Following an article I posted on social media today – "Dealing with CRINK" looked at disparities between on-the-ground reports of the Xi-hosted SCO meeting in Beijing and most Western accounts – I want here to examine a recurrent pattern in Anglophone policy commentary since roughly 2014—especially across elite US/UK magazines, op-ed pages, and major think tank briefs—without claiming or implying universality across the Western world.
The tendency in view is a tone of breathless panic, tinged with attrition, whenever non-Western powers outside liberal democratic frameworks demonstrate cohesion or assertiveness. Such moments are too frequently cast not just as threats but as omens of disorder. Analysis gives way to interpretation, speculation, and intensely emotive rhetoric, underwritten by a persistent bias that—intentionally or not—reinscribes Western centrality and exceptionalism. In the language of futures thinking, what presents as “now-casting” is often a narrative loop that simplifies the system to preserve the system.
Not all Western analysis fits this pattern. Realist and restraint-orientated voices—Barry Posen, Stephen Walt, Jeffrey Sachs, and John Mearsheimer—alongside scholars such as Emma Ashford, Jessica Chen Weiss, Evelyn Goh, and Ayşe Zarakol, and journalistic investigations by Carol Cadwalladr into platform incentives and disinformation, as well as postcolonial and Global South perspectives in venues such as International Affairs and Third World Quarterly, have repeatedly foregrounded structural drivers and small-state agency. The argument here is directed at a prevalent media–think tank discourse that shapes day-to-day perceptions and policy mood music, not at the full spectrum of Western scholarship.
The pattern often starts with a hidden premise: the “global order” is implicitly the post-1945, Western-led order in security and finance. Departures from its norms—alternative alliances, different approaches to sovereignty, and industrial policy over unfettered capital mobility—are framed as assaults on stability rather than plausible evolutions or valid expressions of divergent histories and aspirations. The rise of competing power centres is too often reduced to a reaction to the latest Western leader’s missteps, as if world politics were a morality play revolving around a single court. A systems lens tells a different story. Decolonisation’s unfinished business, security dilemmas, the pursuit of strategic autonomy, and widespread grievances concerning perceived Western hypocrisy and unilateralism constitute slow-moving currents that predate and outlast any single administration. They are the deep structures—path dependencies, institutional lock-ins, and developmental constraints—through which present shocks reverberate.
A further move involves excessive psychologising and speculative mind-reading. Motives of non-Western leaders are treated as settled facts—driven by insecurity, vainglory, or nihilism—while complex statecraft and long-run strategy collapse into the personal quirks of “strongmen”. This narrative of convenience simplifies a polycentric reality and delegitimises national choices by lodging them in presumed pathologies. In parallel, assertive Western actions are more readily framed as defensive necessities. A futures perspective counsels proportion rather than denial. Personalism matters in some contexts—particularly where institutions are brittle, succession norms weak, or elite coalitions fragmented—but it doesn't obviate structure. The analytical error is not the inclusion of psychology; it is the elevation of psychology over capability, doctrine, and base rates.
Alarmism reveals itself most plainly in diction and prediction. Loaded terms—“kowtowing,” “triumphalist,” “expansionist,” “axis,” “new Cold War”—do not merely describe; they predispose readers toward catastrophe. Alliances among non-Western powers are routinely labelled brittle “marriages of expediency”, with forecasts of fracture or chaos the instant a leader exits the stage. Such forecasts underweigh institutional resilience, managed succession, and enduring interest alignment beyond simple anti-Western sentiment. At its most theatrical and absurd, commentary invokes apocalyptic imagery, implying that multipolarity portends systemic collapse. Once again, this is not analysis; it's fear arbitrage in an attention economy. If you wish to persuade a harried policy audience, you learn to sell tail risk as the baseline. But a civilisation doesn't renew its strategic intelligence by fetishising its nightmares.
Calling this discourse “propaganda” risks implying central coordination. A more accurate account points to mutually reinforcing mechanisms that bias the narrative without the presence of conspiracy. Newsrooms and platforms are rewarded for negativity; sourcing gravitates toward security officials fluent in worst-case framing; policy access and funding can privilege threat inflation; and cognitive tendencies—availability cascades, linear extrapolation, and survivorship bias—tilt judgement. These are design features of the current information ecosystem, not aberrations. They create an echo chamber where vigilance morphs into hypervigilance and prudence into paralysis.
The agency of smaller and non-Western states is often the first casualty. They are cast as passively “driven” into the arms of rivals by Western mistakes, rather than as actors widening their options in a world of multiple, intersecting games. Yet the record shows calculated diversification and leverage. Vietnam has expanded defence and economic ties across the United States, India, Japan, and Russia to maintain strategic flexibility. Indonesia has used nickel endowments to shape EV supply chains and extract technology transfer. Saudi Arabia has deepened energy, tech, and diplomatic links with China while relying on the US security umbrella. Türkiye has bargained within NATO even as it purchased S-400s to signal autonomy. Kenya and Ethiopia have combined Gulf and Chinese finance with engagement of Western development finance institutions to broaden fiscal and infrastructural options. I could go on and on. But my point is that these are not reflexes of grievance but exercises in agency amid polycentric interdependence.
It's also worth qualifying the “Western-led order”. US and European influence has been central in security and finance, yet the post-1945 system was reshaped by decolonisation, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the participation of large non-Western economies in global institutions. Multipolarity is not a switch; it's domain-specific and path-dependent—more apparent in trade patterns, commodity governance, and regional security complexes than in formal alliance structures. A futures-inflected reading suggests we're moving from a world of hegemonic simplifications to one of fluid, overlapping regimes—what might be called ‘braided orders’—where coordination hinges on issue-specific convergence rather than monolithic alignment.
A constructive critique must distinguish vigilance from alarmism. Proportionate assessment privileges what can be observed and replicated over what is merely inferred. Capabilities, logistics, and doctrine should outweigh leader psychology. Domestic constraints, cost tolerance, and elite cohesion should be mapped before forecasting aggression or collapse. Regional balances and alliance responses must be incorporated alongside escalation ladders and off-ramps. Historical base rates—for war onset, regime failure, and alliance defection—are more reliable guides than episodic analogies. Scenario planning should be separated from prediction or anticipatory methods, with uncertainty disclosed rather than concealed beneath decisive prose. If mainstream commentary consistently weighted capabilities over intentions, benchmarked claims against base rates, and highlighted small-state agency as often as great-power rivalry, the critique advanced here would fail on its own terms.
Precision also clarifies the stakes. By “neoliberal paradigm”, the reference is not a catchall pejorative but a specific policy assemblage: privileging capital mobility and investor protections embedded in trade and investment treaties; treating fiscal consolidation and central bank independence as default policy norms; and relying on a security architecture that assumes US-led alliances are guarantors of market openness. The current reconfiguration—industrial policy revivals, de-risking rather than decoupling, regional currency and payments experiments, and autonomous digital standards—signals not the end of order but the emergence of alternative equilibria. The wise course is not to deny these shifts, nor to romanticise them, but to learn how to steer in a river that now runs braided.
Good analysis, then, looks different from the alarmist norm. It pairs structural indicators—trade and FDI networks, commodity dependencies, logistics chokepoints, demography, defence spending and posture—with coded discourse analysis and historical base-rate comparisons. It widens the sourcing aperture beyond Anglophone think tanks to regional experts and non-English media. It resists single-cause narratives, separates facts from assumptions and scenarios, and admits uncertainty bands. Policy implications follow: prefer targeted de-risking to blanket decoupling; assemble issue-specific coalitions on climate, maritime safety, and health; reform Bretton Woods representation and instruments to reflect contemporary economic weights; and tolerate regional security architectures that do not map neatly onto US-led alliance templates.
If the commentary that sets the tone of Western debate began to internalise these habits—less mind-reading, more systems mapping; fewer apocalyptic metaphors, more base rates; greater attention to the agency of the many rather than the anxieties of the few—the spectre of Western alarmism would fade of its own accord. The future would not become less uncertain. But our capacity to navigate it, to sense the early signals of transformation without mistaking them for catastrophe, would markedly improve.