I often rebut people in their neoconservative geopolitical views by telling them that their head is stuck in the 1980s.

This is what I mean by that.

The 20th century was the century of the contest between Modernist political theories — Liberalism vs. communism versus fascism. In 1991, communism collapsed in all but a few isolated enclaves. But Liberalism did not defeat communism, it died of old age due to internal contradictions.

The Liberal West experienced a unipolar moment of hubris thinking that we were the reason that Communism collapsed. (I used to think this way myself for a few years, and then I began to see how things were actually unfolding.) Now all the nations were obliged to adopt Liberal democratic values with equal rights for all. And that included abortion rights, gay rights, transgender rights, and so on. I remember the first time I realized that, I began to think that in the same way that God judged fascism and communism, He has now begun judged the Liberal West.

Most nations of the world do not go along with Liberalism. There continue to be illiberal democracies, democracies that do not want social liberalism, and also autocracies that want to return to their civilizational roots.

(By democracies here I simply mean that people vote for their leaders. I realize that there’s no such thing as a pure democracy.)

There is also a surge of nationalist populism, such as the MAGA movement in the US and similar nationalist movements in numerous other countries. The core of these movements is that they are anti-globalist. However, they don’t really have a political theory such as Liberalism. They just have an urge to work to win elections. And this is the reason why things don’t change that much. But in many nations they are making progress. Their system is based on family, culture, religion, tradition, etc. That’s what we need to do in America and in all the West, but we’re seeing it happened first in Latin America, and in some Eastern European countries. Certainly Africa is coming along strong too.

The problem is that most Western countries did not get the memo. They decided that they were obliged to push the Liberal International Order (LIO) on the world, often called the “rules-based order,” and decide the rules for everyone.

The problem now is that we political leaders in the West — including Donald Trump who doesn’t really subscribe to a particular political theory, but who is nationalist and populist — look at geopolitics as playing cards. It’s game theory. They don’t negotiate with other countries, they just dictate the Western narrative is and expect them to go along with it.

On the other side, they are playing a completely different game. It looks like they have the same deck of cards, but it is as though their side is playing bridge, and our side is playing go fish.

The problem for the West, is that go fish is a zero sum games. You don’t win in the long run against a long term strategy, at best you break even or you lose.

We can also use the analogy of playing checkers versus playing chess.

But 85% of the world does have a long-term strategy. They can simply outlast us. The problem with Liberal democracies, is that there’s no continuity. A policy may last until the next election cycle and then is reversed. In illiberal democracies and autocracies their leaders sometimes serve for 15 or 20 years. And they can pass the baton onto a like-minded leader.

For example, since the beginning of the Ukraine War in 2022, the only Western head of state who favored sanctions on Russia that is still in power is Emmanuel Macron in France. Vladimir Putin and his partners in BRICS understand that they can simply wait the West out, while the populist surge rises. Then Western democracies will vote out their incompetent leaders and return to nationalism in which they protect their own interests. There will be less and less interest in enforcing a rules-based world order.

They also know that the United States is the last of the great Western World Trade Currency Empires. Yes, we will still be on top economically for a few more decades, but they know that globally, the economic might will shift toward the global south and the east. It’s just a simple matter of demographics. It used to be 100 years ago that 40% of the world lived in the West, now it’s less than 15%. Already most of the World GDP is with the BRICS nations, and no longer with the G7. Trump said as much in his meeting with the prime minister of Canada yesterday.

The decline of America may or may not be catastrophic, but at some point we will decline as the hyperpower of the world. It will happen eventually. It doesn’t mean that people cannot still have a good live, but other nations will surpass us.

The elite who have the most to lose actually understand this very well. It’s not that they’re afraid of losing money, but they’re afraid of losing the power to manipulate. And so they make a lot of desperate moves. They are evil, dangerous men and women who have invested in a Deep State to run things when elections don’t go their way.

University professors John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs and a host of other thinkers like them understand history. They understand political philosophy, economics, geopolitics, and they know where things are headed. It doesn’t matter where they are on the political spectrum, they might be left wing or right wing, but they see it. Most Americans don’t have the critical thinking skills or the patience to keep up with this. So they just go along with propaganda narratives of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which are just two sides of the same Liberal coin.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed is that the people who are speaking out the most strongly on this are not just university professors and intellectuals, but many are ex-CIA agents and ex-military who were trained to understand what was at stake and to fight to keep America on top.

But they soon became aware of the reality of the way that the world actually works. They understood that it was futile to use hybrid warfare, and military warfare to try to force our system on the rest of the world. And whether they like it or not, they are sounding the alarm telling us that it’s inevitable that the world is headed in a certain direction. There are some realists who get this, I would put John Mearsheimer in that group. They don’t like it, but they are just trying to explain to people that this is reality. And then there are other people like Jeff Sachs who are more idealistic from the multipolar point of view. I like both of these gentlemen, but I am more along the thinking of Jeffrey Sachs. He is a lot more optimistic, and I personally believe that this shift is God’s plan for the nations.

I’m finding more and more people are awakening to this reality. It is extremely encouraging and exciting.