The Mirror Cracks
The Mirror Cracks – 2026
Owen Jones is right that the West destroyed itself through hubris — but the more uncomfortable truth, legible from Delhi or Ramallah or Nairobi but invisible from Washington, is that the policies Jones identifies as the cause of Western decline were first field-tested on the Global South; what we are witnessing is not a fall but a homecoming.
By Meer Yassir Ahmed yassirahmed001@gmail.com
Peter Hopkirk wrote about the Great Game as if the people who lived on the board were irrelevant to its outcome. Owen Jones writes about the Fall of the West as if the countries that absorbed its costs first are merely context for what has now arrived at the metropole. Both books are essential. Both books carry the same blind spot. The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It — Jones’s new polemic, published this month — is the most honest account of Western self-destruction written from inside the Western political tradition; its diagnosis is substantially correct, its evidence is formidable, and the question it does not answer is the one that matters most: if the warnings were ignored for thirty years and the damage has now arrived, where exactly was the damage going in the meantime?
The definitional correction the book requires — and does not make — is a distinction between “the West” as a geography and the Washington Consensus as a governance model. These are not the same thing, and collapsing them is the analytical error that allows Jones’s argument to be received as a story of Western self-destruction rather than what it actually is: a story of a class that externalized its costs until the geography of the externality ran out. John Williamson, the British economist who coined the phrase “Washington Consensus” in a 1989 paper for the Institute for International Economics, spent the remainder of his career clarifying that he had intended it as a description of what Washington institutions agreed on, not as a prescription for the world — and that the broader, more ideological meaning the term acquired was one he emphatically opposed. Williamson’s clarification was, like the warnings Jones catalogues throughout his book, largely ignored. The Consensus became a prescription; Williamson became a footnote to his own coinage; and the prescription was applied, with structural consistency, first to Latin America, then to sub-Saharan Africa, then to India, then to Russia — and then, with the crash of 2008 and the austerity that followed, to the Western populations who had believed themselves its beneficiaries.
Here is the inversion that Jones’s own evidence demands but his book resists: the Global South was not the audience for Western hubris — it was the laboratory. Wayne Merry’s 1994 cable from the US embassy in Moscow, warning that an “economic missionary rather than true partner” posture toward Russia would strengthen extremists and revive adversarial relations between Russia and the West, was an extraordinary piece of prescience. But the shock therapy Merry was watching being administered to the wreckage of the Soviet economy had already been rehearsed on Latin America throughout the 1980s, where the Washington Consensus was born precisely as a summary of what the IMF and World Bank had been demanding of debt-crisis economies for a decade. The CIA analysts who warned in 1987 that arming Afghan mujahideen would create a “mountain of weapons” that an Islamist regime might use to arm guerrillas elsewhere were describing a risk that the United States was simultaneously creating and ignoring — but the people in the direct path of that risk, the ones who would live under the regime and inherit the weapons, were Afghan civilians whose policy preferences were, structurally, irrelevant. Edmund McWilliams, the US envoy who warned in 1988 that the Afghan operation was “going very, very badly,” was reassigned and smeared. The weapons kept flowing. One study estimated 12.2 million excess deaths during Russia’s economic transition. The arithmetic of structural adjustment in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia had been running for a decade before that figure was calculated for a European country.
I would call this the hubris dividend: the surplus of political and economic power that Western elites extracted by systematically overriding internal warnings, distributed as wealth concentrated upward at home and as geopolitical destabilisation exported abroad. The dividend was real, and it was large, and it was paid for in full by others before it began to be paid domestically. Strobe Talbott, President Clinton’s Russia adviser, was not expressing inadvertent arrogance when he declared that Russia had to move toward “our way of doing things” — “that’s us; that’s the US. We are exceptional.” He was expressing the operating logic of a system that had not yet been compelled to pay its own costs because those costs were still being externalized successfully. When India’s foreign exchange reserves fell to cover barely two weeks of imports in 1991, and the government of P.V. Narasimha Rao approached the IMF and World Bank for a $7 billion loan, the conditionalities that arrived with that loan — liberalisation, privatisation, reduction of fiscal deficits, deregulation of trade — were structurally identical to the shock therapy being prepared for Russia three years later. The difference was one of degree, of domestic political capital, and of the bargaining position of the country presenting itself to the creditors’ window. Washington’s confidence in the model was not damaged by its Indian application, because the Indian political system absorbed the transition without producing a Yeltsin or a Putin. The model was confirmed. The lesson drawn was that it worked.
What Jones captures with particular force is the financialisation at the model’s domestic core: Mariana Mazzucato’s finding that 80 per cent of British finance now flows back into finance, insurance, and real estate rather than productive investment; the “let them eat credit” substitution of cheap debt for stagnant wages that papered over the model’s distributional failures for a generation; the World Bank executive who knew in early 2007 that a catastrophic crash was coming because his cleaner — whom he suspected was undocumented — had a $300,000 mortgage. What Jones does not say, and what the South Asian reader supplies without difficulty, is that the financialisation of Western domestic economies was the second phase of the same dynamic whose first phase was the financialisation of Southern sovereign debt. The Global South was not watching the West build a house of credit; it had been living in one for twenty years already, and the IMF had been charging the rent.
Is it then surprising that the political consequences now unfolding in the West — the far right winning nearly 40 per cent of the vote in Germany’s Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, France preparing a €54 billion fiscal squeeze, Donald Trump threatening to “annihilate” Iran at the United Nations General Assembly while a fourth failed Western war on a Muslim nation adds more than $100 billion to Americans’ fuel bills — follow the sequence that the Global South has been watching repeat itself for three decades? Every authoritarian consolidation in the developing world over that period followed the same steps: an economic model that extracted upward rather than invested broadly; stagnant wages papered over by access to credit; a political class too compromised by the extraction to name it honestly; and a nativist reaction that found its audience precisely because the establishment had nothing to offer. The template is not new. The novelty is the latitude and the longitude.
The United States is the most instructive case, because it is the country in which the model was most confidently asserted and most completely delivered. Federal Reserve data for the third quarter of 2025 shows that America’s top 1 per cent of households now hold 31.7 per cent of all national wealth — the highest share since 1989, when the Federal Reserve began tracking it, and the highest on record. The wealthiest 1 per cent collectively hold roughly $55 trillion in assets, approximately equal to the combined wealth of the bottom 90 per cent of the population. In 2025 alone, the ten richest American billionaires grew their fortunes by $698 billion; since 2020, their inflation-adjusted wealth is up 526 per cent. Meanwhile, American life expectancy now stands more than six years below the G7 average of 83 — the largest gap in the group — driven by fentanyl overdoses, suicide, and a healthcare system that remains, uniquely among G7 nations, without universal coverage. Between 1980 and 2022, the share of national income going to America’s top 1 per cent doubled; the share going to the bottom 50 per cent fell by a third. This is not a description of a society in decline. It is a description of a society that has been successfully extracted — one in which the model performed exactly as its designers intended, and the majority of the population absorbed the cost.
Britain offers the same arithmetic in a smaller frame. The National Health Service — the institution Thatcher could not abolish, and the thing Jones cites as worth rebuilding — is now what its own leadership describes as an existential crisis: hospital waiting lists at 7.8 million against 4.6 million before the pandemic; nursing vacancies that have quadrupled since 2010; teacher vacancies that have quintupled. The Institute for Government’s assessment of British public services as being in a “perpetual state of decline since 2010” is not polemical; it is a measurement. The Thatcherite wager — that releasing capital from public obligation would produce broad-based prosperity — has been settled by the evidence. Capital was released. The prosperity did not follow. The bottom 90 per cent were told to wait. They are still waiting.
Frantz Fanon warned in 1961, in The Wretched of the Earth, that Europe had been built on the stolen labour and resources of the colonised world, and that the project was therefore structurally fragile — not morally but materially, because extraction without reinvestment is not a sustainable model regardless of the direction in which the extraction runs. Jones’s book, arriving sixty-five years after Fanon, is in some ways a Wretched of the Earth written from within the metropole: the same structural argument, the same recognition that elite self-interest overrides rational warning, the same prediction of cascading instability. The difference is that Fanon was describing what was happening to the periphery; Jones is describing what is happening to the centre. The sequence is what the Global South reader has been waiting for someone in the centre to acknowledge.
Jones ends by arguing that the left must make a different case — that the “endless, unchecked pursuit of wealth and power by Western elites” produced the crisis, and that rebuilding requires investing the wealth collectively produced rather than extracting it upward. He is right. But the argument will be strategically weakened for as long as it remains an argument about the West alone. Wayne Merry’s 1994 cable was not only a warning about Russia — it was a description of a logic that had already been applied to twenty countries and would be applied to twenty more. The Global South is not a backdrop to Western decline; it is the extended evidence base for the analysis Jones is making. If that evidence base is incorporated, the argument Jones builds becomes harder to dismiss as left-wing Western self-flagellation and becomes what it actually is: an account of a governance model that failed everywhere it was applied, and whose domestic victims are simply the last in a sequence whose earlier entries the West declined to notice. The mirror cracked first elsewhere. The West is only now conceding the diagnosis.
The Global South was not the audience for Western hubris — it was the laboratory.
John Williamson coined the phrase “Washington Consensus” in 1989 as a descriptive summary of what Washington institutions already agreed upon — not, as he repeatedly clarified, as a manifesto for what the rest of the world should do. He described his original ten prescriptions, by the end of his career, as having achieved the status of “motherhood and apple pie.” He meant this as a complaint. It was received as a compliment. The clarification was ignored with the same structural fidelity as every other warning in Jones’s book.
GO TO HOMEPAGE http://www.theredlines.world
Yassir Ahmed is an Indian journalist and analyst specialising in national security, foreign policy, intelligence networks, and geopolitical strategy, defence, and strategic affairs across Globe, examining the intersection of intelligence, diplomacy, and regional power.
Copyright © 2025 Yassir Ahmed Mir. All rights reserved.
No part of this article may be reproduced or distributed without written permission from the author. For permissions or syndication, contact yassirahmed001@gmail.com.
Disclaimer:
This article draws on verified public sources and research available at the time of writing. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent any government or institution. While accuracy has been prioritized, some details may rely on incomplete or evolving information.
Author Note: Yassir Ahmed is an Indian journalist covering national security, defense, and Asian–Middle Eastern affairs.
About The Author
