Journalist and Guardian columnist Owen Jones has published a new book, "The Fall of the West," which examines the decline of certainties that defined the turn of the millennium. Jones recounts how the perceived triumph of free market ideology, US military supremacy, and a rules-based global order have diminished over the past 25 years due to economic failures, foreign policy disasters, and political crises.
The book revisits the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, highlighting their strategic failure and an estimated death toll of half a million. Jones writes that the 2021 evacuation of Kabul airport was "among the starkest images of American decline yet broadcast to the world." He also notes that interventions like the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, both without UN Security Council authorisation, weakened the international legal system.
Jones also addresses domestic decline in Western economies, which he describes as being built on chronic insecurity and precarious employment. He suggests a "correlation between the inability of centrist governments to tackle economic decline in any meaningful way, and the rise of the far right." The book includes interviews with various individuals, such as a former Lehman Brothers employee and the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis.