The Shifting Global Order and its Implications for the Middle East: Part 2
The decline of global order is no longer driven by authoritarian challenge alone. Democracies are unraveling from within, undone by grievance politics, supremacist nostalgia, and technology.
Editorial Note: This essay is the second installment in a three-part series. The first installment traced the historical evolution of the liberal international system and the structural challenges threatening it. The second shifts the focus inward, examining the cultural and ideological currents corroding the foundations of global order from within.
The Crisis Within
In the first installment of this three-part series, I argued that liberal norms—sovereignty, human rights, self-determination—are not timeless universals but recent achievements: precarious and contingent on power. Their survival depends on historical honesty and strategic adaptation. In this second essay, we turn inward toward the cultural dynamics eroding the global order from within.
The international order is being hollowed out by forces incubated within democracies themselves, from a politics of victimhood on one end and a revival of supremacist nostalgia on the other. These two tendencies, seemingly opposed, operate as mirror images—each feeding off and legitimizing the other, each corroding the civic and normative scaffolding of democratic life. Suppose the first essay offered humility as an antidote to hubris. In that case, this one argues for urgency: unless we confront these fractures, the liberal order will not fall to foreign assault—but to slow rot from within.
1. The Rise of Victimhood as Identity
In recent decades, critiques of Western hypocrisy have migrated from anti-colonial discourse into a globalized culture of grievance. What began as a legitimate demand for accountability has metastasized into an ideology that elevates victimhood into a moral identity. From campus debates to diplomatic arenas, the framing is familiar: entire societies are cast as eternal oppressors, others as perpetual victims. Agency, once the rallying cry of liberation movements, is now the first casualty of this worldview.
Domestically, identity politics fractures the civic commons, replacing universal citizenship with hierarchies of suffering. Globally, this logic fuels rhetorical warfare. Authoritarian states weaponize postcolonial narratives to delegitimize human-rights critiques while entrenching their own repression. The result is a paradox; movements that claim to fight injustice end up entrenching it by externalizing responsibility. As everyone scrambles to present themselves as “patient zero” of oppression, moral clarity dissolves. Rights become entitlements without reciprocal obligations, and history becomes an alibi and a justification rather than a teacher.
This matters because democracies cannot function without the presumption of agency. A culture obsessed with grievance breeds political immobilism at home and incoherence abroad. It is one half of a one-two punch, knocking out both democracy and modernity.
2. Supremacism Redux
The other half of that punch comes from the right in the form of a revival of civilizational supremacism masquerading as cultural confidence. Faced with rising powers and cultural dislocation, some in the West misread historical contingency as destiny, converting legitimate pride in democratic achievements into nostalgic arrogance. The story they tell themselves is seductively simple: the West triumphed because it is inherently superior. From there, the slope is steep toward ethnonationalism, nativism, and a willingness to abandon the very universalism that once anchored liberal legitimacy.
Retrenchment and the turn to transactional diplomacy—often justified as conflict avoidance or national interest—are further symptoms of this trend. But they, too, represent a retreat from responsibility and a refusal to uphold the very norms that make global order possible. The new ethos becomes, “We intervene only when it serves us; otherwise, who cares?” This cynical imperialism, or anti-imperialism on demand, is nothing less than capitulation. It recasts democratic leaders as godfathers and global politics as turf warfare—mafia-style arrangements dressed up as strategy. Authoritarian leaders may cheer this shift, but the reverberations will reach home, corroding democratic values from within. This mindset knows no borders.
This impulse is as dangerous as its mirror opposite. Supremacist thinking blinds policymakers to the adaptive realities of global politics, encouraging zero-sum strategies that escalate rather than manage conflict. Worse, it corrodes the normative credibility of democracies. How can liberal states champion equality abroad while tolerating exclusion at home? How can they promote rights only when they align with their interests, yet ignore them when they are inconvenient? When nostalgia becomes policy, the liberal order unravels—not through attack, but through abdication.
Together, these twin ideologies—victimhood and supremacy—form a toxic feedback loop. Each thrives on the other’s excesses, feeding polarization, undermining trust, and hollowing out the democratic center where pragmatic solutions once lived.
3. Technology and the New Oligarchies
If culture supplies the accelerant, technology provides the spark—and vice versa. The relationship is deeply symbiotic. Digital platforms have turned outrage into a business model, amplifying grievance politics and supremacist fantasies alike. And business is booming. Algorithms curate moral tribalism because virality rewards extremism. What began as a democratization of speech has metastasized into an architecture of manipulation, where truth operates at a structural disadvantage.
Meanwhile, tech oligarchies, largely unaccountable and operating beyond national jurisdictions, wield powers once reserved for empires. Authoritarian regimes exploit these tools and the greed of their makers to export illiberal norms and surveil dissent. Democracies lag behind, hampered by fragmented, reactive regulation. Wealth consolidates into influence, birthing a new class of transnational actors whose accountability extends no further than shareholder value. The result is digital feudalism: sovereignty becomes porous, and governance, whether national or global, struggles to catch up.
What is emerging is not the flat world promised by utopian globalization, but a stratified one: competing oligarchic blocs—corporate and state—resurrecting 19th-century patterns of imperial rivalry, this time over data and algorithms rather than colonies.
4. Norm Erosion by Instrumentalization
Contrary to alarmist narratives, global norms are not being discarded wholesale; they are being hollowed out by selective application. Autocracies invoke sovereignty to shield repression while trampling it in their neighbors’ territory. Democracies preach human rights while compromising them in the name of security. This pattern corrodes legitimacy far more insidiously than open rejection. It creates a world where rules still exist but are seen as optional, where norms function as rhetorical weapons rather than binding commitments. And in such a world, trust—the invisible currency of order—evaporates.
5. Pathways Forward
If the first installment in this three-part series argued for humility before history, this one argues for strategic clarity and urgency. The liberal order cannot be defended with nostalgia or dismantled with nihilism. It must be adapted with intent. That requires five urgent moves:
Re-center Agency: Structural injustice exists, but blaming it exclusively on external forces is self-defeating. Empowerment begins internally in governance, education, and civic culture. Nations that deny this truth mortgage their future to grievance.
Recalibrate Alliances: Norms need power. A flexible coalition of democracies, whether formalized or ad hoc, can hedge against the vulnerabilities of U.S. decline and retrenchment while deterring authoritarian revisionism.
Reclaim Narrative Clarity: Liberal democracy is not perfect, but it institutionalizes self-correction in ways closed systems cannot. That is its moral edge. Defend it unapologetically, but without lapsing into supremacist hubris.
Tame Tech Oligarchies: Slow, reactive regulation is no longer sufficient. Democratic states must lead in establishing global trust-busting mechanisms and enforceable standards for algorithmic transparency before digital feudalism ossifies into a new permanent order. This isn’t just about fairness; it’s about restoring competitive dynamism. Startups need a fighting chance to challenge dominant platforms and disrupt entrenched systems. Oligarchies monopolize, and monopolies stifle creativity, innovation, and democratic resilience.
Normalize Pluralism without Relativism: Accept cultural diversity, but draw a red line at systemic violations of agency and fundamental rights. Not all governance models are morally equivalent, and pretending they are only accelerates global disorder.
The Battle for Meaning
The liberal order’s crisis is not merely a contest of tanks or treaties; it is a battle of narratives—about who we are, what we value, and whether agency or grievance will define the human story. Victimhood and supremacy are seductive because they simplify a complex world into morality plays. But they are both lies, and lies—when believed at scale—become self-fulfilling prophecies.
The real choice before us is not between East and West, North and South, Left and Right, or even democracy and autocracy. It is between a world that clings to zero-sum fantasies and one that acknowledges the radical interdependence of the 21st century. The scaffolding of global order will not collapse overnight. It will rot quietly from within—unless we rebuild its foundations not only in law and power, but in the narratives we tell ourselves.
Up Next: What the Crisis of Global Norms Means for the Middle East
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