The Wests: Decline Management and Geopolitics

The ebbing power of the United States signals the end of the period in which a series of “Wests” have created, globalized, and dominated an international order. Each “West” has had its own norms of authority and coercive utopia, but they shared in common the projection of a sense of modernity, technical proficiency, and inevitable, invincible authority. The two current Wests, the European Union and the United States, boast a partial normative overlap but have different creation myths. American fumbling of its hegemonic moments highlights the narrowing of room for error that defines decline. Still, decline does not necessarily lead to collapse, and skillful management could mitigate its effect. In part, this depends on whether Washington can come to rely less on neo-Wilsonian nostrums and more on the creative side of the American record.