The long peace is over
On the 80th anniversary of VE Day, the world is edging ever closer to another apocalyptic conflagration, with India-Pakistan the latest terrifying escalation.
Pax Americana has been shattered, never to return, and with it the delusions of Western modernity.
The situation feels hopeless. The Long Peace, as John Lewis Gaddis called it, was an accident of history, a one-off consequence of America’s fleeting supremacy and the Cold War,
not, as hubristic Western elites convinced themselves, the byproduct of an inevitable ascent of humanity from superstition to reason.
The Global South is laughing at the decadent West, including at Donald Trump’s naivety, and China’s President Xi is meeting his new vassal Vladimir Putin.
America is no longer rich, strong or capable enough to keep the peace, and it wouldn’t want to even if it could.
Its efforts to do so after 9/11 ended in catastrophe, as did its meddling in Libya and elsewhere.
Trump voters no longer want to serve as cannon fodder in forever foreign wars.
His project is very much a defensive retreat, the winding down of the Great American empire, combined with a MAGA version of the Monroe doctrine
The collapse in war-fighting capacity has been staggering. Combined with the pathologies of multiculturalism, especially in Britain and Europe, and the rise of pacifism and a woke, anti-patriotic, Western self-hatred, we are even less fighting fit than we were prior to rearmament in the 1930s.
Allister Heath Telegraph 7 May 2025
Kommentarer