Western hegemony has entered a phase of irreversible decline

A superclass that has grown accustomed to unquestioned supremacy is unlikely to relinquish control voluntarily, which is why the times we are living through are so bloody — and so dangerous

English transcript of an interview I gave to journalist Mohsen Abdelmoumen for the Algerian French-language newspaper La Nouvelle République.

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In your opinion, what are the real issues behind the militarisation of Greenland by Western powers? And why does Donald Trump want to annex Greenland?

I think that, when it comes to imperial powers such as the United States, it is unhelpful to over-subjectivise politics — that is, to ascribe excessive importance to individual presidents. As powerful as an American president may appear on paper (“commander-in-chief” and all that), the reality is that he ultimately remains a temporary torch-bearer whose ability to steer the imperial machinery in one direction or another — let alone drastically alter its course — is rather limited. What Trump “wants”, even assuming that a coherent strategy truly underlies his actions, is therefore of secondary importance. It is far more useful to focus on the long-term strategy of the US imperial system itself: a structure encompassing entrenched financial, military-industrial, corporate and intelligence interests, synthesised through the apparatus of the permanent state. Unlike the personalities who momentarily preside over it, this system exhibits striking continuity across years and even decades.

In this sense, Trump’s policies fit comfortably within the broader US strategy of hindering the rise of alternative centres of power and, more specifically, of maintaining leverage over global energy markets — even if his tactical approach and rhetoric differ from those of the Biden presidency. For a long time, US planners have regarded as a key threat to American hegemony the growing role of energy suppliers operating outside Washington’s control — most notably Venezuela, Iran, and Russia — whose oil and gas exports have fuelled not only China’s rapid ascent but also Europe’s industrial base. A central element of the American response, therefore, was the conclusion that Europe had to be decoupled from Russian gas and redirected toward American LNG.

Successive administrations, beginning in the early 2000s, pursued policies aimed at destabilising Ukraine as a means of driving a wedge between Europe and Russia. This objective was ultimately realised under the Biden administration, which succeeded in pushing Europe toward near-total energy dependence on the United States by drawing the continent into a proxy war with Russia, culminating in Europe’s decision to sever its energy ties with Moscow. Trump is now continuing along this trajectory — not only by consolidating and deepening Europe’s dependency on US energy supplies and maintaining sanctions on Russian oil, but also by seeking to reassert American control over physical choke points in the global oil trade that had slipped from its grasp. The seizure of Venezuelan oil assets and the escalating pressure on Iran [note: this interview took place before the US-Israeli attack on Iran] form part of this wider strategy. The ultimate aim is to gain leverage over rival powers — above all China — by re-establishing the United States as an indispensable “middleman” between them and global energy flows.

This is where Greenland enters the picture. The island occupies a strategic position at the gateway to the Arctic Ocean, a region of immense geopolitical value. Not only does the Arctic hold vast untapped reserves of oil and gas, but the melting of polar ice caps is opening previously inaccessible maritime routes that could significantly reshape global trade dynamics. Chief among these is the Northern Sea Route along Russia’s coastline and through the Bering Strait, which could reduce transit times between Asia and Europe by as much as 40% while bypassing traditional corridors such as the Panama and Suez Canals. By re-militarising Greenland, the United States aims to secure influence over what is poised to become a critical supply artery — particularly for oil — linking Russia and China to global markets. In this sense, Greenland is set to emerge as a key flashpoint in the broader rivalry between the United States and the Sino-Russian axis. There are, of course, more prosaic motives behind Trump’s interest in the island — such as granting his billionaire allies access to its mineral wealth — but these are ultimately of secondary significance.

In your opinion, what is NATO’s real function?

NATO’s real function was candidly summarised by its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, as that of “keeping the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”. In other words, the alliance’s original purpose was to prevent the emergence of an autonomous Europe, ensure the continent’s strategic subordination to the United States and forestall any geopolitical rapprochement between Europe and Russia. Far from being an alliance of equals, as it presents itself, NATO has always been an organisation structurally dominated by Washington. During the Cold War it played a central role in systematically exaggerating the Russian threat: by locking Europe into a permanent militarised standoff with the Soviet Union, the United States could justify a permanent military presence on the continent while exerting de facto control over the foreign policies of its European allies through NATO and, above all, keeping Germany politically and economically distant from Russia.

NATO’s orientation, however, was not only outward, toward the Soviet bloc, but also inward, toward European societies themselves. The most striking example is Operation Gladio: a clandestine, NATO-run “stay-behind” paramilitary network that became involved in acts of terrorism and political violence across Europe, often blamed at the time on far-left groups. Its function was to curb the strength of left-wing parties and movements and to serve as a latent threat against any political force that might contemplate breaking away from the Atlantic framework. In this light, NATO’s true purpose was never really the defence of Europe from an external enemy (a threat that was, to a significant extent, a by-product of NATO’s very existence); it was rather a mechanism for disciplining Europe internally and fixing its strategic orientation within a US-led order.

This logic explains why NATO was not dissolved after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 but instead expanded. Enlargement allowed the United States not merely to preserve but to tighten its grip on the continent. A key instrument in this process was the effective merger of EU and NATO expansion: by making eastern accession to the European Union contingent in practice upon prior entry into NATO, Washington ensured the alignment of Europe’s political and security structures under American leadership. Lord Ismay’s formula therefore remained accurate even after the Cold War — and remains so today.

The war in Ukraine represents the culmination of this trajectory. By dragging Europe into a proxy conflict with Russia through NATO, the United States has reasserted its waning hegemony over the continent, driven a deep wedge between Europe and Russia and pushed Germany toward deindustrialisation. Far from providing security, NATO’s aggressive eastward expansion, coupled with the systematic dismissal of Russia’s repeated warnings over many years, unravelled Europe’s post-Cold War security architecture and created the conditions for the largest armed conflict on the continent since the Second World War. The alliance thus presents itself as a guarantor of peace while in practice generating the very instability it claims to prevent.

In this context, claims that the United States under Trump is “abandoning NATO” amount to little more than political theatre. What Trump seeks is not the dissolution of the alliance but a renegotiation of its financial terms — compelling European states to pay a larger share for their own subordination. NATO, as the institutional framework of American influence in Europe, is not going anywhere.

Do you think we can talk about democracy in a Western world ruled by a degenerate oligarchic elite?

The idea that the West is meaningfully democratic — that political direction is determined by “the people” through elections — is perhaps the most successful achievement of Western propaganda. Beyond the gruesome details of sexual abuse and criminality, the Epstein Files offer a glimpse into the elite power networks that actually govern Western societies behind the façade of democratic procedure: an interlocking web of financial, corporate and military-industrial interests — in short, the Western oligarchy — whose collective priorities are synthesised and administered by the apparatuses of the permanent state, above all the intelligence agencies, commonly referred to as the “deep state”. This structure extends beyond the nation-state into a permanent suprastate: international and supranational bodies — most notably the EU and NATO, but also forums such as the World Economic Forum — that harmonise and coordinate policy across borders while remaining insulated from popular pressure.

Aside from his likely role as an intelligence asset, the Epstein Files portray him as a middleman within this network, a broker connecting powerful actors in ways that maximised the political and economic interests of a transnational superclass. This superclass is not an anomaly but a structural feature of capitalism itself, a system in which wealth — and therefore power — inevitably concentrates in the hands of a small minority that comes to exercise disproportionate economic and political influence regardless of formal electoral mechanisms. Capitalism is thus intrinsically oligarchic or plutocratic: a dictatorship of capital operating beneath a veneer of democratic ritual. This has always been the core insight of Marxist critiques of capitalism. But recent decades have significantly intensified this pattern. The neoliberal era has produced a historically unprecedented concentration of wealth, extensively documented in economic data, and with it an equally unprecedented concentration of political leverage. Epstein — or what might be called the “Epstein class” — is a direct product of this development.

In such a context, democracy becomes largely illusory even as its technical procedures —universal suffrage, multi-party elections constitutional formalities — remain in place (though even these procedural norms are increasingly challenged, as demonstrated by episodes such as the annulment of elections in Romania). The public’s capacity to challenge entrenched power through the ballot box is systematically neutralised through a wide array of mechanisms: electoral systems designed to marginalise smaller parties; consensus-manufacturing propaganda and censorship enabled by compliant, elite-aligned mass media and social-media platforms; character assassination campaigns against unwelcome candidates; virtually unlimited financial resources deployed to purchase political loyalty; and the steady transfer of sovereignty from national governments to supranational institutions structurally shielded from democratic accountability. And this is not even considering the willingness of elites to bend or break the law outright in order to suppress dissent, as the prolonged legal persecution of Julian Assange, or the sanctioning of critical journalists in the EU, starkly illustrate.

Public awareness of this condition is growing, reflected in the steady erosion of citizens’ trust in democratic institutions across the West. Yet most diagnoses of today’s “post-democratic” order rest on the mistaken premise that it represents a deviation from a once-genuine democratic norm. But the post-war social-democratic period was never true popular rule. It is accurate that, roughly from the 1940s to the 1970s, Western societies experienced a more substantive form of democracy than exists today, marked by the partial integration of the masses into political life. But even then democracy remained constrained by concentrated economic power and by permanent state structures — military, intelligence and security establishments — operating largely beyond public oversight and often under US strategic direction. What distinguished that era was not the absence of oligarchic control but the temporary ability of organised labour and mass politics to limit the power of capital to an unprecedented degree.

That balance was the product of a unique historical convergence: the geopolitical pressure of the Soviet challenge, the widespread appeal of socialist ideologies, Keynesian economic frameworks that mediated between wages and profits, and the structural strength of industrial working classes embedded in Fordist production systems. As these conditions disintegrated from the mid-1970s onward, the brief and relative “marriage” between capitalism and democracy unravelled. What followed was not a sudden corruption of an otherwise healthy system but a reversion to the more typical state of affairs: the naked rule of capital, now concealed behind a sophisticated democratic façade. The central question, therefore, is not whether democracy can be “restored” — it cannot — but whether a new political project can emerge to replace the exhausted model of elite-managed liberalism.

Does the Epstein case, in which President Trump is implicated, not reflect the degeneration of the Western ruling class?

Absolutely. Many people struggle to believe what has surfaced in the Epstein Files — the widespread practice of paedophilia and sexual abuse of minors among the elites, and even possibly the practice of ritualistic torture or worse — partly because, in our secular and post-religious societies, the very concept of evil has become intellectually unfashionable. The term is dismissed as archaic or superstitious, a relic of primitive moral frameworks. As a result, practices that can only be described as profoundly evil and anti-human are often met with disbelief or minimised as exaggerations. Yet the reality is that we did not need the Epstein Files to recognise the moral bankruptcy of those who dominate Western power structures. Their conduct in full public view already provides more than enough evidence.

These are people who routinely make decisions that consign hundreds of thousands of young men to death in wars pursued for geopolitical or economic advantage — the ongoing NATO proxy war in Ukraine obviously springs to mind — and who support or enable the industrial-scale killing of civilians, including children, as they have done (and continue to do) in Gaza. Ultimately, whatever emerges (or may emerge in the future) from the Epstein Files, I fail to see how it could match the moral depravity of what these people regularly do in plain sight.

So yes, there is no doubt that the Western ruling classes are morally degenerate. The good news is that their centuries-long global dominance is visibly eroding as new centres of economic and political power rise and Western hegemony enters a phase of irreversible decline. The danger, however, lies in the refusal of entrenched elites to accept this loss of primacy. A class that has grown accustomed to unquestioned supremacy is more likely to escalate conflict than relinquish control voluntarily, which is precisely what we are seeing. This is why the times we are living through are so bloody — and so dangerous.

It is said that Epstein was a Mossad spy and was carrying out a mission. What is your analysis of this?

I can’t say for certain if he was a “Mossad spy” or not but there is no doubt that he was an Israeli asset in the wider sense of the term given his well-documented ties to very powerful Israeli and Zionist political and financial actors, as well as his own strong support for Israel and Zionist causes. Indeed, the fact that the Western media tried to paint him as a Russian agent — a new low for the Western propaganda establishment — appears to be a deliberate attempt to shift the attention away from his Israeli ties.

In your opinion, are there any real divergences between Trump and the Europeans, and if so, what are they?

Since Trump’s return to power there has been constant talk of a supposed “rift” between Europe and the United States, sometimes dramatised as a full-blown “revolt of the vassals” against Washington. A closer look, however, paints a different picture. The current European political establishment has spent years hollowing out European sovereignty by consistently acting against both national and collective European interests while aligning itself with Washington’s strategic agenda on virtually every major issue — trade, energy, defence, foreign policy, etc. The outcome is that Europe today is more politically, economically and militarily vassalised to the United States than at any moment since the Second World War. One might say that what we are witnessing is in fact a case of hyper-vassalisation reminiscent of the dynamics of traditional colonial rule.

This is most evident in Europe’s alignment with Washington’s long-term strategy towards Ukraine and, since 2022, its full embrace of NATO’s proxy war with Russia, including the self-inflicted decision to sever access to inexpensive Russian gas — thereby sacrificing Europe’s core economic and security interests to US geopolitical priorities. Even more revealing is the passive acceptance of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, an act carried out with at least indirect US involvement and likely foreknowledge among certain European governments. It’s thus important to understand that Europe’s current leaders don’t operate in terms of national or even “European” interests; they function instead as managers of vassal states within a broader transatlantic imperial framework. Once this is understood, their otherwise seemingly irrational policies become entirely coherent.

The notion that this same political class is suddenly capable — politically, psychologically or intellectually — of championing genuine European autonomy is laughable. What is actually taking place is an adjustment to a change in tone at the imperial centre. Trump operates with a blunt, overt style of power, openly berating allies and floating ideas such as the annexation of Greenland. Yet even within hierarchical systems, appearances matter. When the imperial centre dispenses with diplomatic niceties and publicly humiliates its European vassals, these are compelled to respond rhetorically — not to defend European interests, but to preserve domestic credibility. Hence the sudden proliferation of language about European “independence” and “strategic autonomy”. But this is purely performative.

There is no genuine fracture between “Europe” and “the United States”, only friction between factions of a single transnational Atlantic elite over how best to manage Western decline. The faction associated with Trump favours an openly unilateral, “mask-off” approach to power; the liberal-globalist faction prefers a multilateral façade and softer rhetoric. But neither camp has any intention of granting Europe real autonomy.

This becomes apparent when we consider that European leaders continue to reaffirm their commitment to NATO and to the proxy war in Ukraine. How can one credibly claim to seek “independence” from the United States while remaining firmly embedded in NATO — the primary instrument through which Washington has long militarily subordinated its Western “allies” — and while actively supporting a proxy war that has been the central driver of Europe’s economic degradation and geopolitical hyper-vassalisation? There is much discussion today of a so-called “European NATO” — a NATO without the United States. But this is a fantasy. NATO is structurally subordinated to the US. Thus, the Europeans’ NATO rearmament programme, far from signifying a break with the existing order, simply reinforces the Atlanticist apparatus, consolidating the structural subordination of the European continent to North American power. This should dispel any lingering illusion of European strategic autonomy or sovereignty. In short, what we are witnessing is a European posture that speaks the language of autonomy while fully accepting the material fact of subordination through integrated NATO command structures, US-controlled critical infrastructure and Western financial architectures.

What is Trump playing at in the Persian Gulf, and what does he really want in Iran?

I return to the point made earlier: it is extremely difficult to assess what Trump “wants”, not only because he himself does not appear to operate with a coherent strategy, but because, at a deeper structural level, it is unclear who actually exercises power in the United States. It is evident that it is not the president. The Biden years made this unmistakable: for four years the country was formally led by a president displaying obvious cognitive decline, yet the machinery of state continued to function and major strategic decisions were still taken. This alone demonstrates that real power in the US extends far beyond the elected executive.

The American system is characterised by multiple overlapping centres of power operating behind and alongside official institutions, making it exceedingly difficult to determine who is truly calling the shots. There is the military-industrial complex, with enormous economic weight and direct influence over foreign and defence policy; the intelligence agencies and broader permanent-state apparatus; the major financial institutions and banking interests; the new generation of tech oligarchs — figures such as Musk and Thiel — who exert substantial personal and ideological influence over political leadership; and, crucially, the Israel lobby, whose weight is particularly visible in Middle Eastern policy and especially in relation to Iran. These factions compete, align, and clash in constantly shifting configurations, rendering policy direction opaque and long-term prediction highly unreliable.

This opacity is inherently dangerous because effective conflict management depends on predictability and clearly understood chains of command. In the cases of China and Russia, external observers can generally read strategic signals and identify decision-making hierarchies with relative clarity. In the American case, by contrast, the diffusion of power produces ambiguity and mixed signals. Trump compounds this instability by treating unpredictability itself as a tactical asset, deliberately cultivating confusion in order to keep both allies and adversaries off balance.

Despite this structural uncertainty, however, two fundamental drivers I think underpin US attempts at regime change (or regime destabilisation) in Iran. The first is Israel and the Israel lobby, for whom Iran represents the principal obstacle to Israeli military supremacy in the region. The second is Washington’s broader objective of reasserting “American energy dominance”, explicitly articulated in official US strategic doctrine. Targeting Iran simultaneously advances both aims: it removes a regional challenger to Israeli power while also striking indirectly at China, which imports a significant share of its oil from Iran. These objectives converge around a single underlying factor — Iran’s refusal to submit to US-Israeli geopolitical dominance.

Why does Israel continue to massacre Palestinians with impunity? Where are international law, the UN and international institutions? Are we not living in an era of the law of the jungle?

Many people are shocked by the fact that no international body — first and foremost the UN — has been able to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has been ongoing for more than two years now. But this is a very naïve view. The reality is that Gaza has simply revealed in the starkest possible terms what has always been true: international law is a fiction. In practical terms, it has never existed. And it couldn’t be otherwise, given that international law — unlike national law — lacks an independent enforcement mechanism: simply put, there is no “global police force” capable of enforcing compliance. This is why international law has always been applied very selectively, especially since the US’s rise to “hyperpower” status in the aftermath of the Cold War, which effectively bestowed upon Washington an international monopoly of violence: in practice, international law has only has only ever targeted, through the ICC, the leaders of weak states, or more generally states that are not part of the US-led Western bloc.

Meanwhile, Western leaders have faced no consequence whatsoever for their repeated violations of international law: from covert coups to bombing campaigns to outright invasions, Washington has long disregarded the very rules it claimed to uphold. The same can be said for Israel, which has faced no consequence whatsoever for its decades-long occupation of Palestine and brutalisation of Palestinians. In short, the international legal order — just like the post-Cold War “rules-based order” — has always been a chimera, a vicar for undisputed US-Western global power. The genocide in Gaza has simply brought this reality into stark relief.

In this sense, the endless appeals to the UN and to international law that we have heard over the past two years aren’t just naïve; by continuing to uphold the comforting myth of international law, they have actually contributed to obscure the reality of the international order: that ultimately the only powers that exist are individual states, and they are the only ones who can act. Appealing to a non-existent international legal framework is just an excuse not to act.

That said, it is also easy to understand why no state has stepped up to defend the Palestinians, including those in the Global South who have formally and rhetorically sided with the Palestinians, as this would effectively mean standing up not only to Israel but to the entire Western/NATO military-industrial complex. There are very few states that have the means to do that — e.g., China — but doing so would immediately escalate into a global war. This is why, for the time being, the US and Israel are able to continue to act with impunity.

My country, Algeria, supports the just causes of the Palestinian and Sahrawi peoples and is considered the Mecca of revolutionaries. Algeria is one of the few countries to have principles and positions of principle from which it never deviates. Because of its positions, my country is the target of plots hatched by secret circles linked to Israel. Why, in your opinion, is it so important to resist in this world that increasingly resembles a jungle?

Resisting empire is crucial for the reasons outlined above. Indeed, I think one of the biggest challenges facing the transition to a multipolar or polycentric order is precisely whether simply challenging empire through the development of an alternative international economic order without directly challenging the West’s increasingly unrestrained use of violence — which is essentially the China-BRICS approach — will suffice, or whether the Global Majority will at some point be compelled to stand up to the West in military terms as well, as Russia was ultimately forced to do in Ukraine. Of course, no one wants the current “piecemeal global war” between the West and the Rest to escalate into all-out conflict. Yet one has to ask oneself whether signalling to the West that it can continue to resort to violence with impunity isn’t in fact creating the conditions that will make conflict inevitable further down the road.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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