The current Western worldview has slowly relapsed back to the cozy “rules-based international order” shared by the intelligentsia of the Great Powers before 1914. According to that perspective, diplomacy was too sophisticated, the global economy too interwoven, technology too advanced, and the balance of power too well-calibrated to allow for a long, devastating war. They were disastrously wrong then, and those who remain attached to the contemporary version of that worldview are just as wrong today.

Traditionally, there are two paths in international relations: diplomacy and war. Usually, diplomacy has been the favored route, and once it is used up, war is the only alternative. For most of human history, that option was accepted as a reasonable, practical, and legitimate means of attaining national objectives. (READ MORE: The Threat of a China-Centric New World Order)

That perception started to change, however, after the carnage of World War I, the devastation of World War II, and the subsequent founding of the United Nations. Moreover, due to the post-WWII order and the West’s victory in the Cold War, the policy establishment now views foreign policy — where every conceivable outcome can be accounted and planned for — as the means by which liberal democracy’s primacy will be made inevitable. Although this outlook gives the illusion of mastery over something inherently uncontrollable, on a practical level, the idea has been disproven by the rise of China; the endurance of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa; and the abject failure of nation-building virtually everywhere.

Not All Nations Play by Western Rules

International relations naturally involve a level of conjecture that does not fit into the current model of “scientific certainty.”

Instead of realizing that the Western liberal-democratic outlook is the wrong way to view interactions between nations, many have explained Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military actions in Ukraine as aberrations, the nonsensical actions of an aggressive power ruled by a mentally unbalanced leader. Be it Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Erdoğan, Kim Jong Un, Alexander Lukashenko, or Bashar al-Assad, rampant speculations about their mental state and physical health are more of a desperate attempt to explain away their actions as an anomaly than a genuine appraisal of their decision-making process.

“He is just sick” or “he is simply crazy” vindicates the popular Western understanding of the ruling order and sidesteps the possibility that those leaders are rational actors taking logical steps to achieve their goals. The American political establishment retreated into similar modes of thought when Donald Trump won the White House. For the establishment, there was no logical reason why Trump and his voters would stampede the establishment’s order — they were simply crazy. (READ MORE: I Stand With Trump)

The leaders mentioned above may be adversarial and disagree with the West, but they are not unintelligent. And it is foolhardy to expect antagonists of the liberal-democratic West to play by the rules the West created for its own benefit.

China and Russia refused to play by rules set by their adversaries and drew a few red lines for the West in Ukraine, Taiwan, and the South China Sea — among many others. The fact that their actions were “unthinkable” by Western policy analysts shows that their current view is fundamentally flawed. The rivals of the West have no compunction about disregarding rules they find troublesome — and why would they? The contenders will continue to flaunt those rules, hoping that one day, most of Europe will find American political, cultural, and military control more toxic than Chinese economic influence.

And that is a distinct possibility. “Culture wars” are in vogue in the Western world today, but the political powers don’t really acknowledge the danger from the forces of division, critical race theory, and Islamism, and they ignore the possibility that only civil war can and will end the growing chaos. At this dangerous moment in history, the more liberal democracy doubles down on promoting gender ideology, feminism, and other divisive left-linked theories, the more it will alienate those national-conservative countries that pursue a far more robust and distinct national culture. (READ MORE: The Left Hates Us)

Throughout the Anglosphere exists the entrenched idea that the younger people are, the more to the left they will be — and, therefore, they should be allowed to vote to consolidate a leftist political hegemony. Specific social science theories originating from the United States fuel a self-loathing existential crisis around the Western world. There is a battle to wage against the subversive, anti-national, and left-leaning intellectuals spewed out by American universities.

Consolidating Europe under American hegemony once brought a net benefit to U.S. influence worldwide. However, that influence and respect have already been lost through repeated attempts to impose an American culture war on others. History teaches us that alliances always take long to build but only days to end — along with the ultimate loss of influence.

Peter J. Sandys was born and brought up in Hungary, where he was briefly imprisoned for attempting to escape from the country in 1963. After successfully defecting to the West, he held engineering and project management positions, mostly in the aerospace industry. Sandys is the author of The Waning of the West: An Inconvenient Truism and Not All Quiet Before the Storm: A Political Study of the West. Retired, he lives in Germany.