Chapter One

A Crisis of the West

When you say “we,” who do you mean?

Many of us would start the answer with our family and our friends. Widening the circle, we might think of our town or region, supporters of the same football team, our nation or state, a sexual orientation, a political affiliation (“we on the Left,” “we Republicans”), or those who profess the same religion—world-straddling fraternities these, with more than 1.3 billion Muslims and nearly 2 billion Christians, though fraternities scarred by deep internal divisions. Beyond this, most of us have a strong sense of “we” meaning all our fellow human beings. Some would add other living creatures.

Yet these largest senses of “we” are seldom what people really have in mind when they say “we must do this” or “we cannot allow that.” The moral “we” of all humankind is today more important than ever, but it’s not the same as our operational “we.” So let us pose the question more precisely: What’s the widest political community of which you spontaneously say “we” or “us”? In our answer to that question lies the key to our future.

For me, an Englishman born into the Cold War, that widest political community used to be something called “the West.” My friends and I didn’t spend much time worrying about its boundaries. If you had asked us, we could not have said exactly where it ended. Was Turkey part of the West? Japan? Mexico? But we had no doubt that it existed, as Europe existed, or communism. At its core, we felt, were the free countries on both s