The Liberal Order Will Collapse Due to Internal Erosion

The future belongs to civilization states and an alliance between technology and tradition, says Dr. Steve Turley.

Steve Turley, an American scholar and public intellectual, has become one of the most recognized analysts of the political and cultural shifts that define our time. Turley has had an unusual career: he trained as a classical guitarist and later earned a doctorate in theology. He left the lecture halls of academia for the forefront of the new media landscape, where he built a large global audience with his daily commentary. In his work, he combines his formal training with a clear style, making him accessible even beyond academic circles.

Turley first gained attention with his thesis that liberal globalism has entered a long-term decline. Instead, he sees the rebirth of enduring forms of identity. In his books and videos, he explores this shift through concrete examples: electoral realignments, the rise of traditional and religious civilizational states, and the growing rebellion against governing elites. According to Turley, liberal globalism rests on a shrinking population base, while culturally rooted and faith-driven groups are growing demographically, laying the long-term foundations for a postliberal world, writes Constantin von Hoffmeister .

Before becoming a full-time commentator, Turley taught theology, philosophy, and rhetoric for many years. This background shaped his measured and historical tone. He often returns to the idea that political change flows from deeper cultural and spiritual currents. For his readers and viewers, this provides context to events that might otherwise seem chaotic or disjointed.

This interview explores his views on the forces reshaping the West and the rest of the world.

What experiences in your early life and education shaped the worldview you express in your work today?

I’ve always been fascinated and captivated by civilization in its highest expressions. As a child, I was very artistic; I fell in love with Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures and did my best to recreate them on canvas with my own oil paint set. Soon, I became obsessed with Gothic cathedrals and their design.

When I was about 12, I turned to music, specifically Bach, and earned my first degree in classical guitar from Peabody Conservatory. While at Peabody, I delved into theology and discovered the philosophy behind this rich tradition of Western civilization.

Then I got my first full-time teaching job at a classical school, where I taught theology, Greek, and rhetoric. During my doctoral studies, I discovered a growing field of study known as civilizational studies, and it was then that I realized how everything I had learned previously came together in this wonderful synthesis of civilizations.

Which thinkers first convinced you that the world was moving away from a universal liberal model?

In 2008, I came across a fascinating book called Anthony Giddens: The Last Modernist by sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic, who convincingly argued that the liberal globalist world that Giddens had devoted so much intellectual attention and energy to building and maintaining was coming to an end, and that a postmodern world, in which culture and identity were central, was already emerging.

The classic geopolitical expression of this proposition was, of course, Sam Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, in which he argued that the world order was moving away from ideology (the bipolar world of Western liberalism versus Soviet communism) and toward identity (the multipolar world of civilizationalism).

Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism provided the rough framework: his diagnosis that liberal modernity was not evolving but collapsing, and that survival required a synthesis of archaic values ​​and technological mastery. And perhaps even more recently, Zhang Weiwei’s concept of the civilization-state offered empirical confirmation of how these various social and geopolitical theories were reawakening around the world, particularly with the rise of Neo-Confucian China.

What was for you the clearest early sign that the unipolar order was beginning to crack?

Theorists like Huntington, Faye, and Pat Buchanan all wrote about the inevitable rupture in the early 1990s. But for me, three events undeniably indicated that the unipolar world was breaking down.

The annexation of Crimea in 2014 marked the first truly irreversible rupture. This was not only territorial, but also civilizational. President Putin invoked the baptism of Kievan Rus in 988 and positioned Russia as the Third Rome, inheriting Byzantium’s mantle. Although Western elites dismissed this as nothing more than manipulative propaganda, they missed the core message: a great power was reorganizing its legitimacy around its own territorial hegemony based on religious-historical continuity rather than liberal-democratic norms.

The second sign was China’s 2015 declaration of cyber sovereignty. When Beijing claimed that countries have the absolute right to regulate internet activity within their borders, it wasn’t essentially about censorship, but about civilization’s control of cyberspace. The fragmented internet wasn’t a bug, but the architecture of spheres of civilization revived by technology.

The third indicator was the Brexit vote in 2016, combined with Trump’s election. Brexit marked the first time a globalist institution like the EU actually shrank and became smaller. And Trump campaigned on a platform promising to dismantle the liberal international order. These were not isolated populist outbursts, but the first mass democratic rejections of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, as he himself admitted. The legitimacy of the liberal order collapsed not through external attack, but through internal erosion—its own people voted against its continued existence.

How would you describe the deep cultural currents driving the transition from a globalized world to a civilized world?

The most important trend is the global rise of populism. But what’s so interesting is that the kind of populism we see today goes far beyond politics. Populism is now a financial force. It’s a social force. It’s a technological force. It’s a cultural force. Today, populism permeates every aspect of our societies and our lives; it even extends to the beer we drink; just ask Bud Light!

I see two major currents converging in the sea of ​​populism: civilizational populism and techno-populism. Civilizational populism is a political force that uses cultural identity as its primary mobilization tool. It’s the “us versus them” of entire civilizations, not just political parties.

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has transformed Hindu nationalism from a fringe ideology into the mainstream. In Russia, Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church have fused nationalism and faith, defining the “Russian world” as a civilizational space based on Orthodoxy, Russian culture, and historical memory. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has positioned himself as the defender of Christian Europe against “Muslim invaders” from the East and “godless” liberalism from the West.

But there is a parallel force to this civilizational populism, known as techno-populism, which consists of all the ways in which digital technologies, particularly cyberspace and the internet, are increasingly liberating the population from the old liberal order and its gatekeepers. The key here is that we have entered what is often called the Third Industrial Revolution, a digital revolution and the age of cyberspace that is rapidly overturning the old liberal structures that dominated the Second Industrial Revolution.

For example, the internet allows us to bypass traditional media, just as email and texting bypass the post office. Crypto solves the problem of debanking. Hyperconnectivity allows like-minded populations to communicate across great distances.

Together, the traditionalism of civilizational populism and the innovations of techno-populism revive ancient civilizations by uniting what liberalism sought to keep separate: religion and science, tradition and technology. Their reconciliation leads to a renewal of an ancient yet profoundly modern world. This, of course, is Faye’s archeofuture thesis.

The key is that this synergy between technology and tradition is the driving force behind enormous civilising potential.

Why do you think Western elites, including in America, have difficulty accepting the reality of multipolarity?

I would argue that this difficulty is existential, not analytical. Liberal elites live in what we might call the “unipolar imagination” —a cognitive framework in which their values ​​are not one of many civilizational options, but the inevitable telos or goal of history. Accepting multipolarity means accepting that: their cosmology is contingent, not universal; their governing expertise is culture-specific, not neutral; their power is waning, not stabilizing.

This cognitive dissonance leads to asymmetric statesmanship: they cannot compete on the level of civilization, so they use traditional institutions (media, academia, finance) to pathologize multipolarity as ‘authoritarian’, ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’.

I would add that the denial is also theological. Western secularism fails to grasp that Russian Orthodoxy or Chinese Confucianism are not instrumental but ontological. They assume that all religion is either personal piety or a political instrument, thereby overlooking the fact that civilizational states function on sacred foundations that liberal modernity has abolished.

Do you see Russia as a stabilizing or a disruptive force in the emerging multipolar order?

I see the Russian Federation as a catalyst. In the short term, it appears disruptive because it actively dismantles the unipolar infrastructure—the dominance of the dollar, the expansion of NATO, liberal values. But this disruption serves precisely to further stabilize a world reorganized around multipolarity by forcing the system toward true equilibrium.

I and some other geopolitical YouTube channels, such as The Duran, faced considerable criticism when we made these kinds of arguments after the special military operation in February 2022, but almost four years later, I believe we were proven right. Following John Mearsheimer’s exceptionally realistic analysis, we all noted that the Russian armed forces were responding to twenty years of NATO expansion that threatened the very core of their civilization. The war in Ossetia in 2008, the integration of Crimea in 2014, and the intervention in Ukraine in 2022 form a consistent pattern: defensive consolidation of civilization against the encroachment of liberal universalism.

Russia, which has largely broken away from the West, sees a rising East and its civilizational states (China, India) as the wave of the future. In such a world, Russia has a strong stabilizing effect. It offers an alternative model to secular liberalism: a Christian civilizational state that rejects progressive universalism while simultaneously embracing technology and industry (hypersonic weapons, the digital ruble, AI development). Russia proves that tradition and technology can merge and forge a world within the world, but above all without the consent of liberalism.

How do you interpret Russia’s use of Christianity as a marker of civilization in contrast to the secularism of the West?

This is the core of the civilizational rift. Western secularism is exhaustive: it treats religion as a personal preference and eliminates the sacred from the public sphere. Russian Christianity is constructive: it uses Orthodox identity as its civilizational DNA—the code that organizes the state, culture, and technology.

The West, rooted in the 18th-century Enlightenment, views religion as personal conviction and faith; Russia, rooted in Byzantium, sees religion as participation in divine energies that shape civilizational and cosmic reality. When Putin describes Russia as “the last bastion of traditional values ,” he’s not campaigning—he’s articulating the axiology of civilization.

The Orthodox Church not only influences Russian policy but also shapes a uniquely Russian view of personality and human flourishing.

The good news is that due to the inherent shortcomings of Western liberalism, such as the demographic contradiction (absolute individual autonomy requires the freedom not to have children), Western secularism is essentially obliterating itself. This global decline is making room for a more traditional Protestant and Catholic Christianity to re-emerge in the public sphere.

It’s fascinating that the loose confederation of nationalist populists in Europe, such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France, openly declare that Europe will be lost forever if it doesn’t rediscover its Christian civilizational roots. Viktor Orbán of Hungary sees the fight to reclaim Europe as a two-pronged struggle: against Islam from the East and against godless secularism from the West.

This explains why religious traditionalists in the West find Russia so appealing. They see a civilization that has not broken its sacred roots—a model for what the West could become if it were to re-establish itself in its own Christian heritage.

What does the American public most misunderstand about Russia’s motivations on the world stage?

I would argue that the fundamental error is a kind of psychological projection. The American public, fed by the traditional media and Russian stereotypes, interprets Russia through the motivational grammar of liberalism: power, profit, and ideology. They lack the grammar of civilization upon which Russia functions.

I think there are three specific misconceptions:

There is the assumption that Russia is trying to rebuild the USSR. But the prominent and central role of the Orthodox Church in Russian renewal should be enough to refute that idea. Instead, it is consolidating the Russian world ( Russian world )—the sphere of civilization that shares the Orthodox heritage, the Russian language, and historical consciousness.

Contrary to the above assumption, there is the accusation that Putin uses religion solely for his own political gain. Here, too, it’s anyone’s guess what this has to do with rebuilding the atheistic Soviet Union. But as I noted earlier, Western secularism simply cannot understand genuine religious ontology. When Russia prioritizes Orthodox Christianity, Americans see it as Machiavellian manipulation. They overlook the fact that civilizational states cannot be understood without their sacred center.

Finally, there’s the narrative of “economic desperation .” Here, sanctions are supposed to expose Russia as economically isolated and desperate. In reality, Russia has largely decoupled from the West and built a civilizational autarky—a self-sufficient economy integrated with the Global South, the BRICS payment systems like CIPS, and commodity-backed currencies. This isn’t desperation, but strategic decoupling from a hostile unipolar system.

The truth is simpler: Russia is fighting for the right to exist as a distinct civilization. The American public, primarily liberals trapped by universalist assumptions, cannot grasp that some actors do not want to participate in the “rules-based order” —they want to preserve their own rules, rooted in their own eternity.

Do you believe that long-term reconciliation between the West and Russia is possible in a multipolar world?

Absolutely. I saw it with my own eyes when I spoke at the World Congress of Families in Verona in 2019.

There were organizations and delegations from numerous countries from both the East and the West, but especially from the US and Russia, all united by a common commitment to protecting and defending traditional values.

That’s why I find the tech-trad alliance we’ve recently seen emerging in the United States so important, because it represents precisely the kind of archaeofuturist synthesis that will revive a civilizational world. The realistic scenario, then, is that the liberal-universalist West succumbs to its contradictions and that the tech-trad West emerges to negotiate the coexistence of civilizations with Russia, China, India, and others. That said, the West that can reconcile itself with Russia is not the West that currently exists, where globalists still hold some grip on political and economic power.

To what extent is America’s internal political instability a result of its loss of global dominance?

I think they’re dialectical. In recent years, we’ve learned a great deal about how panicked the Washington establishment truly was on the eve of Trump’s first election victory. Just months earlier, more Britons had voted to leave the European Union than had ever voted for any party in their country’s history. With the successive victories of Brexit and Trump, those in power suddenly realized to their horror that these persistent populist movements, which had previously mainly disrupted regional elections, were no longer merely a nuisance, nor were they marginal movements: the rising populist wave had now partially dismantled the European Union and, in November, was in the process of dismantling the liberal international order itself. And so, thanks to the Twitter Files, we now learn that it was generally accepted among the unelected bureaucrats who comprise the permanent Washington that the consent of the governed could no longer be trusted; on the contrary, proactive measures had to be taken to ensure that the consent of the governed could indeed be managed, coerced, and, if necessary, thwarted. And so, the same tyrannical tactics that our own Deep State employed internationally during the Cold War were increasingly turned inward, contributing greatly to our internal political instability.

Can the United States adapt to a world where it must negotiate rather than dictate?

Only if it undergoes its own civilizational reform. I see Trump as the bridge between a unipolar and multipolar world; I think J.D. Vance would be the first fully post-unipolar president. He is certainly an important symbol of the tech-trad alliance, with one foot in Silicon Valley and the other in traditional Catholicism. But that said, the rise of both Russia and China on the world stage, along with their borderless alliance, has made it clear that neither will respond to dictates from anyone.

What would a realistic and responsible American foreign policy look like after unipolarity?

Mearsheimer has long argued that American leaders must abandon the idea of ​​America as a “messianic state” or “crusader nation” dedicated to spreading its political, economic, and cultural ideals to all nations. This has clearly led to excessive militarization and failed interventions, which ironically contradict the democratic freedoms and ideals espoused by its proponents.

Instead, a post-unipolar America must respect a world organized around spheres of civilizational influence: a Russian-dominated Eastern European/Orthodox world, a Chinese-dominated East Asia, an Indian-dominated South Asia, an Iranian-dominated Shiite Crescent, and, of course, a US-dominated North American Anglo-Saxon world, which remains uninterrupted in other affairs outside the Western Hemisphere.

Moreover, because of the global return of religion, geopolitics would inevitably entail theopolitics. American foreign policy would be explicitly based on Christian identity, negotiating with Orthodox Russia, Confucian China, and Hindu India as complete and integral civilizations, not as incomplete liberal societies. We would defend our civilization, trade with others, and avoid a universal empire. As J.D. Vance recently argued regarding the Trump administration’s immigration policy, responsibility means preserving your people, not saving the world.

Do you think the American public understands that the international system has fundamentally changed?

The vast majority of Trump’s coalition certainly understands this. Red America, at the grassroots level, has largely abandoned international interventionism. But they lack the civilized vocabulary to express this. Populist sentiments generally see the problem as “globalists versus patriots” or “deep state versus the people.”

While these frameworks are descriptively accurate, they miss the civilizational depth of the transformation. Consequently, they see multipolarity as a threat (hostile China or Russia) rather than an opportunity (a rebirth of civilization). They want to “make America great again,” but often fail to understand that achieving that greatness requires abandoning the universalist architecture that made unipolarity possible. But again, the good news is that the vast majority of the population no longer desires to deploy the US military in endless wars and conflicts around the world that serve no clear national interest.

How do demographic, cultural, and regional differences within the United States contribute to the country’s global decline?

That’s an excellent and highly relevant question, one that’s also of great importance for Western Europe. The global shift from ideology to identity is manifesting itself on both the political right and the left. While identity politics is often associated with the left, a realignment around identity is occurring throughout American politics: racial, regional, and religious identity. The left is thus becoming increasingly divided along lines of race (BLM, La Raza), religion (the rise of Muslim majorities in Dearborn and Hamtramck, Michigan), and region (highly urbanized and coastal).

Collectively, the left is becoming increasingly post-American and rejecting the nation’s ideals as irredeemably racist and discriminatory. The right is more bourgeois in its identity sentiments and strives to make America great again, but is equally susceptible to balkanization based on race (white, Latino), religion (conservative Christian), and region (red states and secessionist movements like Texit).

These two parties are becoming increasingly estranged. According to the Institute for Family Studies, for example, only 3.6% of marriages in 2020 were between Democrats and Republicans, compared to 9% in 2016. This is one of the clearest quantitative measures of the Balkanization of American civilization.

The key here, then, is that there is a kind of clash of civilizations happening within America, which is weakening the resolve to maintain a liberal international order, given the erosion of liberalism from within.

Can the United States restore a coherent national purpose without re-embedding itself in its Christian heritage?

I don’t see how. The French coined the term “idéologie” as a replacement for religion after the 19th-century revolution. And so, with the end of the age of ideology, liberal universalism simply loses its socially binding power. That vacuum either results in tribalism and balkanization, or it is filled with the very enduring binding force that ideology intended to replace: religion.

Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin argued that secular societies inevitably return to religious societies, precisely because the secular is always a derivative of the sacred.

Sorokin theorized that secular society was nothing more than the material, physical embodiment of sacred spiritual realities that logically precede and are fundamental to the secular. The disappearance of the secular (or, as he would call it, the sensuous) therefore inevitably leads to a revival and reorientation of the sacred (or, as he would call it, the ideal).

The tech-trad alliance is groping for this. Tech entrepreneurs instinctively know that a transcendent purpose is necessary for long-term coordination. They collaborate with Christian traditionalists, not out of political expediency, but because only religion offers the temporal perspective for projects that span multiple generations. This means that what liberalism has separated—technology and tradition, science and religion—are necessarily intertwined, as was always the case in previous sacred societies.

The tech-trad alliance, therefore, entails restoring the sacred canopy under which technology, markets, and politics function as human activities directed toward divine goals. Without this, I see no basis for unity in a post-ideological world in an increasingly Balkanized America.

Could multipolarity force America to rediscover a more grounded national identity?

This is the central irony of our time. Unipolarity required America to be a universal solvent—dissolving all specific identities in liberal abstraction and international institutional protocols. Multipolarity frees America to be specific again. This is what I mean by saying that Americans should see multipolarity not as a threat, but as an opportunity.

And we already see it happening. Immigration restrictions are becoming necessary for the cohesion of civilization, not just a policy preference. Energy independence (Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” ) is restoring essential sovereign capacity. Decoupling through trade wars is forcing industrial reshoring, thus restoring the material community. Christian identity is becoming not only a geopolitical but also a theopolitical imperative in negotiations with Orthodox Russia, Confucian China, and Hindu India.

Multipolarity creates competition between civilizations, where a distinctive identity is a survival advantage, not an atavistic burden. The America that competes successfully will be socially conservative with Silicon Valley characteristics: a puritanical work ethic plus AI, covenant theology plus cryptocurrency.

Multipolarity, then, not only enables but demands the recovery of a distinctive American identity.

Are European populist movements part of the same global uprising that you see in the United States?

Yes, certainly; it’s part of the civilizational populism sweeping the world, but with crucial differences. European populism—Meloni, Le Pen, Orbán, Wilders—shares the anti-liberal, anti-globalist impulse with American populism. But the key difference is that European populism operates within a post-war context. European nations are former centers of civilization (Roman, Catholic, Protestant) that have been subordinated to American unipolarity and the globalism of the EU. Their revolt is restorationist—they seek to restore sovereignty within the historical boundaries of their civilization.

The MAGA movement, on the other hand, isn’t so much restoring a lost kingdom as transforming a decaying globalist empire into a uniquely American sphere of civilization. This poses other limitations: American populists must grapple with imperial decline, while European populists face imperial subordination, particularly from Brussels.

How does the archaeofuturist mix of myth, cultural memory, and technological ambition—driven by a vision that links ancestral continuity to radical innovation, from digital frontiers to space exploration—shape geopolitical power in the 21st century?

This is a compelling question, as it rightly recognizes that archaeofuturism bridges geopolitics and astropolitics (the political, military, economic, and social aspects of space). Rather than seeing progress as universal modernization, archaeofuturist powers use advanced technology to reinforce distinctive civilizational identities based on myths and cultural memory.

China exemplifies this strategy with its space program. Missions like Tianwen ( “Questions to the Heavens” ) and Chang’e ( “Moon Goddess” ) invoke ancient Chinese cosmology while simultaneously achieving world-leading technological feats. Similarly, India frames its Chandrayaan-3 moon landing as a revival of Vedic scientific wisdom, naming the landing site “Shiv Shakti Point” to directly link space exploration to Hindu cosmology.

Regarding the digital frontier, as we saw above with China’s 2015 declaration of cyber sovereignty, cyberspace becomes sovereign territory when defended by firewalls and AI systems. Even Western neoreactionaries (figures like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin) advocate for “CEO kings” and technological hierarchies over democracy, suggesting that archaeofuturism is already influencing the thinking of Western elites.

So I see geopolitical power in the 21st century shifting from ideological universalism to a multipolar competition in which legitimacy derives from technological competence combined with cultural continuity—not from democratic consent or human rights.

Why are traditional identities – national, religious, civilizational – returning so forcefully now?

Scholars often point to the rise of post-security politics as the primary driver for the return of traditional identities. Post-security politics entails a global political backlash against all the ways in which liberal globalist policies have eroded the security of the nation-state: border security, economic security, and cultural security.

Globalism erodes borders with mass immigration and cheap labor; it erodes economic security by depressing wages with cheap immigrant labor while simultaneously shifting manufacturing jobs abroad; and it erodes cultural security by flooding countries with migrants who refuse to assimilate into the culture of their host countries. It is therefore entirely natural and logical that populations demand secure borders to restore national sovereignty; they demand the restoration of economic sovereignty and vibrant material conditions; and they insist that their culture, and especially their religion, be respected and defended rather than belittled and ridiculed. And the ultimate expression of post-security policies is the civilizational state, where, under enormous globalist pressure, nation-states transform into civilizational blocs capable of effectively countering that globalist pressure.

Do you see liberalism as a terminal phase, both culturally and politically?

Yes, besides the ideological decline, liberalism is literally dying. I mentioned above what demographer Eric Kaufmann calls the demographic contradiction of liberalism, where the pursuit of individual autonomy requires the freedom not to reproduce. Secular liberals largely no longer have children, while all religious conservatives are having more than ever (if you factor in the decline in infant mortality).

As a result, Kaufmann predicted that by 2030, we would see the culture wars in the United States definitively tilt in favor of the red states. And lo and behold, what do we see with the expected 2030 census and the redistricting of the Electoral College: conservative red states are winning Electoral College votes, and blue states are losing them. This isn’t just because millions of people are fleeing blue states for red states. Twenty years ago, Phillip Longman noted that the states won by George W. Bush in 2004 already had fertility rates 12 percent higher than those that voted for Senator John Kerry. Since then, that fertility advantage has more than doubled in some areas.

Liberals are literally disappearing, while religiously conservative populations are building their own parallel institutions that are becoming increasingly mainstream, as we saw with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. They are thus becoming demographically, ideologically, and institutionally extinct.

Is the information war between traditional and alternative media a microcosm of the larger clash between unipolar and multipolar worldviews?

Absolutely. As I mentioned above, alternative media are part of a third industrial revolution, a digital revolution, and the age of cyberspace, which is rapidly overtaking the old liberal structures that dominated the second industrial revolution. Traditional media emerged and grew in the era of mass society, in which, from the 19th century onward, the population increasingly concentrated around large urban centers.

Therefore, each traditional media outlet is tied to a particular metropolis: the New York Times , Washington Post , LA Times , Chicago Tribune , Boston Herald , Philadelphia Inquirer , etc. As such, traditional media enjoyed a privileged position in relation to news and data, effectively amounting to a monopoly on information acquisition. Moreover, they not only reported on events but also shaped reality according to a liberal-universalist ontology anchored in the cosmopolitan life of which they were, and continue to be, a part.

The rise of the network society, the third industrial revolution, has broken that information monopoly. Thanks to the radical dissemination and democratization of knowledge, we now have access to the same information via the internet as everyone else on CNN or the NYT. This means that more and more people are able to control the media, instead of the other way around. And the more traditional media emerge as propagandists for liberal cosmopolitanism, the more their reliability and legitimacy erode.

By contrast, our shared hyperconnectivity now allows us all to explore knowledge and information from all over the world, in all its diverse narratives and cultural spheres, not just those of liberal cosmopolitanism. This means that alternative media participate in a broader digital world, comprised of cybercivilizations, which embodies precisely the multipolarity that unipolar forces are desperately trying to thwart.

But the outcome is certain: traditional media lose trust and revenue because their unipolar ontology is empirically incorrect in a multipolar world. People can see multiple realities of civilization online; they no longer need CNN to tell them what ‘s “real .” Alternative media automatically win because they form the natural architecture of civilizational spheres.

Which regions of the world will shape the next twenty years of geopolitical evolution?

Certainly the core of civilizations: China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and America’s tech-trad archipelago.

China will shape techno-civilizational politics. Its “four superpowers” model—vast population, territory, tradition, and culture—integrated with AI state capabilities, the digital yuan, and space infrastructure, demonstrates archaeofuturism on a grand scale.

India will define democratic civilizational thinking. Its Hindu-nationalist turn under Modi demonstrates how mass democracy can express civilizational identity rather than liberal universalism. India’s digital public infrastructure (Aadhaar, UPI) proves that technological modernity does not require a liberal ontology.

Russia will define sacred geopolitics. Its Orthodox-technological synthesis—hypersonic weapons blessed by patriarchs, crypto-rubles financing monasteries—creates a powerful and enduring model for Christian civilization in a post-liberal world.

America’s tech-trad archipelago—Texas, Florida, Bitcoin maximalists, Christian tech entrepreneurs—will define a post-imperial rebirth. This isn’t an “American decline ,” but an American transformation: the liberal-universalist armor is dissolving, revealing a renewed Anglo-Protestant civilization poised for a full-fledged archaeofuturist synthesis.

Secondary regions: Saudi Arabia (Islamic futurism via NEOM), Hungary (Christian democratic laboratory), Indonesia (Islamic democratic civilisationalism), Nigeria and the Sahel region (pan-African civilisationalist awakening).

For me, the EU project remains an open question. With a retreating unipolar America and the lure of Russian civilization, I believe the confederation of nationalist populists will continue to grow and possibly even restore a robust Western civilizational renewal across the continent. But that remains to be seen. The EU project could dissolve into its constituent civilizational components: Catholic Poland, Orthodox Greece, Protestant Nordic spheres.

What trend do mainstream analysts still fail to grasp in the current global transformation?

The singularity of civilizations. I think more and more analysts understand multipolarity (multiple centers of power) and deglobalization (fragmentation of supply chains and the rise of populism). But what they overlook is that both the fall of globalism and the rise of multipolarity are the result of the reunification of science and religion, tradition and technology, something modern liberals largely fail to reconcile.

Modernity is characterized by what French anthropologist Bruno Latour called the Great Divide, a social reorganization in which the state exerted a territorial monopoly over the public sphere by displacing all other competing institutions, such as the church and religion. With the rise of populism, modern liberalism is increasingly seen as the ideology of a corrupt elite, and thus the Great Divide is collapsing as more and more populations re-embrace religion as an indispensable marker of cultural identity, fueled by post-security policies. As we noted above with regard to alternative media and the Third Industrial Revolution, the rise of digital civilization only reinforces this divide between the people and the elite.

Religion and science, technology and tradition, are thus coming together to revive ancient civilizations and liberate ever-growing populations from a political class seen as relentlessly hostile to the increasingly popular issues of civilization.

What qualities do leaders need in an era characterized by civilizational competition rather than ideological uniformity?

Although generally very negative about technology, Catholic scholar Patrick Deneen has spoken about the need for an aristocratic-populist society. Based on Aristotle’s analysis, Deneen notes that all societies will always have an elite, but if the elite despises the people, society becomes an oppressive oligarchy, and if the people despise the elite, you get the guillotine and the French Revolution. The solution is an elite that uses its power and wealth to realize and materialize the values, interests, and concerns of the people, ultimately leading to civilization in its highest form.

So I think an aristocratic-populist society implies an archaeofuturistic aristocracy: leaders who are simultaneously priests and engineers. Some characteristics that come to mind are:

1. Holy technocracy: they must possess both a memory of civilization and technological innovation. Interestingly enough, this is precisely what gave us the wonders of Christianity, such as the architectural masterpieces of Gothic and Byzantine cathedrals. For today, this would mean a commitment to both culture and code.

2. Civilization-oriented judgment: they will have to develop the ability to judge nations and actions not based on universal ethics, but on respect for and the flourishing of civilizations. Here, geopolitics will require an appreciation of theopolitics.

In that sense, the model isn’t so much Churchill or Reagan. It’s Prince Vladimir meets Elon Musk—a prince who baptizes the nation and an engineer who builds rockets to Mars. These two endeavors are increasingly becoming one as geopolitics expands into astropolitics.

What do you see as the greatest risk and opportunity within the emerging multipolar system?

I think the greatest risk is the total and absolute unwillingness of liberal globalist leaders to let their power and world disappear. The cruel and reckless rhetoric of some American neoconservatives and European neoliberals regarding firing long-range missiles into the heart of Russia was pure madness, and the fact that Mearsheimer believed we were on the verge of a nuclear exchange, triggered by this unipolar death throes, remains, of course, deeply troubling.

Some have noted that when a political movement realizes it can no longer hold positions of power, its only option is to destabilize the new order. In that case, I could imagine the last modernists escalating the confrontation with Russia/China. The danger is not a calculated war, but a cascade of miscalculations—asymmetrical statecraft spiraling out of control when the legitimacy of a hegemony evaporates.

The greatest possibility is an archaeofuturistic rebirth of human civilization, with the great world religions resurrected to form a sacred and flourishing humanity. A rather breathtaking view of cyberspace that we share is the Jesuit scholar Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of the noosphere: a planetary sphere of human consciousness and mental activity akin to a kind of cosmic consciousness.

The human mind, human intelligence, thus becomes just as active a factor in the planet’s development as geology and biology have been. The word noosphere comes from the Greek word nous , meaning “mind, intellect .” Many theorists have noted that cyberspace closely resembles what Teilhard envisioned as the noosphere. As cyberspace covers the planet, it forms a kind of telecosm, and Teilhard believed that such a development would have an enormously positive effect on fostering human solidarity, especially as it contributed to intercultural spiritual interactions.

With Teilhard’s vision in mind, the opportunity before us would be a kind of noospheric convergence: competition between civilizations fuels collective intelligence, as each sphere develops unique solutions to persistent human problems. That would certainly be a world I’d like to see.

https://www.frontnieuws.com/de-liberale-orde-zal-instorten-door-interne-uitholling