Western Decline Caused by Elites' Unchecked Pursuit of Wealth and Power, Despite Repeated Warnings
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/owen-jones. "The west is in freefall – and the worst part is that we were warned, but chose not to listen | Owen Jones | The Guardian." September 24, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
Owen Jones argues that the west's current crisis—rising far-right movements, economic stagnation, and foreign policy disasters—isn't an accident or mainly about immigration and culture wars, as the right claims. Instead, it happened because western leaders greedily pursued wealth and power after the Cold War, ignoring repeated expert warnings (about Russian economic reforms, Afghan weapons policy, and the 2008 financial crisis) because those warnings threatened their interests.
Conclusion
The decline of the west was caused by its elites' endless, unchecked pursuit of wealth and power at home and abroad, and this decline was foreseeable because credible warnings were repeatedly issued and deliberately ignored when they conflicted with elite interests.
Premises
- After the cold war, western elites declared a triumphant victory and adopted an economic model that channelled wealth upwards while treating western military power as unconstrained and free to reshape the Muslim world.
- Wayne Merry's 1994 cable warned that 'shock therapy' economic reforms in Russia would devastate living standards, strengthen extremists, and revive adversarial relations with the west; this warning was suppressed and Merry was made persona non grata, and the predicted catastrophe (12.2 million excess deaths, Putin's rise, invasion of Ukraine) materialized.
- US envoy Edmund McWilliams warned in 1988 that arming Islamist fundamentalists in Afghanistan was going badly, and CIA analysts in 1987 warned that weapons could later be used by Islamist guerrillas elsewhere; these warnings were ignored, McWilliams was smeared and reassigned, and the predicted consequences (terrorism, extremism) followed.
- Western economies shifted from productive investment to wealth extraction (e.g., 80% of British finance flows back into finance, insurance and real estate), undermining the foundations of shared prosperity.
- A World Bank executive predicted the 2008 financial crisis based on unsustainable credit-fueled consumption papering over stagnant wages, yet after the crash, ordinary people bore the cost through austerity rather than the failed model being reformed.
- The repeated pattern across multiple domains (Russia policy, Afghan policy, financial deregulation) shows that warnings were consistently overridden whenever they conflicted with the interests of concentrated western wealth and power.
- The resulting disillusionment from stagnant living standards, foreign policy humiliations, and moral failures (e.g., Gaza) has fueled far-right movements that now threaten democracy itself.
Assumptions
- The people and institutions issuing these warnings were credible and their predictions were the primary drivers of subsequent events, rather than coincidental or overdetermined by other factors.
- Elite self-interest, rather than incompetence, uncertainty, or genuinely difficult tradeoffs, was the decisive reason warnings were ignored.
- An alternative policy path (heeding the warnings) would have substantially avoided the negative outcomes described.
- The various case studies (Russia, Afghanistan, 2008 crisis, Gaza) are sufficiently similar and connected to support a single unified narrative of elite-driven decline.
- The 'west' can be meaningfully treated as a coherent entity with unified elite interests across different countries, decades, and institutions.
- Rebuilding 'society' through collective investment of wealth is a viable and sufficient remedy for the diagnosed problems.