Oswald Spengler, eccentric German arch-conservative, brilliant author of “The Decline of the West,” and proud pessimist extraordinaire (“optimism is cowardice”), could also be rather woke: You will find no more disdainful scorn or biting derision for the West’s navel-gazing than his.

Skewering the Occident’s “provincial presuppositions,” naïve vanity, and self-crippling narrow-mindedness, Spengler dismissed its compulsive solipsism as producing a “prodigious optical illusion” of self-importance.

Today, a little over a hundred years after these observations, Spengler would feel grimly vindicated. The string of international events – on a scale from “remarkable” to “game-changing” – that has just unfolded first at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin, then around Beijing’s massive 80th-anniversary World War II victory parade, should bring home to even the most somnambulant inhabitant of the Western mainstream media bubble two key facts about our world as it really is.

First, a new global order centered on Eurasia (minus a small, odd, and dismal peninsula, compulsively fixated on the Atlantic and masochistically obedient to the US) and the Global South is emerging unstoppably. China’s President Xi Jinping made clear in Tianjin that its custodians will relegate the West’s farcical “rules-based international order,” this ugly aberration that has facilitated the Gaza genocide and other mass crimes, to the rubbish heap of history.

And second, the West is missing its chance to play a role in shaping what is coming after its half-delusional and entirely brutal “unipolar moment.” Stuck in self-defeating complacency, as illustrated by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s bigoted dismissal of the SCO meeting as a “performative” get-together of “bad actors,” current Western establishments are determined to keep self-marginalizing.

In Slovak leader’s Robert Fico’s apt terms, most of the Western leadership will go on playing “frog at........

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