Is the West Reaching the End of a Cycle?

From Trump to Vico, the Last Stand of a Fading Order

Some defeats do not look like defeats. They end neither in capitulation nor with a white flag, nor even in regime change. They reveal themselves in the exhaustion of political will. Perhaps that is what has just happened in the United States and, by extension, in the Middle East.

Donald Trump is not politically dead. He retains the White House, veto power, considerable executive authority and, above all, that singular talent for turning every setback into a spectacle. But the midterm elections have placed both the House of Representatives and the Senate under Democratic control. The two blades of the scissors are now closing in on his freedom to act. They can cut funding, launch more investigations, block appointments and make continuing the war against Iran far more politically costly. They are unlikely to silence him, however: Trump will remain Trump—loud, unpredictable and capable of dominating the stage even when he no longer controls it.

The Iran war may thus have marked the high point—and perhaps the beginning of the decline—of this presidency. Washington could strike, impose sanctions, strangle and disrupt. But a democracy struggles to sustain an indefinite war once its cost starts showing up at the gas pump, in household budgets and at the ballot box.

Netanyahu finds himself in a different but comparable situation. Israel retains considerable military power, and its freedom to act in the region has not disappeared. But its strategic room for maneuver has narrowed.

Iran has not been transformed as some had hoped. That leaves Gaza and Lebanon, where Israeli force can still be brought to bear directly. In other words, the grand regional vision has been reduced to theaters closer to home, more immediate and, tragically, more familiar.

Here we must introduce a rarely articulated paradox. The survival of the Islamic Republic is not necessarily bad news for every Gulf monarchy. They fear revolutionary Iran, its missiles, its networks and its capacity to destabilize.

But a genuinely democratic, prosperous Iran, open to the world, where women had achieved full political and social emancipation, would have posed a different kind of challenge: political and cultural rather than military. A Persian power of nearly one hundred million people offering the region an alternative model could have become a powerful magnet.

It would be excessive to claim that the oil monarchies wanted the Iranian regime to survive; it is more accurate to say that its democratization would also have upset their own internal balances.

The outcome is strange. The “Global South,” Russia, China, energy interests, authoritarian regimes and the countless power networks of the Levant did not necessarily act in concert.

Yet their interests ultimately converged on one point: preventing a regional order devised in Washington from taking lasting hold. The latest Western attempt to reshape the Middle East through military power, sanctions and the promise of a more democratic order appears to have run up against the same limitation as earlier attempts: overturning existing balances is far easier than building societies.

The Lebanese Paradox

Against this backdrop, Lebanon might, paradoxically, be the only country with a historic window of opportunity. Not because it has won anything—it has paid too high a price for that word—but because three long-unimaginable developments have occurred simultaneously.

The parallel state built around Hezbollah has been severely weakened. The momentum, however slow and fragile, is more favorable than before to the return of the legitimate state and its army.

Finally, the fall of the Assad regime removed the Syrian power base that had undermined Lebanese sovereignty for decades.

Nothing is guaranteed: the state’s monopoly on force has not been restored, and Lebanon’s old political mafias have obviously not disappeared.

But for the first time in a long while, the tide of regional history may no longer be running entirely against the rebuilding of the Lebanese state.

It is not much. For Lebanon, it is enormous.

The West’s Last Stand

Yet the Trump episode is about more than Trump. In time, it may come to be seen as the last stand of a West that dimly senses the world order it built slipping from its grasp.

Its share of the world’s population is shrinking. Its relative economic advantage is eroding. Its societies doubt themselves. Europe struggles to muster the will to wield power; America oscillates between imperial ambition and the temptation to withdraw. More fundamentally still, the West seems no longer to know exactly what it wishes to pass on, defend, or even preserve.

This is where Giambattista Vico becomes surprisingly relevant once again. In his cyclical view of history, societies move from a harsh age to an orderly one, then to a humane one, before refinement itself degenerates into dissolution. This insight could be summed up in four words: cruel, stern, merciful, dissolute.

Applied to the West—with all the caution such a simplification demands—this framework is unsettling.

The cruel phase might correspond to the long birth pangs of modern Europe: the Middle Ages, religious wars, revolutions, conquests, and social upheavals, culminating in the collapse of the old world in 1914.

Then comes the stern phase: 1914–1945. Two world wars, totalitarian regimes, the crash of 1929, genocides, and the industrial-scale destruction of Europe. Perhaps never had the West been so materially powerful and so merciless toward itself.

Then comes mercy: 1945–1991. This is the age of abundance, the baby boom, the thirty-year postwar economic boom, the rise of the middle classes, the welfare state, women’s emancipation, the decline of industrial proletarian life as the lot of the masses, and, finally, the apparent triumph of liberal democracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And then something goes wrong.

The 1990s usher in what might be called the dissolute phase.

For part of Europe, Maastricht symbolizes the shift from a project built on nations to an increasingly technocratic structure.

Public debate becomes moralistic: certain opinions are less often debated than dismissed as illegitimate. Authority in schools crumbles. Individualism grows more radical. Questions of identity, gender, race, and representation gradually take over the political arena. Wokeism is one expression of this; Trumpism, far from being its antidote, may be its mirror image: the same simplification, the same anger, the same taste for transgression, the same competing truths.

A civilization does not become “dissolute” because it grants more rights. It becomes so, in Vico’s sense, when freedom is no longer accompanied by a shared guiding principle; when individuals recognize nothing above themselves—neither institutions, nor shared truths, nor the passing on of a cultural inheritance, nor duty—and when society ultimately loses sight of why it should remain a society.

After Dissolution

If Vico is right, history never comes to rest in comfort. Dissolution carries within it the return of reality. When institutions can no longer manage contradictions peacefully, brutality returns. What Vico called the “ricorso” is not a mechanical repetition of the past: it is the return, in another form, of the basic necessities that societies thought they had left behind.

Perhaps that is the real warning of 2026.

Trump, then, is neither the cause of Western decline nor its cure. He is a spectacular symptom of it. Nor is Netanyahu the master of the Middle East: he operates within a regional system where local actors, emerging powers, and conflicting interests now make it impossible for any one camp to dominate.

In 1991, the West believed it had won history itself. Thirty-five years later, it is discovering that it had won only a moment.

And if the phase of dissolution really is drawing to a close, the question is no longer whether a new cycle will begin.

The question is how much cruelty it will take to bring it into being.

A Note on Method

This opinion piece deliberately distinguishes verifiable facts from the author’s interpretation. The arguments concerning the motivations of the Gulf monarchies and the Vichian cycle constitute an analytical thesis, not established facts.