To yield or to insist? That is the question that will not be asked…
It cannot have escaped even the most die-hard supporter of unipolarity that the West is now at a critical crossroads, not only with respect to Iran, but more generally, geopolitically and economically.
Evristo Bartolo, foreign minister of Malta in 2022, who took part in the NATO summit and the EU Foreign Affairs Council meetings that year, summarized the situation in a 2025 interview:
“Now we are at the crossroads, where those who want to continue dominating those who were dominated and didn’t want to be dominated but were not in a position to push back. Now they are in a position to push back. So how is that going to be resolved? History teaches us that in these moments, quite a number of wars break out. And in fact, quite a number of wars have broken out.”- E. Bartolo, Nov. 9, 2025.
The war against Iran shows how right he was. Bluntly put, the United States and Europe currently are facing significant challenges as their long era of world domination is definitely coming to a close. The United States’ dilemma is how to prevent the demise of the unipolar dream, while Europe wants to continue to bask in the artificial glow of a feigned moral superiority, based on what it believes are “its” Enlightenment values, despite reckless diplomacy and destructive submission to Washington. Both sides of the Atlantic are expressing what George Santayana called the “militant mind” of the West.
The Militant Mind of the West
In his final work, Dominations and Powers (1951), Santayana expanded on his concept of the militant mind. It is an attitude to life that pushes coercive power in society to the foreground, that treats politics as perpetual combat, that cannot accept compromise, and that romanticizes domination of others. The militant mind thus clings to conflict because this is what gives it identity, it prefers struggle to diplomatic resolution of conflicts and confuses loyalty to a cause with loyalty to combat.
This description above makes it clear that the West in general has long had a militant mind, at least as far as its ruling “Epstein” minority is concerned, if not completely so. In particular, the US and Israeli governments, along with the attendant and sycophantic media, are currently expressing the militant mind in its rawest and most violent version, and blatantly so for all who care to truly see.
Santayana reflected on how this Western militant mind has an unintended tendency to suck life out of the societies it claims to value, by the parasitic role of the state, which drains society of all its capability and motivation. He made a chilling and prophetic analysis of the Western will to dominate, which over the centuries transitioned from a generally creative force to an often suffocating one; not only domestically but also abroad. He presciently wrote, echoing Kipling:
“The white man’s burden is a heavy one, and he is often tempted to cast it off; but he cannot. He is a victim of his own energy and of his own virtues. He has created a world in which he can no longer breathe, and he is now engaged in a desperate struggle to impose his own order on a chaos which he himself has produced.”
The prescience of these three sentences above is stunning. As researcher Nel Bonilla explains, even if political correctness is now the norm on the surface, at the core not much has changed:
“Europeans still view the world through Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, seeing those outside Europe as “half‑devil and half‑child.” …If the non‑West is coded as wild and irrational, then multipolarity appears as “lawlessness” rather than a legitimate redistribution of power and resources. Any move by Russia, China, or the Global South is experienced as ontological threat. Therefore, “more governance” at home and “hard power” abroad become existential imperatives.”
No End of History
Old Europe and, by extension, the younger US republic have in common an obstinate refusal to accept that there is no “End of History”, whereby Western style “liberal democracies” in name only, would spread across the earth, whether by conviction or by the bayonet. Radical proselytism drove the Western Christians to “save” others in foreign lands, by spreading Western civilization and justifying hypocritically with Western universal values.
The modern state also expands, as all bureaucracies strive for power, and later are encouraged to merge with each other in the embodiment of Alexander Kojève’s “universal and homogenous state”. The seeds of such dystopian and tyrannical globalism were clearly Western, originating in British non-landed aristocracy and mostly Jewish banking families. They leaned on what was understood as Hegel’s thought, by such influential people as Karl Marx, Kojève, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, Julian Huxley (the eugenist at the UN), and Francis Fukuyama.
Thus, Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis made sense superficially, but how could there be any victory of Western universalist values abroad, if there was no victory at home? Indeed, these values were never well implemented even in the West itself let alone in the “Global South”. Yet, for the last decades, there have been both frustrating doubts as well as dangerous hopes from the West that it would still be able to impose itself fully on the rest of the world, with ever more reckless and violent methods. With the slow recognition that this goal is actually unattainable, a civilizational crisis is awaiting the West; particularly the Western ruling minority, making up a minute but very influential part of Western societies.
Indeed, though this was always wishful thinking, it is now dawning quickly on this minority that their system of domination cloaked in universalism is not the only political alternative, and that their holier-than-thou attitude rings hollow, especially in the light of the criminal and sordid Epstein revelations. As the French Historian Edouard Husson wrote on the depravation of the Western ruling minority:
“With the Epstein affair, we are witnessing the final stage of Western-style globalization: the revelation to the whole world of the behavior of an elite for whom the rule of law and the rules of governance were only a mask, increasingly poorly concealing the claimed amorality, financial corruption and personal cruelty.”
There is a palpable exasperation, especially in the big European capitals, as the supposedly righteous and justified Western domination of past centuries is now being resisted by the Global South for the first time, not only by China and Russia, but also very courageously by Iran. The problem for the citizens of the entire world is the Western reaction to this resistance. For, as Bonilla writes:
“surface manifestations appear frantic, even disorganized, yet this panic fuels a far more perilous response: calculated, systematic escalation.”
To Insist or to Yield? That is the Question
The West is in a bind and must now choose: either it hopelessly insists on its universalist mantra and unipolar worldview, or it adapts to the new multipolar reality and joins a true concert of nations.
In the first case, it hubristically and vainly tries to ram through Western domination once and for all also in the East and South, regardless of the price to pay in blood and money (mostly for others). In the second case, the West wakes up from its delusion of grandeur that has lasted five centuries, it gains wisdom and manages to give up the universalist mindset and its ingrained sense of exceptionalism.
The West is now at a crossroads: it is must choose either a path of insisting or a path of yielding, with momentous consequences in either case. The choice should be obvious, of course, but it is difficult for a ruling minority, so used to generations of domination, to yield. Now, it seems only economic or even military defeat will force the West to shed the militant mind.
This first and foolish choice - to insist - means entering a period of extreme tensions in international relations, first diplomatic and economic wars, but also military, as with Russia, Gaza and Iran. Considering the stubborn rejection to Russia’s reasonable peace conditions based on the root causes of the Ukraine conflict, the willingness to engage in economic war with an economically more powerful China, and the clear preference for war instead of negotiations with Iran, the militant mind is alive and well within the Western ruling oligarchy.
This became clear in a speech by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, at the Munich Security Conference 2026, where he presented the US domination through the lens of historical colonist expansion with vassals that shall share the burden, if not the spoils… The words are truly shocking:
“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe. …. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.”
The second and wiser choice - to yield - means a complete review of the West’s relation not only with the rest of the world but also between the nations that compose it. For instance, why would Europe kowtow to Washington in a scenario in which US republican values are not seen any longer as morally trumping all others and when the unipolar world is crumbling? Why should the Middle Eastern states accept to be vassals to the US in the future, paying Washington billions, when Uncle Sam is unable or unwilling to protect them? The ever-expanding NATO and EU would have much less raison d’être in such a scenario, especially one in which the West has been strategically defeated and exposed by Russia and Iran.
The West has a militant mind and thus, true to its deep-rooted nature, prefers to insist in order to fight until the world order it has painstakingly built comes crashing down. Blogger Simplicius the Thinker describes the “dilemma”:
“These Western governments have no real solutions to their problems because the issues are so utterly structural and fundamental in nature, that merely the simple act of admitting to their root causes would signify the total collapse of everything the Western globalist order has built up over the last decades.“
All this means that the current political world order known to all, no only since 1945 but more profoundly in Europe since 1492, is on its way out. The near future will be rocky because the looming defeats for the Western militant mind is going to lead to severe political crises. The result will be the removal of the incompetent, insufferable and conceited Western political class that has decided to live until the end in a delusion of domination. A “circulation of the elites” will ripple through the West, through the ballot box or otherwise. It is time.
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