It is an almost taken-for-granted idea that what we call the West is in relative decline. From an invincible West and a Europe controlling most of Asia or Africa in 1914, what remains today is a “de-Europeanized” configuration on a profoundly changed global chessboard. China and other powers have contributed to the design of a multipolar scenario, with new power relations across the entire spectrum of power. The center of geopolitical gravity has shifted to the Asian region, just as it did before the rise of Europe at the dawn of the 16th century, while the Western demography that occupied a third of the total population at the beginning of the 20th century now represents barely 12% of the world’s commoners.
The perception of this relative decline remains contradictory and blurred, particularly within the Western sphere. The dominance of Europe’s heirs was unprecedented over the last century and tended to overshadow any degradation of their power in perceptions. This is reinforced by the fact that historically the West was regularly traversed by schisms or fault lines within it. One of the tangible consequences of this is that in the “old” world, elites today often live in a state of greater disengagement with their society and a kind of nostalgia for a former splendor. The recent electoral triumph of Donald Trump in the United States is proof of this. On the one hand, it reveals the eagerness of the American nation to return to an active role in the framework of a more competitive and complex globalization. On the other hand, it expresses the political awakening of an American society shaken by the new geopolitical reality and by years of deindustrialization and institutional self-flagellation.
In fact, this general evolution cannot be separated from a true hybrid war waged by the internal and geostrategic rivals of the West, in pursuit of weakening the global order sealed after 1945 and installing the idea of its definitive decline. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is one of the focal points where this order is confronted above all militarily, but also geoeconomically and informationally. But of equal or even greater importance than the military dimension, several dynamics of social warfare, or political warfare in the Anglo-Saxon lexicon, have participated in the fracturing of this order within the framework of a widespread conflict, particularly in the immaterial field, just as the Western alliance has been practicing against its adversaries and its own allies. In other words, the confrontation between a heterogeneous West and its rivals in terms of political warfare has been reconfigured, with very concrete implications in the geopolitical evolution we observe over time.
The communist combat matrix and its mutations
The communist matrix has occupied and continues to occupy a singular place in this framework. Born with Karl Marx at the end of the 19th century, communism was inspired by a school of thought founded on gnosticism, hermeticism and sociological dialectics, with the influence of Rousseau, Hegel and Kant, and other previous elements that we will not be able to address in detail here. Marx was its best synthesizer and embodied a first version of Marxism in the combative perspective of historical materialism that we all know.
Gnosticism, very schematically, is an alteration of the way of thinking that can lead, always according to the end pursued, to attack three pillars of any society: its faith, its reason and its legal order. It proposes a way of overcoming the way in which the world is seen and induces another way to insert oneself in it as a human being and as a society. While the conception of modern progress proposes to better adapt human life to the existing reality, Gnosticism reverses the equation, directing the gaze towards a utopian world that does not exist and that also has all the probabilities of not being able to exist. That is why Marx has been seen as the inventor of a new “opium” of the people, that is to say, as one of the manufacturers of a new faith and reason capable of enlisting the masses outside their traditional religious and cultural roots.
The historian Arnold Toynbee comments in these terms in his book Manking and Mother Earth: “Marxism, like Buddhism, is theoretically atheistic. But, like Darwinism, Marxism provides a substitute for Yahweh, the god of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Darwin’s substitute is Nature, whose selective action is understood as favoring certain races. Marx’s substitute for Yahweh is “historical necessity” and his “chosen people” is the industrial proletariat”.
The first version of communism aimed at the destruction of capitalism through the seizure of power and the means of production. In China, the combined experience of Confucianism, Leninism and Maoism made it possible to incorporate the methodology of vanguard and dialectics, adding to it a form of revolutionary warfare that successfully reversed a semi-colonial situation that had begun in 1840 with the Opium Wars. In the same perspective, Mao Zedong managed to subvert traditional culture by designating the “Four Old Ones” of China (customs, culture, habits and ideas) as elements to be erased. With the Great Leap Forward in 1961, it failed culturally, economically and in terms of internal peace, similar to the process followed by the Soviet Union until 1990.
Already in the 1920s and 1930s, neo-Marxism had formulated its shift from economics to the field of culture. Max Horkheimer, Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci formalized a second communist matrix precisely because of their clash with the cultural solidity of the Western sphere (institutions, religion, values). The strategic view then sought to subvert and fissure this base, in particular from the Church, culture and education.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Hélder Câmara and Paulo Freire shaped a third Marxism in South America with a radicalization embodied in liberation theology, which would later shape the critical theory of education that would spread throughout the Western educational system. This current entered into resonance with the post-modernism of Marcuse, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze or Foucault, postulating that knowledge is constructed more as a function of power than of the ways of approaching existing reality.
During these same decades, Castroist Marxism opted for pseudo-revolutionary armed struggle in South America, while neo-Marxists elsewhere were losing support and began to infiltrate universities and institutions on the fringes of violent action. Later in 1990, with the effective failure of the armed struggle and the fall of the Soviet Union, Castroism launched a political-cultural agenda adopting the new combat partition of the international left.
In the 1970s, the rivalry between Russia and the United States pushed the latter to accompany the transformation of China under Deng Xiaoping. Surprising as it may seem, the trio of Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon and David Rockefeller sealed a model of capitalism combining communist political theory and fascistic corporatism with a global projection. On the Western side, they laid the foundations of a global governance framework in the wake of the Development Goals (SDGs), Agenda 2030, climate and Net Zero, ESG guidelines, etc., with the aim of diminishing the West, then conceived as an enemy to be subjected to this new bipolar order. The Cloward-Piven1 strategy, designed to undermine the United States from within by overtaxing its resources and generating internal conflicts, including through massive illegal immigration, was and remains part of this dynamic. In China, Deng Xiaoping merged several combat cultures (Marxism, Maoism, capitalism, fascism), making his entry into capitalism from a cartelized corporate model, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and exempt from the restrictions imposed on the West.
The purpose of this “communist-fascist” project, carried out in paradoxical collusion with China, is to make Washington and Beijing the two world superpowers and to use Thucydides’ trap as a strategic threat to cancel any pretension of power. It proposes nothing less than impoverishing Western countries, controlling their energy, water, demographics and food, eroding national sovereignties, as well as laying the foundations for global governance. This new phase of the communist combat matrix, still poorly perceived, is today the most dangerous and the one with the greatest geostrategic impact, even if it has no open military fronts for the time being.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the new left began to internalize postmodernism. Georges Soros formalized his method of “reflexivity” as a means of generating conflict in the field of perceptions, also drawing on the Hegelian dialectical method. This method was then exported to China and consolidated the new phase mentioned above. In 1989, intersectionality and multiculturalism were born as a fusion between cultural Maoism, the identity approach and critical constructivist epistemology. Wokism crystallizes in this hotbed. With the election of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, the left set the course for the “reconstruction of culture”, rejecting any posture of objective truth, while the Fabian socialists in the United States managed to penetrate and weaken the Reagan administration.
From the 2000s to the present, these ideas continued to mutate and were amplified by the emergence of the information society. Critical race theory, post-colonial theory, Wokism were formed, all exploiting the West’s major weaknesses, much less economic and institutional than social, racial and identitarian. This matrix occupies today most of the Democratic Party in the United States and the socialist, center-right or right-wing formations in Europe. In the political arena, it is not guided by the classic left-right axis, but on a new tyranny-freedom axis that interweaves formations of left or right according to the contexts.
Not to conclude
There are other combat matrices that also target the Western bloc, including combative Islam, Eurasianism and the Fourth political theory (Russia) or China’s global community of destiny. These are elements of a new conflict landscape that we will see in other chapters. They contribute to a state of systemic warfare, exercised preferably in the immaterial terrain of perceptions, beliefs and knowledge, interweaving military, geo-economic and political fronts in some cases. They constitute a cycle of fifth-generation warfare, as pointed out by several military analysts, for which few strategic apparatuses are prepared.
Heir to Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, the West is a cultural matrix whose pillars are reason, faith and law, embodied in the recognition of the subject, democracy and the rule of law. The operative plot on which this combat matrix pivots managed to form a modus operandi to attack these pillars according to a subversive logic. Other combat cultures were inspired by it. It is always surprising that the West has not learned how to deal with enemies from its own entrails.
