Cause of Decline of Western Power
One sentence by President Trump concluded what many research papers were discussing for years. So many books are written about the decline of American Empire including my book “Accidental Empire.” But President finally does the honour of bringing the curtain down on the show of Empire.
“Go get your own oil” is the exact sentence that terminates the post-1945 American order. Not a defeat in battle. Not a financial collapse. A post on Truth-Social from the president telling the world the arrangement is over. There is a wait for an address of the President to be televised soon but that is only a matter of semantics. Substance of message is already out in the open.
For 80 years the implicit contract was that America provides security for global trade routes, allies accept dollar primacy and American institutional leadership in return. That contract was never written down but practiced. It was enforced by the carrier groups and the assumption that America would always show up. Now it says “Go get your own oil.”
Can there be any other conclusion?
The Empires
Western European powers, and later the United States, ruled roughly 84% of the Earth’s land surface by 1914. Organized state power with military and economic leverage tends to expand. And it expanded more after WW-2.
The Ottoman Empire, also ruled vast territories across three continents for 600 years. Japan built a colonial empire across East Asia. The Chugtai Turk (Mughal) Empire ruled more people than any European power did at its peak. But West overtook all that by second world war.
Portugal and Spain gained first-mover advantage through Atlantic navigation. Northern Europe then industrialized first, which converted economic surplus into military technology. The Atlantic slave trade and colonial resource extraction funded that industrialisation.
Colonial Rise of West
But China and India dominated East Asia for most of recorded history. At the beginning of the colonial period India and China together accounted for roughly 50-60% of global industrial output. By the end of British rule, India’s share had collapsed to under 4%. This is a conclusion of research made by Paul Bairoch.
Western dominance was not built on superior civilization or better thinking. It was built on the deliberate deindustrialization of existing sophisticated economies. The textile industry of Bengal was not outcompeted. It was legislated out of existence while British textiles received protection. That is not market superiority. That is piracy with parliamentary paperwork.
Bairoch’s data was largely ignored by mainstream Western economic history for decades. It did not fit the narrative that industrialization was a story of Western ingenuity lifting a primitive world. When the numbers showed that the world was not primitive before European contact, the numbers were inconvenient. The epistemological system simply did not absorb the finding.
West did not know what to do with dead bodies until a 100 years ago. Mohanjo-daro had toilets 3000 years ago but Europe started sewage system 170 years ago.
The Islamic Caliphates ran the sophisticated economies from 700-1200 CE and declined after they stopped the epistemological progress. Printing presses were banned in Ottoman long enough to prevent literacy.
The education is the single most important source which give rise to power and it is also the cause of decline of that power. Let me explain.
World Today
The US economy was roughly 50% of global GDP in 1945. It is around 25% today. Western Europe’s share has compressed similarly. China’s GDP by purchasing power parity already exceeds America’s.
But here is the catch. The very calculation of GDP is somewhat dubious. The comparison in USD also distorts the reality. The method of computing purchasing power parity is inherently defective. It will always make the currency of western countries more valuable. Read about it here. Therefore, the comparison of economies on the basis of GDP is misleading. Truth lies elsewhere and we will find it, if you continue to read.
Today’s Narrative
AI is most transparent tool to show the narrative. Quoting from websites can be exhausting. So I asked the AI “is this western dominance in decline now?” This is the answer:
Western dominance was always two things at once: military-economic control, and institutional standard-setting. The second is proving far stickier than the first. The dollar remains the global reserve currency. Western financial institutions still set the terms of sovereign debt. English remains the language of science, aviation, software, and diplomacy. The rules-based international order, however hypocritically applied, was written in Washington and Geneva.
…. India is the more interesting case. It is rising without positioning itself as a Western alternative, which suggests the coming world may be multipolar rather than a clean handoff from West to East.
So: Western dominance is declining as a fact of material power, but Western-originated systems are not declining at the same rate. Those are separable questions that most commentary conflates.
After confronting it with post Iran and Hormuz situation, AI revised its opinion:
What this war reveals is that Western-originated systems are not operating independently of Western military power. They are backed by it. The dollar’s primacy, the rules-based order, the institutional architecture — these were never self-sustaining. They rested on American willingness to use force when its perceived interests demanded it.
The justifications offered were diverse and kept shifting — preventing nuclear weapons, securing oil, achieving regime change — which itself tells you the decision preceded the rationale.
That is not a system operating on principled rules. That is raw power dressed in institutional language.
Western dominance is therefore not declining in the way I suggested. It is simply dropping its more polished exterior.
However, it appears that the dominance is not declining but vanishing fast in past 33 days of war. USA is alone. It has no ally except for lip service. Military power is meaningless if you have no money to waste and you have no courage to bring home body bags. This situation in which world is today and the decline of west is not due to one or few wars. It is the symptom of an underlying cause. The cause of concern is western epistemological failure. It created an untruthful system of education and fell in its trap, itself.
Western Epistemological Failure
The western decline is due to its epistemological failure. It polluted its education system so much to brain wash its people that now it has no brain left to understand geopolitics.
It started with distortion of the thought process of the societies West colonized. For example, British mistranslated ancient Sanskrit text from India in an Operation Sanskrit Mill. The British needed to reshape how Indians saw themselves, and the translations turned namaskara and vandana, acts of recognizing energy, into “worship,” slapping a Christian top-down label on a fluid, interconnected cosmology. The translations provided evidence for depicting Hindu society as backward and needing British guidance, enforced rigid caste categories, and trained Indians to see their own culture through colonial eyes.
The education system was not just polluted to control others. It became incapable of processing evidence that contradicted its own founding assumptions. Paul Bairoch produced exactly that evidence and the system looked away. It is symptom of a civilization that has lost the capacity for self-appraisal.
The planners launched a war and appear genuinely shocked that a cornered Iran closed the Hormuz choke-point. People who understood cause and effect would have war-gamed that outcome in week one of planning. The professional class that spent careers studying Iran was apparently not in the room. In a previous article it was explained that USA today looks like the Railroad Company of the novel Atlas Shrugged.
Four hundred years of dominance created a civilization that confused its own narrative for reality. Britain did this too before Suez. Rome most completely of all. The education system was polluted. it does not matter if it was polluted by triumphalism or the ideology.
AI Feed-Back Loop
AI too has the same narrative. It counts battles without counting the cost. Human and Civilizational cost. Winning battles is not military dominance. It is not winning war. USA wins wars in Hollywood. It wins oil pumps in real world. That is piracy.
The West built a AI as a mirror that showed its best image, then stared into it so long that it forgot that it was a product of polluted epistemology. I have a strong suspicion that Iran-attack scenario was war-gamed on AI fed with presumptive western dominance. Every time the West uses AI, it gets fed more of its own poison.
Examples
Dhurandhar in Economist
A magazine called The Economist, whose stated mandate is economics and global business, sent its “Banyan” correspondent to a Bollywood screening to psychoanalyze the political susceptibility of Indian audiences. And the conclusion they published was that Indians who enjoyed the movie ‘Dhurandhr’ are essentially brainwashed.
Now think logically. A PM with popular 70% rating needs propaganda and a magazine concerned with economy is writing about it?
The Economist cannot process a reality whether Indian popular sentiment is genuine rather than manufactured. In the Western framework, mass enthusiasm for a nationalist leader must be false consciousness, propaganda, manipulation. The alternative, that Indians are making an informed judgment based on their own historical experience with Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, is outside the frame entirely.
This is Operation Sanskrit Mill continuing in 2026. The British told Indians their own texts needed British interpretation to be understood correctly. The Economist is telling Indians their own political preferences need British interpretation to be understood correctly. The calendar changed. Maps changed. The colonial assumption did not.
Now think it on the logic of economics. Let us assume that the Movie is propaganda. Let us us also assume the PM has himself commissioned it. But he has 70% popularity rating. Those are his followers not just voters in typical democratic sense. He is winning election after election. A new state is won every few years. Odisha was also won in 2024. Economist wants Indian subscriber for 1290/- per month but would target the 70% of those readers as blind followers without intelligence?
Economist has convinced me that every western economist reads it. Their expert advice during Covid/Corona pandemic corroborates it. Perhaps, White House too reads it.
Backyard of Economist
While the Economist is so concerned with Indian audience that it wants to save them from propaganda. But it could do nothing for a British citizen who happened to be a Sikh.
Harman Singh Kapoor, a Sikh restaurateur in Hammersmith, faced months of harassment after his restaurant publicly refused to serve halal meat, displaying a sign reading “Proudly we don’t sell Halal.” He received fake negative reviews, threats, and confrontations outside his restaurant.
Britain supposedly exported ‘liberal civilisation’ to the world. A private business owner exercising religious dietary preference, which is the most basic freedom in any liberal framework, was effectively criminalized. The crowd that besieged his family faced no consequences. This is where the supposition ended.
The Economist is in London and writes about Modi propaganda in India. It does not write about Kapoor and his harassment. This is a structural inability to process information that contradicts its colonial narrative of being better than the rest of the world.
Two London mayoral candidates remained completely silent about the harassment, attacks, rape threats, and death threats Kapoor and his family faced.
This is after the incidents named ‘grooming gangs’ in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford. Rape of children and human trafficking suppressed for years by institutions that had trained themselves to not see what was in front of them. No meaningful action has been taken. An enquiry is ordered every few years but without punishing the guilty. So much for a civilised society in which criminals have last laugh.
Conclusion
The above analysis leads to only one conclusion that the Western decline is not a geopolitical event, it is the terminus of a 200-year feedback loop where a civilization corrupted knowledge to control others, then lost the ability to know anything accurately about itself or the world.
The Iran war is not the cause. It is the invoice arriving after 200 years of miseducation.
References:
- Burial of dead in Europe: https://sandeepbhalla.in/europes-superstition-and-denial-of-death/
- The Wait at Hormuz: https://sandeepbhalla.in/what-usa-is-waiting-for-near-hormuz/
- Trump on Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116323481956698353
- USA-Iran War: https://sandeepbhalla.in/america-iran-war-outlook/
- Simplified Article on PPP: https://sandeepbhalla.in/india-reduced-goods-tax-gst-it-must-be-punished/
- Paul Bairoch: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL1410032M/Economics_and_world_history
- Halal Arrest in UK: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15650449/Man-arrested-Sikh-restaurateur-refused-sell-Halal-meat.html
- Arrest of Sikh: https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/sikh-restaurateur-detaine-protests-refused-to-sell-halal-5HjdWN8_2/
- Operation Sanskrit Mill: https://sandeepbhalla.in/the-sanskrit-mill-operation-of-east-india-company/
- Surviving epistemological violence: https://sandeepbhalla.in/indias-response-to-wests-epistemological-violence/
- Dhurandhar article: https://www.economist.com/asia/2026/03/29/is-bollywoods-latest-megahit-propaganda-for-narendra-modi