We have a problem. A problem in how we think about things, how we orient ourselves toward the world as a Western nation. And this problem could eventually lead to very destructive war, or even our downfall.
It began shortly after World War II, which America won decisively, protecting its allies while punishing its enemies. Our immediate reaction was not the traditional behavior of a conqueror: to strip defeated nations of resources, impose permanent subjugation, redraw borders purely to our advantage, or demand tribute in blood and gold.
Instead, we rebuilt our enemies and friends alike.
We fed former enemies. We rebuilt their cities and factories. We integrated them into a new economic order. We restrained ourselves from conquest and chose stewardship instead. In doing so, the United States made a historically unprecedented wager: that generosity would produce stability, that prosperity would tame rivalry, and that shared institutions would eventually replace raw power as the organizing principle of the world.
For a time, this wager worked extraordinarily well.
The Marshall Plan itself was not a mistake. On the contrary, it was one of the most morally serious acts in human history. A victorious nation chose restraint over vengeance, reconstruction over plunder, and forgiveness, so far as forgiveness was possible, over perpetual punishment. That choice was not weakness. It was strength, deliberately exercised.
But generosity has an uncomfortable side effect that moral narratives rarely acknowledge: the recipients of generosity often resent their benefactors.
This is not unique to nations. It is a human pattern. Gifts create imbalance. Imbalance creates shame. And shame instead of gratitude curdles into resentment and mistrust. To accept generosity is to admit dependence, and dependence is intolerable to pride. (This is why expecting repayment of a gift creates dignity in the recipient and the giver, but that’s a different essay entirely.)
When America was not thanked, when generosity was met with suspicion or hostility rather than gratitude, it unsettled us deeply. We did not interpret resentment as a predictable human response. We interpreted it as a moral indictment. We asked not, “Is this how people often respond to mercy?” but “What did we do wrong?”
And so we began to second-guess ourselves. We reexamined our motives, our history, our power, our very legitimacy. We mistook resentment for revelation. We internalized hostility as guilt.
There is no doubt that postwar generosity – kindness to former enemies, reconstruction without conquest, forgiveness without forgetting – was morally serious. It reflected the best instincts of the Western tradition. But morality untethered from an understanding of human nature does not remain morality for long. It becomes self-doubt. And self-doubt, when elevated to a governing principle, becomes vulnerability.
From that moment on, we began to behave as though power itself required apology, as though leadership demanded constant self-abasement, and as though restraint, once chosen freely, must be endlessly repeated even when it ceased to be reciprocated.
Restraint as Virtue, Exploitation as Strategy
By the late twentieth century, restraint had ceased to be a choice and become an identity. It was no longer something the West did in specific circumstances; it was something the West was. To act with restraint was to be moral. To insist on enforcement was to risk appearing crude, aggressive, or unchanged by history. Once restraint is moralized, it stops being conditional. It no longer depends on reciprocity, outcomes, or context. It becomes an end in itself. The act of holding back is treated as proof of goodness, regardless of whether anyone else does the same.
The West began to design systems that assumed good faith as a baseline and treated defection as an aberration. Agreements were written as though shared values were sufficient enforcement. Institutions were constructed to manage cooperation, not to compel it. When rules were broken, the response was rarely consequence; it was dialogue, review, and recommitment. Punishment was simply out of the question.
This worldview worked tolerably well so long as it governed only those who already believed in it. It failed the moment it encountered actors like China and Russia, which did not share its moral premises.
These other powers learned quickly that Western restraint was not temporary or tactical, but principled and enduring. They discovered that it did not require reciprocity to persist. And once that became clear, restraint ceased to function as moral leadership and began to function as opportunity.
This is not a claim about villainy. It is a claim about incentives. In a world where one bloc treats restraint as virtue and another treats it as a strategic weakness, the strategic actor will always gain ground, not because it is more evil, but because it is more honest about how power works.
The Return of the Pattern: Climate and Moral Panic
This moral framework did not remain confined to diplomacy or trade. It became the default lens through which the West learned to interpret every large, abstract problem. Whenever a new, complex challenge emerged, especially one involving technology or scale, the same reflex asserted itself: moralize first, restrain immediately, and assume convergence would follow.
Climate change was the first full rehearsal.
When temperature measurements began to show a modest but persistent rise, Western scientific and political culture did not pause to ask whether this change was unusual in geological or historical terms. It did not begin with humility about the extraordinary stability of the Holocene. It did not foreground the fact that Earth’s climate has never been static, and that change, not equilibrium, is the planet’s default state.
Instead, the conclusion arrived almost immediately: This must be our fault.
The assumption was not argued into being. It was recognized as morally familiar. Humanity had industrialized. Humanity had prospered. Humanity had altered its environment, as every dominant species does, simply by existing at scale. Therefore, when change appeared, guilt preceded explanation.
The language that followed was not the language of cautious inquiry. It was the language of transgression and atonement. We were told we had “broken” the planet, that nature was “retaliating,” that a reckoning was coming. The solution was not adaptation, resilience, or sober cost–benefit analysis. It was repentance.
We must consume less. We must restrict ourselves. We must accept lower standards of living. We must confess, publicly and repeatedly, that our way of life has been a mistake, or worse, a sin.
This was never merely an environmental argument. It was a moral narrative grafted onto a complex system whose behavior we only partially understand. Questions about long-term climatic cycles, solar variation, planetary comparisons, or Earth’s extraordinary resilience were treated as distractions or moral evasions.
Skepticism was not answered. It was pathologized.
What followed was not prudent stewardship but unilateral self-restraint elevated into virtue. Western nations constrained their own energy production, industrial capacity, and economic growth, often symbolically, often preemptively, and often without enforceable reciprocity. The point was not effectiveness. The point was moral demonstration.
Artificial Intelligence and the Abdication of Agency
Artificial intelligence has followed the same script.
AI is a powerful, general-purpose technology with real risks and extraordinary potential. Like any tool that magnifies human capability, it can be used well or badly, prudently or catastrophically. The danger is real, but it does not reside in the machine. It resides in the human beings and institutions that direct it.
This distinction matters because it exposes a fatal error in how the West has begun to talk about AI. In Western discourse, AI is discussed primarily in moral and metaphysical terms. We debate whether machines might want things, whether intelligence itself is inherently dangerous, and whether development should be slowed or paused to preserve ethical purity. The dominant question is not who will wield this tool, but whether touching it at all compromises our virtue.
Restraint is framed as humility, and acceleration as sin.
Western firms are urged to self-limit. Governments debate moratoria. Ethical frameworks proliferate faster than implementation. The dominant fear is not being outcompeted, but being impure—of having acted too decisively, too confidently, or without sufficient moral anxiety. This posture is often defended as responsibility. It is not.
Withdrawal is not humility. It is irresponsibility. It is the abdication of agency.
AI will exist. The knowledge exists. The incentives exist. The strategic value is obvious. No amount of Western hesitation will prevent its development. Withdrawal from AI development will not make the world safer. Rather, it cedes authorship of the future to those who feel no comparable hesitation.
Outside the Western moral ecosystem, AI is not treated as a metaphysical puzzle. It is treated as infrastructure, capacity, and power. Development proceeds pragmatically, integrated directly into logistics, manufacturing, intelligence analysis, surveillance, and command systems. The question is not whether AI should exist, but how it can be deployed most efficiently in service of national strength.
The contrast is not accidental. It reflects fundamentally different civilizational operating systems.
Western societies embed friction into power. Decision-making is slowed by law, dissent, press scrutiny, divided authority, and moral argument. These constraints are often frustrating. They can delay action and, at worst, result in failure. But they also limit abuse, surface wrongdoing, and impose real costs on excess.
Authoritarian systems minimize friction. Power is centralized. Dissent is suppressed. Oversight is instrumental rather than moral. Technology is fused directly to state ambition. When such systems acquire powerful tools, those tools are not debated into restraint; they are absorbed into coercive capacity.
This difference matters enormously. A powerful technology in a restrained, pluralistic system is dangerous in one way. The same technology in an expansionist, authoritarian system is dangerous in another, and far more predictable, way.
Western commentators often behave as though the gravest moral risk is Western misuse. That assumption is itself a product of guilt-based thinking. It ignores observable behavior and stated intent. It treats restraint as universally binding and ambition as morally symmetrical.
They are not.
The uncomfortable truth is that we may not be choosing between good and evil. We may be choosing between lesser and greater evils. But refusing to choose does not absolve us. It simply ensures that others will choose for us.
The adult moral position is not purity. It is responsibility.
If AI is dangerous – and it certainly can be – then it is morally imperative that the civilizations most constrained by law, dissent, and accountability remain engaged in shaping it. Retreating from that task does not prevent harm. It guarantees that harm will be shaped by those least inclined to restrain themselves. To step back now, out of moral anxiety, is not to rise above history. It is to abandon it, to value our own morality more than the future of humanity.
Abandonment dressed up as virtue has consequences no less real than any misuse of power.
Related: We Live in an Age of Miracles: Five Real Advances and One Mental Shift That Will Change Everything
Two Problems, One Reflex, and One Clear Asymmetry
The fundamental difference here is not scientific judgment or technological capability. It is orientation.
The West increasingly asks, “What must we give up to be good?”
China asks, “What must we build to be strong?”
In climate policy, Western nations restricted energy and industry as proof of seriousness. China expanded capacity, weighing environmental concerns against economic and geopolitical position. In AI, Western nations debate moral purity while China accelerates development to secure advantage.
China’s focus is not absolution. It is power and position.
This matters because leadership matters. The United States and its allies have exercised global leadership with unusual mercy, restraint, and goodwill. We rebuilt former enemies. We created institutions that favored stability over domination. We tolerated criticism and even exploitation in the belief that long-term order was worth short-term cost.
China has shown, repeatedly, that its primary loyalty is to its own continuity and power. Where mercy conflicts with advantage, advantage wins. This is not a moral insult. It is an observable pattern.
Weakness does not create peace. It creates vacancies.
A world in which Western leadership retreats under the weight of its own guilt is not a neutral world. It is a world in which influence shifts toward actors who do not share Western commitments to restraint, transparency, or individual dignity.
Globalism and the Insulation of Responsibility
The asymmetry described above did not arise on its own. It was accidental at first, but it did not persist without assistance. Globalism emerged in the space created by Western moral overextension, and it learned how to operate there not through conspiracy or malice, but through opportunity.
By “globalists,” I do not mean a shadowy cabal of billionaires seeking to own the world. That caricature misses the reality. Globalists are better understood as people who share a particular way of seeing the world: one in which national sovereignty is an obstacle, moral coordination is preferable to power, and stability is best achieved through process rather than enforcement. Most globalists are not plutocrats. They are administrators, regulators, consultants, NGO professionals, academics, and international civil servants. They live in frameworks. They manage systems. And the systems they build depend on one critical assumption: that the world will not change too much.
Globalism did not create the initial imbalance between Western restraint and rival ambition, but it quickly learned how to benefit from it. A world in which Western nations voluntarily limit themselves, avoid enforcement, and absorb costs internally is a world in which global managerial systems can expand with minimal resistance. In this worldview, problems are addressed through accords, targets, and principles. Success is measured in alignment and language rather than outcomes. When these systems fail to bind less cooperative actors, failure is not treated as a signal to enforce rules, but as evidence that commitment was insufficient. The answer is always recommitment: more process, broader scope, thicker layers of coordination.
Crucially, the costs of failure do not fall on those who design these systems. Instead, they fall on national populations in the form of higher energy prices, lost industrial capacity, and growing strategic vulnerability. The people most affected by these outcomes have the least influence over the frameworks that produce them. Over time, this insulation distorts priorities. Restraint hardens into doctrine. Enforcement becomes taboo. Reciprocity becomes impolite. Power is treated as destabilizing, while process is treated as virtue.
The appearance of moral seriousness is preserved. The material position of Western societies erodes. And because globalism is built to prize stability above all else, any attempt to reintroduce limits, enforcement, or national interest is framed not as necessary correction, but as dangerous disruption. Change itself becomes the enemy.
In this way, globalism does not merely fail to correct the West’s moral overreach. It locks it in, institutionalizing asymmetry while insulating decision-makers from consequence and exhausting the societies expected to carry the burden indefinitely.
Growing Up: Power, Limits, and Moral Reality
The problem confronting the West is not a lack of values. It is a failure of orientation. Civilizations do not collapse because they care too much about morality. They collapse because they confuse morality with self-erasure.
Power is not a sin; it is a condition of responsibility. Mercy is only meaningful when paired with firmness. Responsibility must be bounded to remain real. Restraint must be reciprocal to remain virtuous.
We cannot repent our way to stability. We cannot apologize our way to peace. And we cannot moralize our way out of competition.
The West does not need to become ruthless. But it must stop treating power as a moral stain. Mercy, chosen freely by those who could act otherwise, is strength. Leadership, exercised without shame, is necessary.
The world does not need a West that disappears out of moral exhaustion. It needs a West that remembers how to lead, calmly, firmly, and like an adult.
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