May you live in interesting times, The Tower

Leitmotif 7: A Western crisis of confidence

The Tower Tarot card signifies sudden upheaval, broken pride, disaster

After years of erosion, the pillars of the international order that the US and its Western allies built from the ashes of World War II are betraying signs of critical structural failure and potential collapse.  Yet, despite decades of warning, Western elites continue to act as though the Western “rules-based” order is eternal.  They continue to see the West’s own unruly masses as more of a threat than the increasing international disorder around them, or than their strategic competitors’ fanning of its flames, perhaps even igniting them.

But the evidence of failure in all three pillars of the Western order – legitimacy, economy and military – is becoming undeniable.  The accelerating decay that I described in Global entropy: Enter the dragons – and which has only hastened since – threatens to force the emperor’s reconning with his missing clothes.  The Politics of Rage, which largely reflects average Westerners’ loss of faith in their institutions, has disruptively called attention to the lack of clothing.  But Western elites, clinging to Apex neoliberalism, still haven’t noticed.  What happens when they do?  A crisis in Western confidence – the risk of which is growing rapidly – has broad implications not only for geopolitics, but for markets and asset prices.