No voice now rises above the roar of the American Israeli war on Iran. Yet understanding this war requires revisiting the concepts that led to its outbreak in the first place. For that reason, it is impossible to overlook the speech delivered by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference in February last year, a speech that drew wide attention both inside and outside the United States, to the point that it reportedly stirred Donald Trump’s jealousy, prompting him to joke that so much praise for Rubio might force him to remove him from office. Rubio’s address effectively condensed the political worldview of the current US administration into a brief slogan: “The West against the world.”
Rubio called on Europe to unite with the United States on the basis of a shared belonging to a Western civilisation carrying a common religious and cultural inheritance. Ideological zeal led the Cuban born US Secretary of State to exaggerate even further by speaking of a common language within this civilisational legacy. This naturally raises the question: what common language exactly was Rubio referring to? Latin, the only language once shared by several European peoples, was never the language of daily life, but of high culture, and ultimately became a dead language, not only among the public, but especially after the Bible was published in German following the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation.
If Rubio meant English, he may have overlooked the fact that the number of native speakers of Russian, French, and German in Europe exceeds the number of native English speakers across Europe, the United States’ principal partner in the so called Western world. The United States itself, moreover, historically never adopted English as an official language at the federal level, even though it remained the dominant language in government, education, and media. That was the situation Donald Trump attempted to alter in March 2025 through an executive order designating English as the country’s official language for the first time.
Even if one sets aside this imagined common language, “Western civilisation” today faces a threefold threat according to Rubio’s view, which is little more than a repetition of the discourse of the American right as it has taken shape since the 1970s. There is the strategic threat posed by China and Russia through their military power, as well as China’s economic capabilities. Then there is the demographic threat confronting the white race, through Latin American migration in the case of the United States and African migration in the case of Europe. Finally comes the cultural threat, which the American right does not clearly identify in its public rhetoric, yet whose literature, as we shall see, points unmistakably with crusading hostility towards Islam.
This civilisational discourse of the West in confrontation with Islam, or the East, or the Other more generally, tempts one into adopting a reversed civilisational lens, accepting the Western thesis that the real global conflict is a civilisational struggle between Western civilisation and the white race on one side, and Muslims, Arabs, or Asians on the other. Such a view leads to cultural entrenchment in the face of the Western threat, which is a logical response to such a “crusading declaration”. Yet what deserves attention here is that this civilisational struggle is not inevitable in the way the American right presents it today. Rather, it is a conflict inflamed by that American right through its close alliance with Israel and its attempt to impose a unifying framework linking the United States, Europe, and Israel as a single Western civilisation facing the Muslim Other, without any genuine concern for the actual interests of the United States in directing its energy towards Israel.
Economy and Geography
Historically, two theoretical visions emerged around the true nature of modern international conflict. The left argued that this conflict arose from the rise of monopoly capitalism and its drive to dominate markets, resources, and even labour, thus producing imperialism, meaning the effort of major capitalist states to control other countries across the Global South. In this reading, cultural slogans such as religious or civilisational hostility were not the true cause of enmity, but rather a cover used to conceal the underlying material interests at stake.
This theory of imperialism took the Boer War as one of its key examples in demonstrating the material and economic roots of hostility. In the Second Boer War, fought in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, British colonialism waged a brutal war not against non Christian black Africans, but against white European Christian Dutch settlers. British colonialism dealt with the Boers with the same ferocity it directed at the Indian people, driven by the greed of British colonialists seeking control over the mines held by the Boers.
Supporters of geopolitics, meanwhile, saw global conflict as an expression of an unavoidable geographical rivalry among powers distributed across a specific regional space.
In contrast to the economic explanation, geopolitical theories emerged from the early twentieth century, viewing conflict as the outcome of geographically determined competition among powers occupying a given region. Sir Halford Mackinder, the British geographer and politician, advanced his theory of the geographical pivot of history. Mackinder argued that the Eurasian expanse stretching between Russia and Central Europe formed the heartland of the world, and that whoever controlled it could dominate the world island. This world island consisted of the three old continents, Asia, Europe, and Africa, and whoever controlled it would control the entire world.
Mackinder’s theory was in fact shaped by the growing rivalry between England and Germany, and by British fears of a German Russian alliance that could have enabled Germany to dominate Europe while leaving England an isolated and besieged island. The expansion of the railway intensified this Eurasian threat by allowing land powers to mobilise rapidly and thereby surpass the historical advantage long enjoyed by maritime powers.
The American admiral Alfred Mahan was influenced by Mackinder’s ideas and came to see history as a permanent geographical conflict between land powers and sea powers. Yet he believed superiority ultimately belonged to the side with the strongest naval forces, because of their control over trade routes and their ability to project military power rapidly across the globe.
Geopolitical theories later acquired a civilisational dimension through the German school of geopolitics. Karl Haushofer adopted the premise of conflict between land powers, or tellurocracies, and sea powers, or thalassocracies. He added that this conflict would lead states to cluster into wide geopolitical spaces, or Grossraum, around a central power such as Germany in the Eurasian sphere, in order to wage struggle against other large spaces, above all England.
Carl Schmitt, in his work The Nomos of the Earth, added a further civilisational dimension to geopolitics. He saw the conflict between continental Europe and the Atlantic powers not merely as a political struggle, but as a cultural one between European powers inclined towards preserving tradition, heritage, and distinct cultural identity, and the Anglo Saxon Atlantic powers, England and America, which embraced liberalism. The problem with liberalism, in Schmitt’s view, was its claim to universal rights and values transcending cultural identities. In doing so, it transformed traditional conflicts from wars between opponents seeking limited gains into existential moral wars between liberal good and identity based evil.
Up to that point, theories of civilisational struggle revolved not around a conflict between West and East or Europe and Asia, but largely within the West itself, between continental Europe and the Atlantic powers. The imperial capitalist struggle between rapidly industrialising Germany and dominant Britain was clothed in cultural language from both sides: the Aryan race against the Semitic threat, liberal democracy against fascist authoritarianism, continental identity and tradition against Atlantic liberalism.
The notion of “the West” at that stage was used primarily in a cultural context, and ironically it was a context of decline rather than of declaring war against the world.
The West had not yet been invented, nor had it been placed in opposition to the East. The East, preoccupied with liberation from colonialism, was itself divided by these same claims, whether on ideological grounds, such as support for democracy among Arab liberal forces like Egypt’s Wafd Party, or on pragmatic and even nationalist grounds, as with King Farouk in Egypt and Abd al Rahman al Kayyali’s government in Iraq leaning towards Germany in the hope of liberation from British colonialism.
The term “the West” was first used largely in a cultural setting, and paradoxically in a discourse of decay rather than domination. The German thinker Oswald Spengler was among the first to articulate the term explicitly in his book The Decline of the West. Spengler was in fact a romantic thinker hostile to liberalism and to the idea that there are basic human rights by which different civilisations can be compared. In his view, Western civilisation was not a superior stage of historical progress, but merely one civilisation among many, none of which could be judged as inherently superior. He believed it had degenerated into a Faustian civilisation through its abandonment of spirituality, its descent into materialism, and the corruption of democracy under the rule of money.
The Invention of the West
The modern Western idea was born after the Second World War through an attempt to overcome internal Western division by proposing the notion of a shared Judeo Christian tradition. Before the war, Jews had generally tended towards communism as a political creed that was not based on national belonging, a basis that often excluded Jews in Europe and treated them as suspect outsiders whose loyalty was always in question. After the war, however, many formerly Marxist Jewish intellectuals shifted towards a culturally liberal position hostile to authoritarian totalitarian systems that threatened minorities. They sought to confront the cultural pull of extreme nationalism and closed identities by proposing a broad cultural identity, the Western identity, within which Jew and Christian could overlap. The Jewish sociologist and theologian Will Herberg was the first to advance this vision in the United States.
No one in Europe had previously conceived of Western civilisation as a blend of Christianity and Judaism, nor was it easy to imagine a unifying framework capable of containing both traditions. In classical Western Christianity, Judaism remained an internal enemy no different in principle from Muslims, who represented the external enemy.
During the First Crusade, for example, led by Peter the Hermit and known as the People’s Crusade because it was not organised by kings and princes, pogroms were carried out against the Jews of the Rhineland in western Germany. Likewise, when the Moriscos were expelled from al Andalus, the Sephardic Jews of al Andalus suffered a persecution resembling that inflicted on Muslims in Spain. Jewish philosophers contributed significantly to the development of Western culture from the nineteenth century onward, heralding a form of abandonment of Jewish distinctiveness in favour of integration into modern European identities through Enlightenment ideals. Yet Jewish culture and Jewish communities continued to be viewed with suspicion by Europeans even after the Enlightenment.
The neoconservatives in the United States embraced this idea of Judaism and Christianity forming a shared tradition. This group emerged among Jewish intellectuals in New York who had migrated from Europe before the Second World War, led by figures such as Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, and to some extent Leo Strauss. The neoconservatives argued for the necessity of preserving the Western cultural framework, of which religious culture formed a part, in the face of moral and cultural relativism that threatened society and allowed “extremist currents” to emerge. At the same time, this group remained committed to liberal democracy, which is why it came to be described as “conservative”, but “new”.
The rising American right in the 1970s adopted this group as a means of attacking the New Left, which posed a serious challenge to the right, and of undermining the New Deal policies championed by the Democratic Party. Those social programmes of a left leaning character had dominated American economic and social life from the rise of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 until their dismantling began under the hard right President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s.
Among the central ideas advanced by this group was support for the relationship between the United States and Israel as two parties within the broader equation of the Judeo Christian West. Israel, in the eyes of the neoconservatives, also represented a model of a state that respected cultural tradition, embodied in Jewish heritage, while at the same time preserving liberal democracy and secular Enlightenment values.
This position planted the seeds of a civilisational Western vision that no longer viewed the principal conflict as one among Western powers themselves, whether between Eurasian and Atlantic powers or between socialism and capitalism. Instead, it portrayed the conflict as one between Western civilisation and those who differ from it, foremost among them the alleged Islamic extremists who threaten Israel and oppose the United States because of its lavish support for Israel, a relationship that since the Nixon era has become a pathological existential bond rather than a pragmatic political alliance.
Paul Gottfried, one of the leading thinkers of traditional conservatism, described the neoconservatives as people who mistook the capital of the United States and imagined it to be Tel Aviv.
Traditional conservatives, in fact, launched a sustained critique of the neoconservatives’ Zionist orientation. Gottfried, one of the major theorists of the paleoconservative school, famously said they confused Washington with Tel Aviv. This conservative current, while sharing many of the same cultural premises, still regards the alliance with Israel as a pathological condition that threatens the United States, as can be seen in the rhetoric of figures such as Tucker Carlson and other traditional conservatives.
The New Crusades
The Zionist American right exploited the Iranian Revolution in order to exaggerate the supposed hostility between the newly invented West and Islam. This discourse served as a colonial pretext for redirecting American resources towards the Middle East in support of Israel and for launching a campaign of aggression against Islam. Edward Said confronted this rhetoric in his book Covering Islam, viewing it as a revival of Orientalism, a framework that begins from ordinary cultural difference among civilisations and religions, but then transforms that difference into political hostility by casting the different other, Muslims in this case, as existential enemies.
According to these claims, the Muslim cannot be an ally of the West, the interests of the two sides can never converge, and Islam itself is inherently incompatible with democracy. The problem is that these ideas, regardless of their factual validity, did not arise from a sincere engagement with difference or from an attempt to reach peaceful cultural accommodations. Rather, they were designed to justify America’s “unwarranted” support for Israel, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
Islamic forces did in fact ally with the United States against the Soviet Union as a common threat in various places and moments, as occurred in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and earlier during the Indonesian coup against Sukarno in 1967, and even against Arab republican regimes that leaned towards the Soviet camp. The vast majority of Islamic states also showed a clear tendency towards alliance with the United States and Europe, even when that meant standing against China and Russia. Iran itself did not adopt a principled alignment with China against the United States, and remained prepared for rapprochement with Washington if the latter abandoned its policy of supporting Israel.
Yet all these realities dissolve in the writings of the new Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis and the “new crusaders” such as Samuel Huntington. In their telling, Islam is an existential enemy, Israel is the forward defence line of the West and civilisation against extremism, savagery, and Islamic barbarism, and Muslims are the ones who initiate hostility towards Israel due to their cultural extremism or demographic expansion, which supposedly drives them to swallow “peaceful neighbours” like Israel.
The discourse of the new American right, now embodied in its most vulgar form in the Trump administration and voiced by figures such as Marco Rubio and JD Vance, rests on the thesis Samuel Huntington set out in The Clash of Civilisations. Huntington never explains why civilisations must clash, or why they cannot coexist peacefully, even though such coexistence is clearly possible, particularly given the development of global capitalism, international trade, the relocation of industry to Asia, and the easy movement of capital across continents and states.
He does not explain this because he does not wish to state plainly that the conflict is first and foremost an imperial conflict aimed at preserving the interests of the American capitalist elite and justifying its greed, a greed that drives it to mobilise millions of Americans and Europeans into its private wars with China. It is also a Zionist conflict aimed at preserving Israel, led by the same elite that is either allied with Israel or deeply tied to it through religious and cultural affiliation, figures such as financier Bill Ackman, American tycoon Larry Ellison, and the duo Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the owners of Palantir.
Huntington distinguishes between modernisation and Westernisation. In his framework, non Western civilisations may accept material modernisation but reject cultural Westernisation. He then claims that the demographic explosion in Muslim societies will lead to wars erupting along the fault lines between Muslims and other civilisations. This is a falsehood contradicted by reality, by the peace between Asian Muslims and their neighbours, and between Arab Muslims and both Europe and Africa. What Huntington conceals here is that the war igniting along the borders of Muslim societies is a specific war rooted in the conflict with Israel, a conflict that has nothing to do with Muslim demographic growth or religious extremism, but rather with the colonial and genocidal character of the Zionist project.
Huntington borrows Haushofer’s hypothesis of core states around which civilisational spaces gather and suggests that Türkiye might play that role in the Islamic world, which may well be true today. Yet he also calls upon the United States to embrace its Western identity more forcefully, presenting this as the path of civilisational salvation for both America and the West. He then advances his crude claim that the West did not triumph over other civilisations because of its cultural virtues, but because of the power of its weapons, and that if the West has forgotten this, others have not.
Huntington speaks with the blindness of a crusader who seeks to militarise difference and conflict and wage war against the other. With a naivety unworthy of a serious political scholar, he assumes that the West simply awoke one day possessing advanced weapons unavailable to others, rather than recognising that those weapons were the product of scientific and institutional development, themselves born from commitment to particular values and visions that drove such development forward and ultimately produced military superiority.
Economy and Culture
This same blind vision is echoed by Alex Karp, a Jewish investor and intellectual who began his life as a liberal before embracing technological determinism, the belief that technology is the solution to every problem facing society and civilisation. Karp, who goes out of his way to display his loyalty to Israel alongside his friend Peter Thiel, argues that technology must be harnessed in service of Western military superiority and that this superiority must be displayed with force and violence to suppress the West’s three enemies: China, Russia, and Iran. He also employs Huntington’s language almost word for word, to the point of quoting Huntington’s claim that the only real superiority is military superiority, in a letter he sent to investors in Palantir, the company he heads. Palantir in particular has played a pivotal role in enabling the genocide in Gaza by providing Israel with the artificial intelligence software necessary to operate drones and analyse the data of Gaza’s population.
Like the wider current of American Zionism, including Larry Ellison, Karp calls for rushing into war against Iran and portrays it as a Western interest, despite the fact that many strategic experts in the United States and Europe believe that war with Iran serves neither their interests nor those of the West, but instead drains their military strength while opening the field to the Chinese rival.
The American Zionist current formulates an imagined Western identity under whose shadow it places both the United States and Israel, while transforming Muslims, who in reality are peaceful, into an existential threat to this imagined West.
This historical and ideological survey makes clear that the issue is not one of a West defending its superiority or of an American state protecting its interests. Rather, it is the story of an American Zionist current constructing an imagined Western identity that shelters both the United States and Israel, while turning peaceful Muslims into an existential threat to that fabricated West and draining America’s capabilities and resources not in response to strategic threats, but in service of Israeli demands.
At the theoretical level, this discourse appears deeply fragile and internally contradictory. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, sees immigration as a demographic threat to the West and campaigns against it in the United States, even though the migrants he opposes are not primarily Arab, Muslim, or Eastern peoples, but Latin American peoples from the very same ethnic world to which he himself belongs.
US Vice President JD Vance represents another contradiction. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, presenting Catholicism as a religious, cultural, and moral reference point capable of transcending Protestant fragmentation and the historical link between Protestant reform and liberal individualism, which he claims now threatens the cultural identity of the West and the United States. Yet this same Vance, who advances these claims, is also waging war on Latin American migrants, who constitute the largest bloc of Catholics in the Americas.
Likewise, Karp, Thiel, and Larry Ellison claim to be serving America’s strategic interests by delivering technological support and military superiority to the United States, yet the same trio calls on America to exhaust its strength and redirect its most powerful military force towards Latin America and Iran. This contradiction was already visible in the claims of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington that “extremist Muslims” threaten the West and dream of its destruction, at a time when most Arab and Islamic governments displayed a clear political inclination towards the United States, while the main resistance to American dominance came from left wing movements and regimes in Latin America.
These glaring ideological contradictions reveal a clear crisis within American capitalism. Neoliberal policies that deprived the poor of social programmes and reduced taxes on the rich have concentrated American wealth in unprecedented fashion in the hands of a tiny layer of major capitalists, with the top 0.1 per cent of Americans holding around 15 per cent of the country’s wealth. At the same time, rising government debt, higher energy prices, and declining industrial production in the United States have caused inflation to exert severe pressure on the American public, creating a clear political and economic crisis that began two decades ago and has intensified and receded without ever truly disappearing.
Instead of confronting this crisis, which is rooted in real inequality, the American right has moved towards imposing arbitrary tariffs without any clear economic vision and manufacturing cultural conflicts that redirect popular anger towards migrants and Muslims. Faced with growing criticism of American support for Israel, the American right today needs to manufacture a new, imaginary cultural conflict between West and East in order to justify the “blatant political corruption” at the heart of the United States’ relationship with Israel.
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