It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Greek Air Force Rafales fly over the Parthenon on Greek Independence Day
- Copyright AFP JADE GAO
French President Emmanuel Macron denied Friday that a troubled fighter jet programme with Germany was dead, telling reporters Paris and Berlin were still working on that and other defence projects.
The multi-billion-euro project has faltered as disagreements persist between the firms involved — France’s Dassault Aviation and Airbus, which represents Germany and Spain.
Speaking ahead of a EU summit in Cyprus, Macron said that after morning talks with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, the pair had instructed their respective defence ministries to carry on work on a range of issues, including the fighter jet.
“No, not at all,” Macron replied, asked by a journalist whether the European FCAS warplane programme was dead in the water.
“We had a good discussion this morning with the Chancellor and we have instructed our defence ministries to work on a number of areas, covering various topics –- not just the fighter jet,” Macron said.
“We are continuing to move forward. Europe has never needed unity, greater independence and greater sovereignty more than it does now,” he added.
The Future Combat Air System (FCAS) programme was launched in 2017 to replace France’s Rafale jets and the Eurofighter planes used by Germany and Spain.
It is often seen as a bellwether of defence and security cooperation between France and Germany as the two EU powerhouses seek to put up a united front in the face of a hostile Russia and wavering US security commitment.
Mediators tasked with salvaging the struggling initiative requested ten more days to deliver their conclusions, the French government said this week after reports suggesting the effort had failed to bear fruit.
A German government spokeswoman confirmed Macron and Merz discussed the fighter jet programme Friday morning and instructed defence ministers to continue work “on various aspects of cooperation and to agree on the next steps.”
“This work will be completed in the coming weeks,” she said.
Before his death, Professor Stephen Hawking called on the world to avoid the risks of artificial intelligence, warning it could be the worst event in the history of civilization - Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP Jemal Countess
Please note: This article is largely intended to raise the subject of whether civilization exists. You get to guess.
Western civilization wasn’t always a contradiction in terms. Gandhi was famously asked what he thought of Western civilization, and he said he thought it’d be a good idea. You can even see Western civilization in the news occasionally.
This isn’t a civilization in the strict definition of the term. This is the AI definition; praise be to the LLM, hosanna, and who’s Anna?
A civilization is a complex, organized human society featuring cities, a central government, job specialization, and social classes. It represents a high level of cultural, technological, and social development, often characterized by written language, monumental architecture, and art.
Complex, yes. To the point of utterly counterproductive and self-destructive insanity. Cities, you probably mean antiquated, disorganized, badly maintained hellholes. Government, maybe/not very/hardly. Looks more like a boys’ club for corrupt geriatric proven idiots.
Social classes, there are two: obscenely rich and anyone else who can afford to pretend to exist. Cultural development, rehashed garbage. Social development has been going backward since about 2016. Technology, we know, and more often than not wish we didn’t.
The default image of Western civilization usually trudges back to something that looks like the Parthenon, Rome, or anything else 2000 years old. Money, the apparent sole reason for Western civilization, traces back to the Lydian civilization, those nice people who invented it. That society went extinct quite quickly.
These images of long-gone societies are what we call “civilized”. They weren’t. Their physical reality was brutal at best. They fought endless wars as bad in proportion to the much smaller populations of the time as modern wars. Despotism was the norm, backed up by rich sycophants. These despotic regimes regularly failed dismally. Crime was the default way of life for people who couldn’t afford to live. Cue Generations Z, A, and B.
The modern take on Western civilization isn’t as grandiose and inspiring as it looks from this idyllic description.
It’s just considerably more stupid, and there’s a lot more of it.
Even stupider, somehow, is the stomping ground our invaluable rhetoricians have made out of the subject of Western civilization. Everyone’s apparently trying to save it.
Sooner or later, someone’s going to figure out what they’re trying to save it from, which is largely itself. The noises, however, are hilarious.
Let’s start with the Heritage Foundation, that invaluable supplier of conservative clichés with footnotes. Apparently, Western society can only be saved by abolishing the EU. They think the EU is a hotbed of socialism. The EU and European history in general is more like a very large Chamber of Commerce meeting with occasional wars. It’s about as socialist as Goldman Sachs in practice.
In conservative circles, you win Brownie points for fearlessly agreeing with anyone and everyone. Listening to an American talking about socialism is like listening to a nun explaining the fine nuances of brothel franchising. It’s a case of Margaret Thatcher’s children’s children, those ridiculous paragons of altruistic greed, pretending they can understand anything after about the year 1600.
Then there’s the other side. Dissent Magazine is a good one-stop for this opposing argument, whether you entirely agree with them or not. “How Liberalism Failed” is a nicely structured take on the current issues of plutocracy, populism, and the failure of democracies to deal with things like immigration. Citing Putin stooge Viktor Orban saying, “The era of liberal democracy is over,” was a nice touch. He wasn’t gone when he made that statement, but it reads well now.
These polar opposites deliver one message in total. Western civilization is talking itself to death and taking the global economy and future generations with it.
There’s a reason for that. The real future is effectively a no-go topic. You can have any number of fictional futures, though. Maybe even something really imaginative like a dysfunctional society, a post-apocalyptic world, zombies, bleak, uninspiring landscapes, or whatever.
You could hardly hope for a more dysfunctional society. It barely exists even in theory. The apocalypse was late, so economics did it for you, and now you don’t need World War 3. If the current political situation isn’t enough like the Attack of the Living Dead, you just haven’t been paying attention. The urban deserts could be said to be self-explanatory.
As for “whatever”, it’s pretty obvious nobody has a clue or is trying to have a clue. The collapse of Western civilization is apparently a good go-to for all that self-important media that people used to take seriously. Now, it’s barely a weather report.
Where did the future go? It was the big sparkling prize of the 1950s and 60s. Things would be incredible in 2000. It’d be The Jetsons, and everyone would have flying cars. Science was the real story.
Ah, um, no. What we got was pure mediocrity. Progress was replaced by Process, where virile, meaningless, instantly forgettable bastards in meetings turned everything into an in-house bitching session about individual words. The means became the end. No thought or sensory processes required. The future? When was that? Was it on the agenda? If not, it didn’t and doesn’t matter.
So here’s the question, folks:
Do you want a future?
Because you can’t have one doing things like this.
________________________________________________________________ Disclaimer The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
The $1.5 trillion in committed AI infrastructure spending by major tech companies is built on an assumption of a functional global supply chain, which the Iran conflict has fundamentally broken.
The war's effects, including the collapse of shipping insurance in the Strait of Hormuz, attacks on data centers, and a spike in oil prices, are structural problems that will increase component costs and slow the AI buildout.
Compounding issues—higher costs for fuel and fertilizer, coupled with elevated electricity bills from data center demand—will shorten the political window for the AI transition and fuel consumer backlash.
The stock market spent the first week of the Iran war doing something strange: mostly shrugging. Oil spiked. Insurance markets effectively collapsed. Amazon had two data centers blown up. And the Nasdaq dipped, steadied, and the conversation shifted within days to whether the Fed might still cut in June.
The prevailing read was: disruption, yes. Catastrophe, no. This thing will be over soon. I think that read is wrong.
And wrong in a specific, structural way, not because the war will necessarily escalate further, but because the damage being done right now is the kind that compounds quietly.
It hits a system that had no room left to absorb it. And it is aimed, with surprising precision, at the single largest economic bet America has ever made.
The $1.5 Trillion Bet
Add it up. Meta has pledged over $600 billion in US AI infrastructure by 2028. Apple committed $500 billion over four years. Amazon is projecting $200 billion in data center spending in 2026 alone, up from $131 billion last year. Google sits at $175 to 185 billion. Microsoft is tracking toward $105 billion for the year.
That is roughly $1.5 trillion in committed AI capital, most of it tied to data centers, chips, and the supply chains that feed them.
These numbers have a numbing quality. They are so large they start to feel theoretical.
But they’re not theoretical. They’re the load-bearing wall of the current bull market.
Goldman Sachs noted in December that consensus capex estimates have been too low for two years running, with actual spending growth exceeding 50% in both 2024 and 2025 against forecasts of 20%.
The market has priced in the spending, the compounding returns that spending is supposed to generate, the AI productivity boom, the new revenue streams, the structural advantage that justifies Nvidia trading at the multiples it does.
The whole thing is a bet. A very large, very confident, very specific bet. And that bet has one core assumption embedded in it: that the global supply chain stays roughly functional.
Tiffany Wade, a senior portfolio manager at Columbia Threadneedle, was already nervous before the war started. "This feels like a return to Meta's old days of overspending," she told Bloomberg. "Investors are losing patience." That was November. Before the Strait of Hormuz closed.
Annual average market capitalisation of S&P 500 companies, November 2022 and November 2024
Here is something most people don't know: a single semiconductor chip crosses more than 70 international borders before it reaches an end customer.
The journey takes up to 100 days and involves more than 1,000 discrete manufacturing steps. This is not a quirk. It is the architecture.
Silicon wafers start in Japan or Germany. Chip design happens in the US or the UK. The actual fabrication, for the most advanced chips that power AI workloads, is done almost entirely in Taiwan (92%) and South Korea (8%). Assembly and testing happen in Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines. The finished chip ships to a US data center.
There are more than 50 points across this chain where a single country controls more than 65% of global market share. Each one of them just got more expensive and more uncertain.
Every step in that chain costs energy. Every border crossing costs money. Every logistics node, the freight forwarders, the marine insurers, the fuel for the container ships, is now running hotter than it was on February 27th.
The friction is structural and it compounds with time. It does not resolve when the headlines move on.
Oh, and the Gulf also produces a significant share of the world's helium, a critical input for semiconductor manufacturing. These things connect in ways that don't make the front page.
Halving the Dream
Here's the part that doesn't get enough attention.
Those $1.5 trillion in AI pledges weren’t just announcements; they are the reason the stock prices are where they are.
When Meta says it's committing $600 billion in AI infrastructure, the market hears something more: $600 billion in projected returns, plus whatever multiplier you want to apply for future AI dominance. The capex is the proof of conviction.
Now imagine what happens when that budget doesn't go as far as it was supposed to. Component costs up. Shipping up. Energy up. Insurance on every supply chain touchpoint up.
The dollar amount of the pledge stays the same. The buildout it actually buys does not. You're not getting less ambition, you're getting the same ambition running into a world that charges more for everything it needs.
The pledges don't disappear. The compounding future returns that were priced in do. And the correction, when it comes, is not proportional to the shortfall. It's proportional to the distance between what was promised and what gets built.
Markets priced in the full vision. They didn't price in the friction.
The Pin
On February 28th, the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury. Within days, the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 million barrels of oil flow every day, about one-fifth of global oil consumption, was effectively closed.
The IEA called it the biggest oil supply disruption in history.
Brent crude went from $70 a barrel to touching $120. It's sitting around $110 as I write this, which sounds like a retreat until you remember where it started three weeks ago.
But the oil price is almost the least interesting part of what happened to shipping. What happened to shipping was a collapse of the insurance architecture that makes global trade work.
Before the war, insuring a tanker through the Strait of Hormuz cost between 0.02% and 0.05% of the vessel's value. For a $120 million tanker, call it $40,000 a trip.
Bloomberg reported last week that coverage has leaped to roughly 5% of hull value. The same tanker now costs $5 million to insure for a single voyage. That cost does not stay with the shipowner. It travels through the price of everything on that ship.
All 12 of the Protection and Indemnity Clubs, mutual insurers that cover 90% of the world's ocean-going tonnage, gave 72 hours' notice of war cover cancellation in the Gulf. Hapag-Lloyd added a War Risk Surcharge of $3,500 per container. Daily charter rates for supertankers quadrupled to nearly $800,000 a day. Iran has made 21 confirmed attacks on merchant ships as of March 12th. That is not a threat. That is a policy.
And then there's the data centers.
Iran's IRGC-linked Tasnim News Agency published a target list: Amazon, Microsoft, Palantir, Oracle, captioned "Enemy's technological infrastructure: Iran's new goals in the region."
Within days, AWS confirmed drone strikes had damaged two UAE facilities and one in Bahrain, causing structural damage, power disruptions, and water damage from fire suppression.
AWS told customers to consider migrating workloads out of the Middle East entirely.
On pro-Iranian Telegram channels, researchers at SITE Intelligence Group documented hackers posting: "The datacenters need to be taken out. They host the brains of USA's military communication and targeting systems."
Both the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz are now active conflict zones simultaneously, severing the undersea cables connecting Gulf data centers to Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
First time both chokepoints have been closed at once. The $1.5 trillion bet on AI infrastructure assumed those cables would stay intact.
Why It'll Last Longer Than You Think
Markets are pricing this as a short-term disruption, a bad few weeks, a ceasefire, a slow normalization of shipping routes.
That's wrong, and wrong for a specific reason: Iran's incentive structure.
Iran cannot win this war militarily. That was decided on day one. But Iran doesn't need to win. Iran needs to make the war expensive enough for everyone else that the pressure to de-escalate lands somewhere other than Tehran.
Every week the Strait is effectively uninsurable costs the global economy more than the week before. Every data center attack is essentially free, drones are cheap, reputational damage to cloud infrastructure is not.
Every shipping delay, every fertilizer shortfall, every spike in electricity prices is a cost Iran isn't paying.
The incentive to cause economic chaos outlasts the incentive to sue for peace. The math on oil is already severe.
Federal Reserve models suggest the same $10 increase pushes US inflation up by roughly 0.35%.
Oil is up about $30 from pre-war levels right now. If prices reach $140 and hold for two months, the US approaches a temporary economic standstill. Europe, the UK, and Japan face mild contractions.
There is a historical pattern here that economists keep raising: 1973, 1978, 2008. Every significant oil shock has been followed, in some form, by global recession.
The Gulf War of 1990 to 1991 is the most instructive parallel, prolonged disruption, sustained high prices, meaningful economic slowdown even though the military phase was fairly brief.
Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, put it plainly: "The longer this lasts, the more significant the shock would be."
Why would this time be different? Especially when there's less cushion than there's ever been.
The Federal Reserve entered this conflict with inflation already above its 2% target, the easing cycle already paused, and American consumers already financially stretched.
The WEF's 2026 Global Risks Report described the economy as "already navigating tariffs, post-pandemic debt overhangs and inflationary pressures." Cut rates to stimulate growth and inflation comes back. Raise rates and a stretched consumer breaks. There is no clean move.
The Part That Connects Back to the Bet
Here is where the story loops back to the $1.5 trillion.
People think of oil shocks as a gas pump problem. They are also a food problem, a chip problem, and a financing problem.
Start with fertilizer, because it's the one nobody is watching. The Persian Gulf is a fertilizer corridor, not just an energy corridor.
According to Al Jazeera's reporting on the crisis, 46% of global urea supply comes from the Gulf. Qatar's QAFCO alone supplies 14% of the world's urea. Since LNG output from Qatar collapsed, here is what has happened in the span of weeks:
India cut output from three of its own urea plants
Bangladesh shut four of its five fertilizer factories
The US is already close to 25% short of fertilizer supply for this time of year
Urea export prices surged roughly 40%, from ~$500 to ~$700 per metric tonne
Nitrogen fertilizer prices could roughly double; phosphate up ~50%, per Morningstar analysts
This lands in the middle of spring planting season. Farmers who can't get fertilizer don't just have higher costs, they have lower yields. Lower yields mean food supply pressure in three to six months, well after the news cycle has moved on. The cause and effect will look disconnected. They won't be.
Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, wrote directly to Trump warning that the US "risks a shortfall in crops" that "could contribute to inflationary pressures across the US economy."
Jet fuel is up 58% since the war began. United Airlines has already warned fares will rise.
Here is how this connects back to AI. Higher food prices, higher energy bills, higher airline tickets... these all hit the same consumer who was supposed to start seeing AI productivity gains show up in their lives in the next two to three years.
The patience required to get through the transition costs just got shorter.
The political window for the buildout just got narrower.
And the financing conditions that made $1.5 trillion in capex possible, low rates, stable inflation, patient investors, are all moving in the wrong direction at once.
Everything that makes the AI bet work is getting more expensive. Everything that makes it politically survivable is getting harder.
The Backlash Engine
AI already had a political problem before any of this. The job displacement anxiety is real and growing. The IP lawsuits are piling up. The environmental footprint was drawing scrutiny. But the resentment was abstract, it didn't have a number attached to it.
The IEA projects that roughly half of all US electricity demand growth over the next five years will come from data centers. Goldman Sachs estimates that data center electricity demand will add 0.1% to core US inflation in both 2026 and 2027. Retail electricity prices are already up 42% since 2019, significantly outpacing CPI.
The PJM Interconnection, managing the grid serving 65 million people from New Jersey to Illinois, saw data center capacity costs add $9.3 billion to the 2025 to 2026 cycle. That works out to $16 to $18 more per month on the average residential electricity bill. People are noticing.
An AI server rack requires 40 to 100 kilowatts of power. A traditional server rack needs 5 to 15. A single AI workload consumes roughly 1,000 times more electricity than a traditional web search. These are not marginal differences. They show up on bills.
Data centre electricity consumption by region, Base Case, 2020-2030
...permitting battles get even harder. Grid priority legislation becomes real. State-level pushback on data center tax exemptions accelerates.
The buildout was already being slowed by cost. Now it gets slowed by politics. And those two forces amplify each other.
China Watches
There is one more actor in this story that has not fired a single shot. Yet.
China controls roughly 90% of rare earth processing globally and about 70% of rare earth mining.
Since July 2023, Beijing has been running a methodical escalation of export controls on the materials that underpin semiconductor manufacturing:
July 2023: gallium and germanium controls
October 2023: graphite controls
August 2024: antimony and superhard materials
February 2025: tungsten and tellurium
April 2025: seven medium and heavy rare earth elements
October 2025: comprehensive controls, for the first time asserting jurisdiction over foreign-made products containing Chinese-origin rare earths and over rare earth technology know-how globally
The October controls were suspended through November 2026 after US-China talks.
The underlying architecture is fully intact. The US Geological Survey has estimated that a total gallium and germanium ban alone could cost the US between $3.4 and $9 billion in GDP. The weapon is built. Beijing is deciding when to use it.
China doesn't need to do anything dramatic right now.
The US is bogged down in a Middle East war. AI capex timelines are slipping. Supply chains are taking friction from every direction.
Beijing can wait, let the situation compound, tighten rare earth flows through "administrative review" if the moment calls for it, and emerge in 18 months having closed the AI development gap while everyone else was watching Hormuz.
The Question Markets Haven't Asked Yet
The AI bet was not irrational. It was made by serious people with real conviction, backed by genuine technological progress. The case for AI productivity gains is not fabricated.
But it was a bet made under specific conditions: stable energy prices, accessible components, functional shipping lanes, cooperative geopolitics, and a consumer with enough slack to absorb a few years of transition costs before the gains showed up on their side of the ledger.
None of those conditions exist right now.
The insurance market has already repriced the Strait of Hormuz as a war zone. The fertilizer market is already pricing a supply shock. The shipping market is already pricing in a new risk premium that will not disappear when the shooting stops, because once underwriters reprice a region, they don't unwind it quickly. Reputational risk is sticky. Supply chain reroutes are sticky. Political backlash, once it finds a number to attach to, is very sticky.
The question is not whether the AI buildout survives this. Some version of it will. The question is whether the market has actually updated its model, or whether it is still running on the assumption that this resolves in a few weeks and everything returns to February 27th.
I don't think it resolves in a few weeks...
The bet was made. The conditions changed. The math is what it is.
By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com
Sunday, March 01, 2026
From Greenland to Gaza, the White Man's Burden makes a comeback
From Gaza to Greenland, Iran to Venezuela, imperial projects are rebranded as “security” at the expense of Indigenous freedoms, writes Randa Ghazy.
Decisions about land, sovereignty, and resources are debated in distant capitals, while those most affected are treated as secondary actors in their own history. Their voices, once again missing from Western media, writes Randa Ghazy.
British imperialist businessman Cecil Rhodes once claimed that “[The English people] are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.” This statement, I feel, perfectly embodies the so-called “civilising mission” behind every British colonial endeavour in history.
It was such scientific racism that legitimised imperial expansion: under this logic, having one’s homeland annexed by the British empire was not dispossession, it was an advancement for humanity itself.
For a time, many of us believed this ideology — with its ethical cover for exploitation and brutality — had been consigned to the past. Not anymore.
In the past few years, the genocide in Gaza and the de-facto annexation of the West Bank have reminded us that imperial expansion has not disappeared; it has merely been rebranded. Much of the Western political establishment continues to frame such projects as matters of “security,” “stability,” or “shared values.” And in 2026, leaders like Donald Trump and his allies have revived colonial tropes with striking openness.
Profit-making, wrapped in the language of a “civilising mission,” that echoes Rudyard Kipling’s 'White Man’s Burden', underpins how foreign intervention is sold to the public — whether in Iran, Greenland, or Venezuela. Meanwhile, legacy media often provides reassuring framing: strategic necessity, geopolitical chess, and national interests. Whilst leaving out the human side of the story.
Greenland is a revealing example. The dominant concern among Western liberals was Danish sovereignty, not Greenlandic self-determination. European leaders expressed solidarity “with the Kingdom of Denmark and the people of Greenland,” subtly conflating a colonial administrative structure with the will of an Indigenous population.
As critics have noted, supporting Denmark in the name of international law risks reinforcing an imperial conception of international law — one that arbitrates between empires rather than empowering colonised peoples.
Much of the coverage focused either on Denmark’s legal claim or on Trump’s bombastic style. Trump “wants” Greenland, he “needs it” for security. As Republican Senator Eric Schmitt told the BBC: “Europe should understand that a strong America is good — it’s good for Western civilisation.”
But what does “Western civilisation” mean in this context? Civilisation for whom? And at whose expense?
The Greenlandic Inuit — the Indigenous people of the territory — were largely absent from the conversation. Palestinians are conspicuously missing from the so-called reconstruction discussions around Gaza that are taking place at the ‘Board of Peace’, all whilst aid remains severely limited, and Israel is continuing to encroach on the Strip as the yellow line going further west.
Decisions about land, sovereignty, and resources are debated in distant capitals, while those most affected are treated as secondary actors in their own history. Their voices, once again missing from Western media.
This rhetoric was echoed when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed the Munich Security Conference on 14 February. He urged European allies not to be “shackled by guilt and shame” over their “culture and heritage” and to help the US “revive the West’s age of dominance”. He received a standing ovation.
Soon after, the State Department’s official X account proclaimed that Western civilisation stretches “from Athens to Rome to America” and must embrace its “noble legacy” to reverse its decline.
Yet, few seriously believe that the motivation behind acquiring or threatening to invade Greenland is the defence of Plato or the Parthenon. It is about resources — oil, methane, uranium, nickel, titanium, tungsten, zinc, gold and diamonds — Greenland’s vast and largely untapped mineral wealth.
And this is how colonialism has always functioned, through threats and political pressure, economic domination, and extraction of land as well as labour for the benefit of the coloniser. It is not an archaic system, it is a recurring pattern.
Iran offers another telling case. Western outlets provide extensive coverage to opposition figures such as Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed shah, while often devoting far less space to the diversity of political voices within Iran itself. The country’s complexity — its ethnic plurality, its ideological divisions, its deeply fragmented diaspora — is flattened into a binary: regime versus liberation through Western pressure.
History should have served as a warning. In 1953, US and British intelligence services intervened in Iran, restoring Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power after the nationalisation of oil. At the time, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles justified intervention partly on the grounds that the “free world” could not be deprived of Iranian oil. Strategic resources, once again, were framed as moral necessity.
Today, calls for regime change are often presented as humanitarian concern. Yet the devastating impact of sanctions on ordinary Iranians — and the extent to which economic pressure fuels unrest — receives comparatively little attention. Criticism of Tehran’s brutal repression is necessary and justified. But that should not become a gateway to manufacturing consent for foreign military intervention.
The same double standards are evident elsewhere. Venezuela is framed primarily through the lens of oil and geopolitical shifts. Cuba is discussed through sanctions and containment. Gaza is analysed as a security dilemma. Rarely are the people at the centre of these crises given sustained, primary attention.
The “rules-based international order” is in retreat, while occupation, annexation, or collective punishment are becoming the norm, whether it’s Russia invading Ukraine, Israel annexing Palestinian territory, the US treating Latin America as its ‘backyard’.
Western media cannot single-handedly reverse this trajectory. But it does have a responsibility to decentre imperial narratives, to foreground Indigenous and local voices, to resist the false framework of “civilisation versus chaos.” Journalism should challenge power — not echo it.
Because at its core, this debate is not about civilisation. It is about who gets to define it.
If “Western civilisation” is truly grounded in democracy, human rights and self-determination, then those principles must apply universally — not selectively. They must apply to Greenlanders deciding their own future, to Palestinians seeking freedom and safety, to Iranians navigating their political destiny, to Venezuelans controlling their own oil, and to Cubans living free from the weight of sanctions.
Otherwise, we are not witnessing the defence of civilisation. We are watching the rehabilitation of empire — repackaged in modern language, amplified by media megaphones, and justified once again as a gift to humanity.
The question is not whether history is repeating itself. It is whether we are willing to recognise it — and refuse to participate in its next chapter.
Randa Ghazy is an Italian Egyptian journalist and writer based in London. She has published several books with Italian publisher Rizzoli, including "Dreaming of Palestine" at the age of 15, which has been translated into 16 languages. She has worked as a TV producer at Pan-Arab network Al Araby TV, and led the Gaza media response at Save the Children International, where she held the role of Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe Media Manager.
Follow Randa on X: @ghazy_r on Instagram: @randa_ghazy
Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@alaraby.co.uk.
Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
