Afrasianet - There is no louder voice than the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, but understanding this war requires recalling the concepts that led to it in the first place. Therefore, we cannot miss the speech of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference last February, which received so much attention inside and outside the United States that it aroused the jealousy of U.S. President Donald Trump Rubio teased that receiving praise might push him out of office. Rubio's speech summed up the political vision of the current administration, which can be summed up in a succinct slogan: "The West versus the world."
Rubio called on Europe to join hands with the United States on the basis of a shared belonging to a Western civilization that has a common religious and cultural heritage. Ideological fervor has prompted the U.S. secretary of state, who immigrated from Cuba, to talk about a common language as well in this cultural heritage, which raises the question of what common language Rubio speaks, as Latin — the only language on which a number of European peoples came together — was the language of higher culture rather than everyday life, and ended up being a dead language Not only on people's tongues, but since the publication of the Bible in German following the religious reform in the 16th century.
If Rubio meant English, he may have missed that there are more native speakers of Russian, French, and German than native speakers of English as a mother tongue in Europe, the United States' main partner in the "Western world." The United States itself has historically not adopted English as an official language at the federal level, even though it has remained the de facto dominant language in government, education, and the media. This is a situation that President Donald Trump tried to change in March 2025 through an executive order designating English as an official language for the first time.
If we turn a blind eye to this common "perceived" language, "Western civilization" today faces a triple threat according to Rubio's vision, which is only a repetition of the discourse of the American right that has been taking shape since the 1970s. There is the strategic threat posed by China and Russia with their military forces and China's economic capabilities. There is the demographic threat to the white race from Latino immigration in the case of the United States, and Africa in the case of Europe. Finally, the cultural threat that the American right does not clearly identify in its public discourses, but the literature of this right, as we will review, clearly points the fingers of "crusader hostility" toward Islam.
This civilizational discourse tempts the West in confronting Islam, the East, or the other in general, to adopt an inverted civilizational vision, which is to accept the Western thesis that the actual global conflict is a civilizational conflict between Western civilization and the white race on the one hand, and Muslims, Arabs, or Asians on the other. This vision leads to cultural entrenchment in the face of the Western threat, which is a logical position in the face of such a "Crusade Declaration." However, what is worth paying attention to here is that this The civilizational conflict is not as inevitable as portrayed by the American right today, but rather it is a conflict that has been fueled by this American right based on its close alliance with Israel and its attempt to assume a framework that unites the United States, Europe and Israel, which is the framework of Western civilization vis-à-vis the Muslim other, without even real concern with the realistic interests of the United States in directing its energy towards Israel.
Economics and Geography
Historically, two theoretical visions have been formed about the reality of contemporary international conflict, where the left saw that this conflict stems from the rise of monopoly capitalism and its quest for dominance over markets, resources, and even labor, and then the emergence of imperialism, i.e., the quest of the major capitalist countries to dominate other countries in the Global South in general, not for actual cultural motives – such as religious or cultural hostility – but out of material interest that uses these cultural slogans as a cover for the causes of actual hostility.
This theory of imperialism's interpretation of the Boer War has been used as a model to emphasize this material economic root of hostility. In the Second Boer War in South Africa at the end of the 19th century, British colonialism waged a brutal war not against non-Christian black Africans, but against white European Christian Dutch settlers. British colonialism treated the Boers with the same colonial ferocity as it treated the Indian people, driven by the economic greed of the greedy British colonists who were greedy for Boer-controlled mines.
"Proponents of geopolitics saw the global conflict as a manifestation of the geographically inevitable rivalry between forces distributed within a given regional scope."
In contrast to this economic theory, since the beginning of the twentieth century, geopolitical theories have been formed, which saw the conflict as a manifestation of the inevitable competition between the forces distributed in a certain regional area. Sir Halford Mackinder, a British politician and geographer, put forward his theory of the geographical pivot of the historical conflict. Mackinder believed that the Eurasian space between Russia and Central Europe was the heart of the world, and whoever controlled it could control the island of the world. This island is made up of the three ancient continents, Asia, Europe, and Africa, and whoever controls the island of the world controls the entire world.
Mackinder's theory was in fact driven by the escalating rivalry between England and Germany, and British concern about an alliance between Germany and Russia, which likely secured Germany overall control of Europe, leaving England as a besieged, isolated and remote island. The development of railways compounded this Eurasian threat, allowing land forces to mobilize rapidly and outweighing the naval forces' historical advantage of rapid action.
Influenced by Mackinder's theory, U.S. Admiral Alfred Mahan believed that there was an inevitable geographical conflict between land and sea powers, but he believed that superiority was guaranteed to those who possessed the most powerful naval powers thanks to control of trade corridors and the ability to rapidly deploy military around the world.
Geopolitical theories gained a civilizational dimension by the German school of geopolitics. Karl Haushofer adopted the hypothesis of the conflict between the forces of the land (Tellurocracy) and the forces of the sea (Thalassocracy). Haushofer added that this conflict leads to the rally of countries in large spaces (Grossraum) around a central state such as Germany in the case of the Eurasian space, to fight the conflict with other large spaces, referring mainly to England.
In his book "The Law of the Earth", Carl Schmidt added an additional civilizational dimension to geopolitics, as Schmidt saw the conflict between continental Europe and the Atlantic powers not just a political conflict, but a cultural conflict between European powers that tend to preserve traditions and heritage and adhere to their own cultural identity, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon Atlantic powers, England and America, which adopt liberalism. The problem with liberalism, in Schmidt's view, lies in its claim that there are universal rights and values that transcend cultural identities, and thus it transforms traditional conflicts from wars between adversaries seeking specific gains to moral existential wars between liberal good and identity evil.
Until that time, the hypotheses of the civilizational struggle were not actually taking place between the West and the East or between Europe and Asia, but rather within the West itself, between continental Europe and the Atlantic powers, as the capitalist-imperialist conflict between the rising industrial Germany since the end of the nineteenth century, and England, which has been dominating since the Industrial Revolution, has had cultural dimensions that justify it on both sides: The Aryan race in the face of the supreme threat, liberal democracy in the face of fascist authoritarianism, continental identity and traditions in the face of Atlantic liberalism.
"The West's statement was used primarily in a cultural context first, which is ironically the context of decay rather than the declaration of war on the world."
The West had not yet been invented, and the West was not pitted against the East, but the East, concerned with its liberation from colonialism, was divided between these same claims, whether on ideological grounds, such as the bias towards democracy in the case of Arab liberal forces such as the Wafd Party in Egypt, or on a pragmatic or even nationalist basis, such as the bias of King Farouk in Egypt and the government of Abd al-Rahman Kayyali in Iraq towards Germany in order to be free from British colonialism.
The phrase "West" was used primarily in a cultural context, which is paradoxically, not a declaration of war on the world. The German thinker Oswald Spengler was one of the first to put it explicitly in his book The Decline of the West. Spengler was in fact a romantic thinker who was anti-liberal and the idea that basic human rights could be compared to different civilizational systems on the basis of what they provide. In Spengler's view, Western civilization does not represent a historical advance that surpasses previous human civilizations. Rather, it is one of many civilizations that cannot be differentiated. In his view, it was transformed into a Faustian civilization by abandoning spirituality, falling into materialism, and corrupting democracy under the rule of money.
The invention of the West
The idea of the West was born after World War II as a result of an attempt to transcend this Western divide through the idea of a shared Judeo-Christian tradition. Before World War II, Jews generally leaned toward communism as a political doctrine that was not based on nationalism that excluded the Jew in Europe and treated him as an outsider of dubious loyalty. But after World War II, many former Marxist Jewish intellectuals shifted to a culturally liberal stance hostile to totalitarian regimes Authoritarianism that threatens minorities, and seeks to counter this cultural tendency towards extreme nationalism and closed cultural identities by proposing a broad cultural identity, which is the Western identity in which the Jew and the Christian overlap. Will Herberg, a Jewish sociologist and theologian, was the first to put forward this vision in the United States.
" Judaism in the eyes of classical Western Christianity remained an internal enemy no different from the Muslims who represented the external enemy."
No one in Europe thought of Western civilization as a combination of Christianity and Judaism, and it was not easy to envision an inclusive framework that accommodated the two traditions. For classical Western Christianity, Judaism remained an internal enemy no different from Muslims representing the external enemy. For example, the First Crusade, led by Peter the Hermit, was known as the "People's Campaign" because it was not organized by princes and kings, saw the Pogroms, that is, a wave of violent, widespread targeting against the Jews of the Rhine in West Germany. When the Moors were expelled from Andalusia, the Sephardic Jews of Andalusia suffered persecution similar to that of Muslims in Spain. Jewish philosophers have been contributing to the development of Western culture since the 19th century, heralding a kind of abandonment of Jewish culture and assimilation into modern European identities on the basis of the Enlightenment, but Jewish culture and the Jewish public remained suspicious of Europeans even after the Enlightenment.
Neoconservatives in the United States embraced this vision that combined Judaism and Christianity in a common tradition. The group was formed from Jewish intellectuals in New York who had emigrated from Europe before World War II, led by Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and, to some extent, Leo Strauss. The neoconservatives saw it necessary to adhere to the Western cultural framework of which religious culture was a part, in the face of cultural and moral relativism that threatened society and allowed for the birth of "extremist currents." But this group It also adhered to liberal democracy, which is why it was described as "conservative," but "new."
The American rising right in the 1970s adopted this group with the aim of attacking the New Left, which posed a strong threat to the right, and to consolidate the New Deal policies adopted by the Democratic Party, a package of left-wing social programs that dominated American economic and social life from the rise of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to its dismantling by the far-right President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s.
One of the main ideas of this group was to support the relationship between the United States and Israel as parties to the Judeo-Christian West. For this neoconservative group, Israel is also a model of a state that respects cultural tradition, represented by Jewish heritage, without compromising liberal democracy and the values of the secular Enlightenment.
This position has laid the seeds of a Western civilizational perception that does not view the same Western hostility between the Eurasian and Atlantic powers, or the socialist and capitalist camps, but rather between Western civilization and those who differ from it, especially the so-called Islamic extremists who threaten Israel and are hostile to the United States because of its generous support for Israel, which has turned into a satisfactory existential relationship rather than a pragmatic political one, since the Nixon era.
"Paul Gottfried, one of the traditional conservative theorists, described neoconservatives as mistaken for the capital of the United States for Tel Aviv."
Traditional conservatives have in fact launched an attack on this neoconservative Zionist position. Paul Gottfried, one of the traditional conservative theorists, or "Paleocons," has described neoconservatives as mistaken for the capital of the United States for Tel Aviv. Despite the same cultural stance, this conservative current still sees this alliance with Israel as a pathological condition that threatens the United States, as reflected in the rhetoric of conservative American media personality Tucker Carlson and other traditional conservatives.
New Crusades
The Zionist American right took advantage of the Iranian revolution to exaggerate the hostility between the newly invented West and Islam. This discourse was a colonial prelude to pushing American resources into the Middle East in support of Israel and to wage atrocities against Islam. Edward Said countered this discourse in his book "Covering Islam," which he considered a revival of the institution of Orientalism, which proceeds from a normal cultural difference between civilizations and religions, to a political rivalry that sees the different other, in this case the Muslims, as existential enemies.
According to these claims, a Muslim cannot be an ally of the West, the interests of the two parties cannot meet, and he cannot accept democracy because Islam is a religion that does not tolerate democracy. The problem is that these ideas, regardless of their accuracy, did not stem from the agitation of dissent or the search for peaceful "cultural" settlements, but rather aimed to justify "unjustified" American support for Israel, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
Islamic powers allied themselves with the United States against the Soviet Union as a common danger in various places and occasions, as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and before that in the Indonesian coup against Sukarno in 1967, and even against the camp of Soviet-leaning Arab republics. The vast majority of Muslim countries also showed a clear inclination toward an alliance with the United States and Europe, even in the face of China and Russia. Iran did not adopt a principled bias of China against the United States, and was prepared to converge with the United States. The United States abandons its policies of supporting Israel.
All these facts are dissolved in the writings of neo-orientalists such as Bernard Lewis and "neo-crusaders" such as Samuel Huntington. Islam is an existential enemy, and Israel is an advanced line of defense against the West and civilization in the face of Islamic extremism, barbarism, and barbarism. It is the Muslims who start hostility to Israel because of their cultural extremism or demographic hypertension that drives them to swallow up "peaceful neighbors" like Israel.
The rhetoric of the new American right, embodied today in its crudest form in the Trump administration, and pronounced by the likes of Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance, is based on the proposition made by Samuel Huntington in his book "The Clash of Civilizations." Huntington does not explain why civilizations should collide, and why they cannot coexist quietly even though it can indeed happen, especially with the development of global capitalism, international trade, the migration of industry to Asia, and the ease of the passage of capital across continents and countries.
Huntington does not explain this because he does not want to say clearly that the conflict is firstly an imperialist struggle aimed at preserving the interests of the American capitalist elite and justifying its greed that drives it to mobilize millions of Americans and Europeans in its own wars with China, and secondly it is a Zionist struggle aimed at preserving Israel by the same elite allied with or affiliated with Israel on religious and cultural grounds such as financial investor Bill Ackman, American tycoon Larry Ellison, and the duo of Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, owners of Palantir.
Huntington distinguishes between modernization and Westernization: non-Western civilizations accept physical modernization, but do not accept cultural Westernization. He then claims that the demographic explosion of Muslim societies will lead to wars on the lines of contact between Muslims and other civilizations, a lie that is realistically embodied in the peace that unites Asian Muslims with their neighbors, and brings Arab Muslims together in Europe on the one hand and Africa on the other. What Huntington's argument hides here is that the war that is raging on the borders of Muslims is a war defined by the conflict with Israel. It is a conflict that has nothing to do with the demographic inflation of Muslims, nor with religious extremism, but with the colonial and genocidal nature of the Zionist project.
Huntington borrows Haushofer's hypothesis from the central states around which civilizational spaces revolve, and assumes that Turkey may represent this in the Muslim world, which may be true today. But he also calls for the United States to strongly embrace its Western identity, as the civilizational survival of the United States and the West in general. He makes his primitive claim that the West has not surpassed other civilizations by its cultural characteristics, but by the power of its weapons, and if it has forgotten it, others have not forgotten that fact.
Huntington speaks of the blindness of the "crusader" who wants to militarize conflict and discord and wage war on the other, so he naively assumes that the West has woken up to find this advanced weapon that others do not have, and not that this weapon is the product of scientific and institutional development, that is, the birth of adherence to certain visions and values that advance this scientific and institutional development and lead to military superiority.
Economy and Culture
This same blind vision echoes Alex Karp, a Jewish investor and intellectual who began his life as a liberal before embracing technological determinism that assumes that technology is the solution to all the problems of society and civilization. Karp, who is adept at demonstrating his loyalty to Israel alongside his friend Peter Thiel, believes that technology should be harnessed in the service of the West's military superiority, and that this military superiority should be displayed vigorously and violently to suppress the West's three enemies: China, Russia, and Iran. Huntington's speech and phrases are also used in its text, to the point of quoting Huntington's claim that the only real superiority is gun superiority, in a letter he sent to investors at his Palantir company. Balantir in particular has played a pivotal role in enabling the genocide in Gaza by providing Israel with the artificial intelligence software necessary to operate the drones and analyze data from Gaza's population.
Karp, like other components of American Zionism , such as Larry Ellison, calls for a hasty war on Iran, portraying this as in the West's interest, despite the tendency of many strategists in the United States and Europe to argue that a war on Iran is not in their interest or the West's interest, but rather depletes its military power in exchange for giving way to the Chinese horse.
"The American Zionist current is formulating an imaginary Western identity under which the United States and Israel are united, and in reality peaceful Muslims are transformed into an existential threat to this imagined West."
In fact, this historical and ideological presentation reveals that the issue is clearly not a question of a West that maintains its supremacy or an American state that protects its interests, but rather the story of an American Zionist current that formulates an imagined Western identity under which the United States and Israel are united, and turn peaceful Muslims into an existential threat to this imagined West, and deplete the capabilities and resources of the United States not in the face of strategic threats, but in the service of Israeli orders.
On a theoretical level, this discourse seems very fragile and contradictory within it. Frubio, the son of immigrants from Cuba, sees immigration as a demographic threat to the West, and he fights immigration in the United States, even though it does not come from Arab, Muslim or Oriental peoples, but from Latino peoples who are the same people to whom he belongs ethnically.
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance is another paradox. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, seeing Catholicism as a religious-cultural moral reference that transcends Protestant disintegration, and the historical relationship between Protestant Reformation and individualistic liberalism that threatens the cultural identity of the West and the United States today. But it is Vance himself who makes these claims who is fighting the Latin immigrants who make up the core mass of the Catholic population in the Americas today.
Similarly, Karp, Tell, and Larry Ellison claim to serve the strategic interests of the United States by providing technological support and military superiority to America, but it is the same trio that calls for America to deplete its capabilities and direct its striking military bloc toward Latin America and Iran. This same contradiction has already been demonstrated by Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington by claiming that "radical Muslims" threaten the West and dream of its annihilation, at a time when most Arab and Muslim governments have shown a clear political leaning toward the United States, at a time when the main resistance to it has come of leftist regimes and currents in Latin America.
These stark ideological contradictions reveal a clear crisis in American capitalism. Neoliberal policies that deprived the poor of social programs and cut taxes on the rich have led to an unprecedented accumulation of American wealth in the hands of a very small segment of big capitalists, with 0.1 percent of Americans owning about 15 percent of wealth in the United States. With rising U.S. government debt, rising energy prices, and declining U.S. industrialization, inflation is beginning to put severe pressure on the people This created a clear political and economic crisis that began two decades ago, which intensified and subsided without going away.
Rather than confronting this crisis that stems from inequality in reality, the American right has tended to impose arbitrary tariffs without a clear vision of its economic plans, creating cultural conflicts that unleash popular anger on immigrants or Muslims. In the face of sharp criticism of U.S. support for Israel, the American right today needs to create a new hypothetical cultural conflict between the West and the East to justify this "blatant political corruption" in the U.S. relationship with Israel.
