“Westlessness” rhymes with restlessness, hinting at mounting concern about the phenomenon. This neologism attracted attention in mid-February at a session of the Munich Security Conference, an international forum for discussions about the state of the world. It brings together think-tanks in Europe and America and attracts VIP participants – a political version of the better-known Davos World Economic Forum.

The conference’s annual report, in its own words, “analyses current security policy developments in China, Europe, Russia and the United States, and ..examines regional dynamics in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and South Asia. In addition, it provides insights into the issues of space and climate security, as well as into the threats arising from new technologies and increasingly transnational right-wing extremism.”

In a packed 48-hour agenda, the rise of China was the outstanding theme – or certainly the one that generated the most comment, among the wider range of issues on which there is growing disagreement between the US and its European allies in the age of Donald Trump and his disruptive “Make America Great Again” policies.

Last December in London, at an ill-tempered Nato summit marking the alliance’s 70th anniversary, leaders for the first time ever also issued a declaration recognising the challenges posed by China’s growing influence and international policies.

Huawei, the Chinese technology giant, was an important sub-theme in Munich. Mark Esper, the US defence secretary, warned that the company’s bid for European 5G networks was “a textbook example of China’s strategy to destabilise and to dominate.” Dependence on it, he cautioned, could make US partners’ digital systems vulnerable and make it difficult to share information with them.

In the background is the unmistakable implication that it will no longer be possible to be a friend of the US while engaging in economic partnership with China. Repeated warnings have been issued to Britain, which has long boasted of its unique “special relationship” with Washington. Boris Johnson, the Conservative prime minister, has given the go-ahead for the UK to use Huwaei’s advanced technology, but that decision has fuelled speculation that it will endanger the vital post-Brexit trade deal he desperately wants to strike with Trump.

Polling shows that the majority of Europeans would opt to remain neutral in tensions or conflict between the US and China, even as Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian policies, including the “re-education” of millions of Uighur Muslims, are subject to mounting scrutiny. Unrest in Hong Kong has also been disturbing to China’s leaders, as has the outbreak of the Corona virus.

Long-standing US-EU differences over the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran are also part of this growing transatlantic divergence, as is the lack of an effective alternative European policy. Profound differences over Trump’s controversial “deal of the century” to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict are relevant as well.

It is now over a century since Oswald Spengler published his famous book The Decline of the West, in which he predicted the imminent decay and the ultimate collapse of western civilization. These days, as the Munich report argued, far-reaching power shifts and rapid technological change contribute to a sense of anxiety and restlessness: “The world is becoming less Western,” it added. “But more importantly, the West itself may become less Western, too. This is what we call “Westlessness.”

Liberal democracy, human rights, market-based economies and cooperation in multilateral institutions have all been characteristics of western behaviour. But they can longer be taken for granted in an increasingly globalized world. Russian support for the Assad regime is a Middle Eastern part of that wider story. Yet so too are America’s mixed messages and European opposition to accepting more Syrian refugees.

Part of the problem is the rise of right-wing, populist and racist movements in western countries, which have eroded the traditional distinction between them and non-democratic authoritarian regimes. Xenophobic white nationalists have attacked mosques and synagogues from Belgium to New Zealand in the name of protecting “western values.”

The prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, proudly presents himself as leading opposition to a “liberal” Europe and redefining the old idea of a “Christian democracy” as “illiberal democracy.” Trump’s “America First” policies have attracted support from extremists. The US president himself put it well in his speech to the UN General Assembly in 2019: “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots.” Last year Vladimir Putin declared liberalism “obsolete.”

These are not just abstract arguments. Many of the Munich speakers emphasized their alarm about current security issues. "It's not enough for the most powerful people in the world to shrug your shoulders and say that this is the way things are," cautioned the conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger, who defined the present state of global insecurity as “absolutely unacceptable." France’s President Emmanel Macron said in a now familiar response that Europeans needed to develop their own policies, instead of transatlantic ones, in their relations with the Middle East, Russia and Africa. Macron had warned earlier that Europe, “if it can’t think of itself as a global power, will disappear, because it will take a hard knock.”

Ian is a former Middle East editor, diplomatic editor and European editor for the Guardian newspaper. In recent years he has reported and commented extensively on the Arab uprisings and their aftermath in Syria, Libya and Egypt, along with frequent visits to Iran, the Gulf and across the MENA region. His latest book, a new history of the Palestine–Israel conflict, was published in 2017 to mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration and the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war. He has an MA in history and social and political science from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in government from LSE. Ian has written for the Economist, the Washington Post and many other publications, and is a regular commentator on TV and radio on Middle Eastern and international affairs. He wrote the introduction to The Arab Spring: Revolution, Rebellion and a New World Order (Guardian Books, 2012); Israel's Secret Wars (Grove Press, 1991), Zionism and the Arabs, 1936–1939 (Taylor & Francis, 1986, 2015); and contributed to the Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa (Macmillan Library Reference, 2004). His most recent book is Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 (Allen Lane, 2017).