The same grim conclusion follows for just about every other project of global meliorism, those which can justly be said to have a planetary aspect. The TEWAR creates enormous pressure on all of these, if only because the TEWAR inescapably brings China into its clutches. As Anatol Lieven argued before the war, “If there is no systematic cooperation on a range of key issues between the US and China, there will be no global cooperation at all.” The West would then just be making agreements with itself. That’s where it's headed.

The decision to employ extreme methods of economic warfare, on the unpersuasive ground that Putin gave Western leaders no alternative, was taken by the West and for the West, for a Western cause above all. The rights and interests of seven-eighths of humanity were not considered in the least. The combined population of the United States, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand is 959 million, which is 12 percent of the world’s 7.9 billion people. By what right do they command the destinies of the others?  The West says it is committed to national self-determination, to the freedom of the peoples, but why then does the West so readily sacrifice their ability to scrape by?

Beyond the bottom billion, there are another billion people close to the margin. Another rung up is genteel poverty. All of these rungs of humanity are a lot closer to destitution than even a moderately destitute member of the financial commentariat. They have the right to expect that the West will not dismiss their perspective as beneath contempt. The West, in my view, is not under an obligation to pay reparations to the Global South, nor even to badly strain its resources to help them, but it is under a solemn obligation not to hurt them. The United States is cavalier in its breakage of that rule.

In his Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington wrote of how the late twentieth century “blossomed forth in the widespread and parochial conceit that the European civilization of the West is now the universal civilization of the world.” Huntington did not deny that there was a universal civilization; he did deny, emphatically and wisely, that the West could claim to be that of itself. The significance of the TEWAR is that it stretches this claim to universality beyond anything previously known or attempted by the Western powers since 1945. During the Cold War, it was the attractiveness of the American idea, the sheer unbelievable bounty you would get by signing on with the nice guys, that gave America a big foothold in world public opinion. Now, the United States invariably appears as the sternest of schoolmasters, the type that used to exist in the old days, for whom the administration of corporal punishment seemed like the best part of the job.

How can this arrogation of power possibly win the allegiance of the peoples in the long run?

David C. Hendrickson is President of the John Quincy Adams Society and the author of Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition (Oxford, 2018). His website is davidhendrickson.org.

Image: Reuters.