican projects, and later the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and beyond all formed part of a longer sequence. French and British power mattered greatly in this story; France and Britain, together with Israel, attacked Egypt in 1956, and France and Britain were central to the 2011 intervention in Libya. Yet the largest and most system-shaping disruptions of the last decades were inseparable from Anglo-American power, above all the United States and, often in close alignment, Britain. The issue is not that a once coherent and benevolent order-builder has suddenly become ineffective. It is that the very powers that presented themselves as custodians of order have repeatedly also been producers of disorder. (Fromkin, 1989; Kinzer, 2003; Westad, 2005)

To understand that process properly, it is useful to read the position of the West through three forms of power: market power, military power, and normative power. Not because states fit neatly into only one of these forms, but because every great power generally seeks to ground its predominance in some combination of the three. Yet it is doubtful whether the West ever truly succeeded in uniting them in a fully credible way. Even in the decades often remembered as the high point of liberal order, this apparent synthesis rested on selective memory, uneven enforcement, and a striking blindness to the violence that unfolded under Western, and especially American, primacy. What appeared, from within, as a reinforcing triangle was always more fragile, more partial, and more exclusionary than it claimed to be. The present crisis has not created that contradiction from nothing. It has made it impossible to ignore. It is precisely there that the seed of the inevitable fall lies. (Spengler, 1926)
One may still ask whether the celebrated Western capacity for self-critique and moral revision is sometimes overstated, and whether it too often yields, in practice, to cynical raison d’état. That question need not be answered here in a final way to remain troubling.

Three Forms of Power

Market power is the ability to control production, trade, raw materials, financial infrastructure, and technological chains. It is about more than wealth alone. A state or bloc possesses market power when others are forced to adapt to its economic rules, when transactions pass through its currency and institutions, when sanctions and exclusions are credible tools, and when industry exists not merely as a symbol, but as an actual source of strategic autonomy. (Damro, 2012)

Military power is the capacity to organize force credibly, to deter as a credible threat, and, if necessary, to sustain its use over time. It is not only the possession of modern weapons that matters, but also scale, logistics, production, replacement, ammunition stocks, command structures, and the political willingness to endure losses. A society that appears technologically formidable but cannot sustain a war of attrition possesses only a fragile form of military power.

Normative power is the ability to present one’s own order as legitimate, universal, and worthy of imitation. It rests on prestige, legal forms, diplomatic credibility, cultural attraction, and the idea that one is not only strong, but justified. A power that possesses normative influence needs to coerce less, because others voluntarily wish to align themselves with its language, its institutions, and its rules. (Manners, 2002)
In periods of ascent, these three forms of power can reinforce one another. Economic expansion finances armies. Armies protect trade routes. Moral and legal legitimacy lowers the cost of dominance by producing allies, clients, and admirers. In periods of decline, however, the relationship reverses. The economy becomes increasingly financial and less productive. The army remains expensive, but grows less decisive. Normative language becomes louder, even frantically louder, precisely because its persuasive force is fading. In the end, a paradox emerges: the more insistently a power proclaims its values, the less others still believe in them. (Spengler, 1926)

That is broadly the condition of the West today. But the problem is not simply that the West has lost a previously stable equilibrium. No democratic power can indefinitely maximize military, economic, and normative power at the same time without generating severe internal strain. For a time, the Atlantic world managed this tension by distributing functions across an alliance system. The United States supplied most of the hard military force, Europe much of the regulatory and normative language, and both benefited from a wider economic order they largely shaped. But that arrangement was never fully stable. It depended on asymmetries, the externalization of costs, and the temporary absence of truly systemic challengers. Keohane, 1984; Damro, 2012; Manners, 2002)

The United States still possesses by far the strongest military machine in the world, but that power yields fewer durable political outcomes than it once promised. Europe still retains a normative aura in law, diplomacy, and regulation, but that aura is increasingly weakened by selectivity, dependence, and inconsistency. Economically, both have eroded: the United States through debt, financialization, and relative monetary decline; Europe through deindustrialization, energy vulnerability, and strategic dependence. China, meanwhile, has risen not outside the system the West built, but in large part by mastering it. What has been exposed, then, is not the collapse of a once natural balance, but the fragility of an arrangement that was always more contingent than it appeared.

The deeper argument is therefore that market power, military power, and normative power are not indefinitely additive. A great power may, for a time, appear to unite all three. It may dominate trade and finance, command overwhelming military force, and still present its order as legitimate and universal. Yet such moments are rarely durable, because each form of power, once maximized, tends to erode the conditions that sustain the others. Military activism consumes material reserves, bureaucratizes politics, and normalizes exceptional practices that weaken normative legitimacy. Economic predominance generates dependency, but also resentment, imitation, and eventually counter-blocs seeking to escape that dependency. Normative authority depends on consistency and restraint; once it becomes visibly selective, it ceases to function as genuine legitimacy and hardens into ideology. What looks, at its height, like a synthesis of all three is often only a historically specific alignment of favorable conditions. Over time, the internal tensions reassert themselves. A hegemon that seeks to be everything at once often ends not in stable supremacy, but in overstretch, fragmentation, and declining credibility. (Spengler, 1926; Keohane, 1984)

A West Growing Apart

The current tension between the United States and Europe is therefore not a passing episode that can be attributed solely to the style of one president. It is older and more fundamental. This does not mean that serious transatlantic disagreements are new. The relationship survived earlier ruptures, from Suez to the Iraq War, because those crises unfolded within a broader strategic framework that neither side was yet prepared to abandon. Even when they clashed sharply, the United States and Europe still operated within the same hierarchy of interests, the same security architecture, and the same basic assumption that the Atlantic space remained the central political core of the West. (Lundestad, 2003)

What makes the present moment different is not the mere existence of disagreement, but the fact that disagreement now touches the hierarchy itself. Already under Obama, Washington increasingly signaled that the decisive theater of the future would not lie in Europe, but in Asia, above all in the rise of China. That shift should not be overstated as a simple physical transfer of bases or capabilities from Europe and the Middle East to the Pacific. In many respects, it began as a change in strategic imagination, long-term planning, and elite attention. But precisely for that reason it mattered. It indicated that Europe was no longer the unquestioned center of American grand strategy, but one theater among several, and no longer the most decisive one. (Clinton, 2011)

For Europe, this was a slow-moving shock. But Europe was not alone in that experience. The unipolar moment did not offer strategic dependence only to Europe. It extended, in different forms, across the wider network of American allies, from East Asia to the Gulf. Under that order, allies could enjoy protection, integration, and relative prosperity without developing full geopolitical responsibility of their own. Europe, however, increasingly interpreted this condition as something more than alliance. It imagined itself not merely as one protected partner among others, but as a privileged moral and political counterpart within the Atlantic order.

That illusion is now breaking down. For decades, Europe had grown accustomed to a comfortable construction: economic integration without full geopolitical responsibility, moral language without its own power-political backbone, and security ultimately guaranteed by the United States. But once America shifts its gaze, the fiction is exposed. Europe is not a true imperial core, but neither is it a sovereign pole. It is a wealthy space without full strategic autonomy. Its difference from other American partners was real in degree, but not absolute in kind. In the eyes of a hegemon, even a privileged ally may still remain, in the final instance, only another ally.

From the perspective of neorealist thinkers such as Mearsheimer, none of this is surprising. Great powers do not follow sentimental loyalties, but their own interests of power. For Washington, the central question is not how Europe can be morally protected, but how potential rivals can be prevented from attaining dominance in strategically decisive regions. If Asia becomes the main theater, then Europe necessarily becomes secondary. From that logic, the Atlantic alliance is not an eternal community of values, but an instrumental arrangement that lasts only as long as it remains useful to the stronger partner. (Mearsheimer, 2001)

Much of the non-Western world drew that conclusion long before many Europeans were willing to do so. The Iraq War was a decisive moment in that regard. It revealed that the leading power of the Atlantic order was prepared to break the very rules it claimed to uphold, while Europe, despite its rhetoric of law and restraint, proved unable or unwilling to translate its objections into genuine strategic separation. Instead of becoming the moment of an Atlantic rupture, the period that followed saw the continuation and even expansion of the wider Western order in institutional and economic form. For many outside observers, that was proof enough that the language of shared values remained subordinate to the realities of hierarchy, dependency, and power.
A further irony is that the external enemy that now disciplines Atlantic cohesion may also be, in part, the product of a failed post-Cold War settlement. There were real attempts to create a cooperative Euro-Atlantic security order that included Russia. The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act explicitly stated that NATO and Russia did not consider each other adversaries and aimed at a lasting and inclusive peace in the Euro-Atlantic area. The NATO-Russia Council, established in 2002, was designed as a forum in which Russia and NATO members would meet as equal partners on matters of common security. One may therefore argue that the return of Russia as the necessary external enemy was not simply given by fate. It also emerged from the failure to transform those mechanisms into a durable security architecture. (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 1997, 2002)

Europe and the Costs of Dependency

The United States remains, in military terms, the central power of the Atlantic system. But that very military predominance has, over time, repeatedly undermined the order it claimed to defend. The destabilization of the Middle East cannot be reduced to the last twenty years alone. Its roots stretch back much further: to the late Ottoman crisis, to the colonial partition of the region, to the establishment of Israel in a recently decolonized space, to the Anglo-American coup in Iran in 1953, to the Suez Crisis in 1956, to the long preference of Western powers for pliant monarchies over independent republican movements, and to the broader pattern of intervention by outside actors in the internal political development of the region. In recent decades, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and the wider politics of regime change only accelerated that legacy. None of these interventions produced a durable order. Most destroyed existing structures without creating a credible replacement. (Fromkin, 1989; Kinzer, 2003; Westad, 2005)

Russia, too, and before it the Soviet Union, bears responsibility, especially in the Syrian theater, where intervention intensified the brutality and prolongation of the conflict. But that does not alter the central point. Within the Atlantic system, the United States remained the decisive military actor, and the broader Western management of the region repeatedly displaced the costs of disorder onto Europe. Migration flows, humanitarian breakdown, terrorism fears, energy insecurity, and social tensions were experienced far more directly on the European continent than in North America. Western Europe is not only more exposed to the costs of dependency; it is also, by now, more familiar with them. Europe thus paid the price of strategic choices it did not fully control. Here it becomes clear that alliance is not the same thing as harmony of interests. (Lundestad, 2003)

The war in Ukraine and the fracture lines in the Middle East must also be read in that light. One may debate causes, but one thing is clear: Europe pays a far higher price for destabilization in its surroundings than the United States. War on its eastern flank, the energy break with Russia, migration pressure from the south, and budgetary strain caused by military expenditure affect the European continent directly. The industrial question belongs here as well, though with nuance. The United States does not possess an untroubled productive economy, but it still retains a much larger defense-industrial base than Europe. Europe, by contrast, was hit more sharply by sanction-driven energy costs and the resulting stress on industry. For Washington, a war in Europe can form part of a broader strategy to weaken a rival, deepen Europe’s reliance on American weapons and logistics, and tighten strategic hierarchy. For Europe, by contrast, the same war is not a distant instrument of power, but an existential weakening of its economic and social foundation. At the same time, the war also had the opposite effect in some parts of Europe: it pushed countries such as Finland and Sweden into NATO and accelerated rearmament across the continent. (Mearsheimer, 2001; Lundestad, 2003)

That is why it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain that Anglo-Saxon and continental European interests coincide. Yet the European response to this divergence is far from unified. The elites of Europe are themselves divided, ideologically as well as geographically. Atlanticism remains deeply rooted in parts of the political center, on both the center-right and the liberal-progressive center-left, especially when Washington is governed by figures seen as respectable custodians of the liberal order. More radical currents on the left are often far more critical of the United States as such, while parts of the sovereigntist right have also grown increasingly hostile to American influence. Geographically, too, the divide is clear. Eastern Europe tends to remain more strongly attached to the American security guarantee, whereas Western Europe is more ambivalent, more fatigued, and more familiar with the costs of dependence. (Lundestad, 2003; Zwolski, 2025)

But this division within Europe does not erase the underlying asymmetry. It merely obscures it. The Atlantic reflex remains strong in important segments of the European political, media, and security classes, yet it masks a deeper structural reality. The United States can afford strategic experiments that Europe cannot survive without lasting damage. The regime changes in the Middle East offer the clearest examples: wars that could be rationalized in Washington as strategic gambles returned to Europe as migration shocks, energy exposure, social fracture, and intensified dependence. That makes the present relationship less one of allies pursuing a common project than of a core power and a dependent periphery within the same civilizational space, even if parts of that periphery still resist naming it as such.

Europe’s Normative Self-Image

Europe long presented itself as the civil or post-national power par excellence: less oriented toward brute coercion, more toward law, trade, norms, and institutional attractiveness. There was real strength in that posture, but also a great deal of illusion. Europe’s normative self-image was never fully detached from the hard strategic architecture in which it was embedded. Its relative softness rested in part on an Atlantic order that externalized military force upward to the United States and allowed Europe to cultivate the language of law, restraint, and post-sovereign legitimacy without fully bearing the burden of strategic enforcement. In that sense, the transatlantic relationship was never a partnership of equals, but an asymmetric arrangement in which Europe’s normative confidence depended on American hard power remaining in the background. That arrangement now shows increasing signs of fracture. (Manners, 2002; Damro, 2012)

At the same time, Europe’s claim to normative distinctiveness was always more compromised than its own rhetoric suggested. The age of the War on Terror did not leave Europe untouched. Surveillance expansion, security cooperation, the normalization of exceptional measures, and dependence on American intelligence all revealed how quickly the language of rights and legality could coexist with practices that undermined both. Europe could regulate, admonish, and institutionalize, but it did so from within a wider security order whose coercive mechanisms it neither fully controlled nor fully resisted. (Manners, 2002)

That is why normative power without hard power has limits. As soon as war broke out at Europe’s borders, it became unmistakably clear how dependent Europe had become on American protection, American intelligence, American technology, and American strategic decision-making. Europe can make rules, but it cannot defend them without outside help. Its normative power is therefore not simply weakened by external threats. It is vulnerable because it was never as autonomous as it claimed to be. (Manners, 2002; Zwolski, 2025)

There is, moreover, a temporal problem. Europe’s normative edge may have been historically shorter-lived than many assumed. It looked durable in the late twentieth century, but it may prove in retrospect to have been a fifty-year interval rather than a stable civilizational condition. What is now unfolding suggests that its erosion hits Europe harder than many believed, precisely because Europe mistook a contingent phase for a permanent vocation.
And yet Europe’s own interests and international law need not be placed in opposition. A continental European strategy could, in principle, combine both: a more independent course, less subordinated to Atlantic military logic, and more consistent with a neutral or restrained reading of international law. In that sense, older arguments for neutrality deserve renewed attention. A mid-1980s example is Jochen Löser and Ulrike Schilling’s Neutralität für Mitteleuropa: Das Ende der Blöcke, which explicitly argued for neutrality in Central Europe. Central Europe in Löser’s sense does not coincide exactly with continental Europe as a whole, but the underlying intuition remains relevant: a non-aggressive posture can be both a legal principle and an expression of self-interest, rather than a mere moral alibi. (Löser & Schilling, 1984)

Rome Without a Republic

At this point, the comparison with the late Roman Republic becomes compelling. Not because history literally repeats itself, but because certain structural forms return. Rome grew from a city-state into a Mediterranean great power, but its institutions remained essentially designed for a smaller political scale. This produced a tension between formal republican legitimacy and real concentration of power. The old institutions remained in place, but were gradually transformed into theater. Real power shifted to generals, factions, patronage networks, and financial power blocs. (Spengler, 1926; Engels, 2013; Farrenkopf, 2001)

That pattern is recognizable today. In the West as well, elections, parliaments, and constitutional rituals remain standing, but citizens increasingly perceive that decisive power lies elsewhere: with large concentrations of capital and corporations, supranational bureaucracies, security structures, media platforms, private technological empires, and ever more frequently with courts, regulatory systems, and legal-administrative procedures that appear to govern from a distance. The institutions still function, but they seem less and less the place where power is formed. They ratify, delay, dramatize, or legitimize what has already been decided elsewhere. The growing chasm between managerial elites and the rest of the constituency intensifies this perception. “Government by judges,” technocratic administration, and regulatory expansion create additional sites of decision that weaken the older image of politics as visible public rule. (Spengler, 1926)

The security structures that now weigh so heavily on public life did not arise in a vacuum. They were consolidated through the long aftermath of the War on Terror, and in Europe too this meant the normalization of surveillance, emergency logics, and a lasting politics of suspicion in which Muslims were very often cast as the internal figure of danger. The social consequences of that turn are still with us. A language of constitutional legality remained in place, but more and more of political life was reorganized around pre-emption, monitoring, and managed fear.

At the same time, the rise of social networks has further hollowed out the classical institutional arena. Public debate is no longer mediated primarily through parties, parliaments, and traditional civic organizations, but increasingly through private digital platforms whose algorithms reward outrage, speed, tribalization, emotional escalation, and high-conflict identity performance. What presents itself as democratization often intensifies fragmentation. Politics becomes more immediate, but also more unstable; more participatory in appearance, but more easily manipulated in substance. A large systematic review of the literature found that digital media are, on balance, associated with higher levels of political polarization, even if the magnitude and mechanisms vary by context. Contemporary power is therefore not only concentrated above the institutions, but also dispersed through technical systems that deepen polarization while making responsibility harder to locate. (Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2023)

That is why the renewed interest in Caesarism and populism is so telling. In Spengler, Caesarism is the phase in which exhausted parliamentary forms remain in existence, but the real energy of politics shifts toward figures who directly embody power: leaders who seem to stand above parties, who address the masses through image, speed, conflict, and the promise of restored authority, and who respect the institutional form only so long as they can dominate it. In David Engels, the comparison with Rome becomes even more explicit: he too sees in the contemporary European crisis a mixture of elite exhaustion, mass politics, identity loss, technocratic alienation, and preparation for a post-liberal phase. What ties Caesarism to populism here is the same underlying structure: a demand for decision, authority, and protection arising from a widespread sense that the elites have betrayed, abandoned, or bypassed the political community. (Spengler, 1926; Engels, 2013; Farrenkopf, 2001)

This comparison should not be made mechanically. Our age differs fundamentally from Rome because of technology, media, the world market, and nuclear weapons. But that is precisely why the insight becomes sharper. The modern version of Caesarism does not necessarily appear in the classical form of a general marching into the capital with an army. It appears as a hybrid of plutocracy, media personalization, populist anti-elite rhetoric, and emergency politics. Whoever controls the means of communication, the financial levers, and the digital infrastructure possesses a power that is difficult to see in formal parliamentary terms, but in practice often becomes decisive. (Spengler, 1926; Spengler, 1932)

That makes the contemporary West at once oligarchic and plebiscitary. The people are addressed constantly, but seldom made truly sovereign. Parliament speaks incessantly, but decides less and less. Politics becomes performance, conflict becomes content, and legitimacy depends more and more on emotional mobilization. This is precisely the kind of regime in which classical republican balances are hollowed out long before they formally disappear.

The Limits of Expansion

Yet there is also an important difference from the Roman analogy. The Roman civil wars ended with the consolidation of imperial power. Octavian conquered Egypt and thereby gained immense economic resources capable of anchoring his rule. The transition from republic to principate therefore meant not only institutional centralization, but also a strengthening of the material basis of the center. (Spengler, 1926)

For the West, the opposite seems to be happening, even if parts of the American strategic class still hope that prolonged crisis might restore a more centralized hierarchy around Washington. Internal tensions are increasing at the very moment when the external environment is becoming more hostile. The Western core does not emerge from its civil and ideological conflicts with new spoils, but runs into limits. Russia does not appear easily breakable militarily in Ukraine. Iran, too, cannot be treated as though it had simply appeared out of nowhere as an isolated threat. It is itself the product of a much longer history of intervention, revolution, regional rivalry, sanctions, and mutual escalation, and has become a durable regional actor that cannot be neutralized without enormous cost. China, meanwhile, is developing faster than expected into a technological, industrial, and maritime challenger. Where Rome, after its crises, consolidated power, the West seems after each crisis to lose another fragment of its aura of invincibility. (Spengler, 1926)

This is particularly visible in the relationship between quality and scale. The West often possesses highly advanced weapons systems, but produces slowly, expensively, and bureaucratically. China, by contrast, combines growing technological competence with a speed of production and industrial breadth that are weighing ever more heavily in strategic terms. Russia has shown in Ukraine that endurance, ammunition capacity, adaptability, and a willingness to endure extremely high casualties remain crucial in prolonged conventional warfare. Beneath this lies a deeper political tension: liberal-democratic societies that have long organized themselves around consumption, financialization, and limited civic sacrifice are far less prepared for sustained industrial mobilization than systems able to concentrate resources more directly. In that sense, the military-industrial problem also reflects the older contradiction between democratic self-government and imperial scale. The myth that the West can automatically neutralize any opponent through technological superiority is being dismantled step by step. The same is visible in the wider Middle East, including in Israel’s wars: overwhelming technical superiority and external backing may deliver destruction, but they do not by themselves produce durable political order.

At sea and in logistical chains the same limit appears. Maritime hegemony remains credible only so long as it can secure its peripheral fronts without exhausting itself. Here Homer Lea becomes unexpectedly relevant. His language and historical categories were very much of his time, and in some respects problematic, but his geopolitical intuition still deserves attention: a maritime civilization can appear dominant and yet already be in decline when it has too many fronts to defend at once, when its opponents become stronger in continental-industrial terms, and when its moral self-image no longer corresponds to its material capacity. It is precisely that field of tension that can be seen today in the Atlantic West.

Signs of Exhaustion

Civilizations rarely fall militarily first. They first disintegrate inwardly. Political polarization in the West is a central symptom of that process. Polarization in itself is not necessarily destructive. Conflict can also be a sign of political vitality. But contemporary conflict has a different nature. The opponent is no longer seen as a rival within a shared order, but as an existential threat to society itself. As a result, politics shifts from a struggle over policy to a struggle over the denial of legitimacy. That opens two classical exits: civil war in slow or fast form, or an authoritarian reaction that seeks to save order by reducing freedom. (Spengler, 1926)

Economic inequality deepens the process. When wealth and the means of production become increasingly concentrated in a small minority, political influence shifts with it. In theory, the citizen remains equal. In practice, access to media, lobbying structures, party machines, and digital platforms becomes increasingly monopolized by those who possess capital. The democratic form is preserved, but the material conditions of equal citizenship are weakened. This feeds resentment, conspiracy thinking, populist eruptions, and a general sense that the rules no longer apply equally to all. (Spengler, 1926)

The monetary sphere shows the same erosion. The dollar remains the principal reserve currency in the world, but its predominance is no longer as absolute as it was at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Its share in officially allocated global reserves has fallen from around 71 percent at the launch of the euro to roughly 58 percent by the end of 2024. This is not a collapse, but it is a clear decline of about thirteen percentage points. The significance lies less in an imminent end of the dollar than in the direction of the movement. The world is searching, albeit slowly and partially, for diversification. De-dollarization is therefore not a catastrophic rupture, but a steady erosion of exclusivity. (International Monetary Fund, 2025a)

The comparison between the West and the BRICS countries shows the same shift, although one must immediately specify the yardstick being used. In purchasing-power terms, the BRICS+ have risen over recent decades from roughly 17 percent of the world economy in the mid-1990s to around 35 percent in 2024. The G7, in the same broad measure, fell to around 30 percent. In nominal dollars, the G7 remains clearly larger for the time being, still accounting for around 45 percent of the world economy in 2023 and 2024, compared with roughly a quarter for the original BRICS and more for the expanded group. The lesson is therefore not that the West has already been economically defeated, but that the unipolar relationship has disappeared. Whoever looks only at nominal figures misses the industrial and demographic depth of the shift. Whoever looks only at purchasing power underestimates the West’s continuing financial power. Both measures together show a world in transition. (International Monetary Fund, 2025b)

For Europe, the condition is especially precarious. The continent faces high public debt, aging populations, rising defense needs, energy vulnerability, and industrial erosion. At the same time, it is expected to play a geopolitical role for which it is institutionally and psychologically scarcely prepared. It still speaks the language of universal values, but hesitates whenever those values demand a price. It invokes international law, but loses credibility when that law is applied selectively. As a result, Europe loses precisely the normative power that long formed its strongest asset, perhaps more quickly and more painfully than many expected. (Zwolski, 2025)

Europe Between Subordination and Sovereignty

This brings us to the question of what is still possible for Europe. The most favorable scenario can hardly still be described as a renewed, harmonious transatlantic unity. That would presuppose that American and European interests once again coincide spontaneously. But precisely the opposite has become visible: Washington thinks globally and maritimately, Europe territorially and existentially. For the United States, Europe is one theater among several. For Europe, Europe itself is the stake. (Mearsheimer, 2001)

From Mearsheimer’s perspective, this is almost self-evident. A great power tolerates no competitor in its own hemisphere and seeks elsewhere above all to prevent the emergence of regional hegemons. From that logic, Washington will support Europe only insofar as it remains useful in a broader balancing strategy. From Homer Lea’s perspective, albeit read critically and stripped of his time-bound ideological ballast, something similar applies: a maritime civilization that confuses its interests with those of its continental allies, while binding itself on too many fronts, hollows itself out. Both thinkers point, in different ways, toward the same conclusion: the most desirable scenario for Europe is not eternal subordination within an Atlantic order, but a difficult recovery of strategic sovereignty. (Mearsheimer, 2001; Lea, 1912)

Such a sovereignty would require reindustrialization, energy security, military buildup, border control, demographic seriousness, and a diplomacy that is not merely the moral echo of Washington. It would also require that Europe once again learn to speak in terms of its own interest, without thereby abandoning its sense of law. A continent that no longer dares to formulate its own interest will not preserve its values for long either. Yet it is precisely here that the weakness is greatest. The political will remains largely absent. The Atlantic lobby is deeply embedded in institutions, media, diplomacy, and party structures. Europe knows rationally that it must become more autonomous, but psychologically it continues to behave as a province of a larger empire. A further problem is institutional: the European Union is a weak polity with weak legitimacy and no robust common identity in the strong sense of the term. It too often resembles a system of managers who present themselves as statesmen. (Zwolski, 2025)

That managerial weakness is not unrelated to the liberal triumphalism of the early 1990s. If history, in Fukuyama’s famous formulation, had effectively reached its ideological endpoint in liberal democracy, then politics could easily be reconceived not as tragic decision and statecraft, but as administration, optimization, and technical management. The statesman gives way to the bookkeeper; vision gives way to governance metrics; the executive becomes a branch office of post-historical normality. Yet geopolitics did not end, and the world did not agree to become managerial. Europe is now paying the price for having believed, too long, that politics had become administration. (Fukuyama, 1992)

And yet even here a final caution is necessary. A European sovereignty worthy of the name cannot simply reproduce, on a smaller scale, the very logic Europe now resents in its relationship with the United States. For Europe has long treated parts of Africa and the Arab world in similarly asymmetrical ways: externalizing costs, instrumentalizing dependency, and invoking partnership where hierarchy often remained the deeper reality. A merely inverted Atlanticism would therefore not amount to renewal, but only to repetition. (Löser & Schilling, 1984; Zwolski, 2025)

That is why a more realistic image of the future looks less like sovereign rebirth than like crisis management interrupted by shockwaves. Not a neat transition to a new order, but a sequence of ruptures: financial tensions, electoral revolts, migration crises, energy conflicts, social unrest, strategic humiliations, and emergency measures. The system will not collapse all at once. It will rather drag itself forward through improvisation, emergency politics, and temporary pacifications, until the next shock once again exposes the structural weakness.

Caesarism and the Authoritarian Correction

In such a context, Caesarism becomes not unthinkable but more likely. Not necessarily as classical dictatorship, but as a regime in which the appeal to emergency, security, efficiency, and immediate decisiveness further hollows out the remaining republican forms. As trust in party systems, parliaments, and supranational procedures declines, the demand grows for figures and apparatuses that simply decide. (Spengler, 1926; Engels, 2013)

In principle, this can come from the right or the left, in technocratic or populist form, national or post-national. In practice, however, the present conjuncture makes the radical right the more likely vehicle. It is particularly well placed to convert diffuse insecurity into demands for militarization, surveillance, stronger borders, executive power, and permanent exception, all while presenting itself as the defender of popular sovereignty. (Spengler, 1926; Farrenkopf, 2001)

Yet this does not mean that the populist grievances on which such movements feed are actually resolved. More often they are absorbed, redirected, and instrumentalized. Anger is mobilized, but not redeemed. The language of revolt is retained, while the structures that produced discontent remain largely intact. In that sense, the authoritarian correction of a decaying liberal order may come dressed as anti-elite rebellion while in fact deepening the very tendencies it claims to oppose. It can be slowed only if the underlying causes of exhaustion are addressed politically rather than merely managed through spectacle, fear, and emergency.

Fall of the West

The fall of the West is therefore not primarily a military defeat, nor merely an economic decline. It is the dissolution of a synthesis. Market power, military power, and normative power are coming apart. The United States still possesses military supremacy, but finds it increasingly difficult to convert that into stable order. Europe still retains remnants of normative authority, but insufficient hard power to sustain it credibly. Both are also gradually losing market power to a world that is reorganizing itself in multipolar, continental, and industrial form. (Damro, 2012; Manners, 2002; Mearsheimer, 2001)
There is a particular historical irony in this. The West is not simply being displaced by forces alien to the order it built. It is losing primacy inside a game whose rules it did so much to write. Global markets, liberalized trade, financial integration, and technological diffusion were once presented as instruments of Western universality. They have also become the terrain on which non-Western powers, above all China, have learned to rise within the very system that was meant to secure Western predominance.

At the same time, the domestic structure of the West displays the classical signs of civilizational fatigue: institutions that lose their substance, oligarchic concentration behind democratic façades, escalating polarization, the loss of a common horizon, and the rise of personal or extra-institutional centers of power. The comparison with the late Roman Republic is therefore not a cheap analogy, but a warning. Not because we are Rome, but because we too live in a time when the forms continue to survive after their spirit has already weakened. (Spengler, 1926; Engels, 2013)

The only difference is that Rome, after its crisis, could still enter an imperial consolidation. The West enters its crisis at the very moment when the outside world is growing stronger. That makes the outcome more dangerous. Whoever becomes internally divided while external pressure rises loses not only coherence, but time. And time, in geopolitics, is often the decisive resource.

The best conceivable way out would be a European sovereignty that finally understands that alliance is not the same as subordination, and that values without power are merely rituals. But even that possibility remains, for the moment, weakly grounded, because the will to pay its real price is lacking. That is why it is more likely that the coming years will be marked by crisis management, followed by shocks that repeatedly produce new ruptures. Not an apocalyptic final scene, but a crumbling order that may continue to move for a long time while its center has already been hollowed out.

The inevitable decline unfolds precisely in this way: not as one single moment of collapse, but as a long process in which a civilization must deploy ever more power in order to govern ever less reality.

Conclusion

If Spengler remains unsettling, it is because he forces one to ask whether what declines first in a great civilization is not material power as such, but the inner form that once made power intelligible. The West has not ceased to possess armies, wealth, technologies, universities, legal doctrines, and global influence. What is increasingly in doubt is whether these elements still belong to a common civilizational pattern, or whether they have begun to drift apart into a late-civilizational aggregate of techniques, institutions, and moral gestures that survive their original coherence (Spengler, 1926; Hughes, 1991; Engels, 2021).

Seen in that light, the present moment appears less as a simple geopolitical downturn than as a more profound transition from cultural confidence to civilizational management. That is why the crisis is experienced simultaneously as strategic dependence, political exhaustion, institutional hollowing, and semantic disorientation. Europe’s future, in particular, depends on whether it continues to inhabit this late form passively, as a managerial appendage of a wider Atlantic order, or whether it rediscovers a more coherent political horizon of its own. Even that would not mean a return to youthful cultural spring. At best, it would mean a lucid and disciplined response to a late age. Spengler’s real provocation was never that decline comes, but that civilizations often continue to speak in the language of universality long after they have lost confidence in their own form. The West may now be entering precisely such a phase: not a single collapse, but a drawn-out evening in which inherited concepts outlive the order that once made them real (Spengler, 1926; Spengler, 1932; Fukuyama, 1992; Mearsheimer, 2001).

The inevitable decline unfolds precisely in this way: not as one single moment of collapse, but as a long process in which a civilization must deploy ever more power in order to govern ever less reality. In Spengler’s darker formulation, this is the phase in which “high history lays itself down weary to sleep.”

Sources

Clinton, H. R. (2011, October 11). America’s Pacific century. Foreign Policy.
Damro, C. (2012). Market power Europe. Journal of European Public Policy, 19(5), 682–699. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2011.646779
Engels, D. (2013). Auf dem Weg ins Imperium: Die Krise der Europäischen Union und der Untergang der Römischen Republik. Europa Verlag.
Engels, D. (2021). Oswald Spengler: Werk, Deutung, Rezeption. Kohlhammer.
Farrenkopf, J. (2001). Prophet of decline: Spengler on world history and politics. Louisiana State University Press.
Fromkin, D. (1989). A peace to end all peace: The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East. Henry Holt and Company.
Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. Free Press.
Hughes, H. S. (1991). Oswald Spengler: A critical estimate. Transaction Publishers.
International Monetary Fund. (2025a). Currency composition of official foreign exchange reserves (COFER) [Data set].
International Monetary Fund. (2025b). World economic outlook database, April 2025 edition [Data set].
Keohane, R. O. (1984). After hegemony: Cooperation and discord in the world political economy. Princeton University Press.
Kinzer, S. (2003). All the Shah’s men: An American coup and the roots of Middle East terror. John Wiley & Sons.
Lea, H. (1912). The day of the Saxon. Harper & Brothers.
Lorenz-Spreen, P., Lewandowsky, S., Sunstein, C. R., & Hertwig, R. (2023). A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy. Nature Human Behaviour, 7, 74–101.
Löser, J., & Schilling, U. (1984). Neutralität für Mitteleuropa: Das Ende der Blöcke. C. Bertelsmann.
Lundestad, G. (2003). The United States and Western Europe since 1945: From “empire” by invitation to transatlantic drift. Oxford University Press.
Manners, I. (2002). Normative power Europe: A contradiction in terms? Journal of Common Market Studies, 40(2), 235–258. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5965.00353
Mearsheimer, J. J. (2001). The tragedy of great power politics. W. W. Norton.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization. (1997, May 27). Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization. (2002, May 28). Rome Declaration: NATO-Russia Relations: A New Quality.
Spengler, O. (1926). The decline of the West (C. F. Atkinson, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf. (Original work published 1918–1922)
Spengler, O. (1932). Man and technics: A contribution to a philosophy of life (C. F. Atkinson, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf. (Original work published 1931)
Westad, O. A. (2005). The global Cold War: Third World interventions and the making of our times. Cambridge University Press.
Zwolski, K. (2025). Pan-Europe revisited: Inter-war debates and the EU’s pursuit of geopolitical power. Journal of Common Market Studies.