Rupture: The West’s Lack of Self-Belief Collides with an Impressive Winning Streak

Last week, in the midst of President Donald J. Trump’s saber rattling against Denmark over its control of Greenland, new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – in many ways more of a European-style technocrat than much of the current European leadership – declared a rupture within the Western-affiliated world. In his view, America’s threats against its own NATO ally over this frozen tundra was yet another example of the untrustworthiness of the USA, the former anchor of the Western alliance.

Carney’s take, however, smacks of political opportunism by a wily Canuck politician with an approval rating in the high 50s almost entirely due to the understandable antagonism of many Canadians towards Donald Trump. Without Trump, his “51st state” jabs, and his bizarre tariff regime directed at Canada, Mark Carney would, at best, be the leader of a chastened and unpopular Canadian Labour Party presiding over the Canadian Parliament’s minority. Instead, Trump’s absurdities gifted him a massive comeback and governance of America’s northern neighbor.

Beating up on Donald Trump’s America wins you points with Canadian voters, and Mark Carney has not missed squeezing maximal blood from the anti-American turnip. That said, he has missed a geopolitical reality that a more sober statesman would recognize.

Simply put, the American-led Western order has – despite its own and its enemies’ doubts – repeatedly proven its efficacy, if not its outright geopolitical dominance, since direct challenges from its adversaries began in 2022 and 2023. Let’s take a careful look at the post-Covid geopolitical order.

1. February 2022 – Russia invades Ukraine.

In 2014, Vladimir Putin seized the Crimea from the Ukraine, while funding Russian proxies’ efforts to establish an “independent republic” (that is, a Russian satellite) in that country’s eastern Donbas provinces. The European and American response offered little more than public condemnation.

In 2022, Putin calculated that the entirety of Ukraine, backed by a weak and fractured Western alliance, could do little to stop Russia’s conquest of the entire country and his replacement of the democratically-elected government in Kyiv with Russian-controlled sycophants. Putin unleashed a million man army across large sections of the Russia-Ukraine (and some of the Belarus-Ukraine) border. Within months, much of his invasion had been stymied, and the war ground into a brutal quagmire largely fought in the same Donbas provinces contested in the mid-2010s.

Today, Ukraine – a nation less than a quarter of the size of Russia – holds firm, with Russian casualties estimated at well over a million (including more than 300K dead). Much of its extensive stocks of military hardware having been obliterated, Russia is unable to break through Ukrainian defenses and has resorted to small group infiltration tactics probing weak points in the Ukrainian line, hoping to advance a few hundred yards at a time. Nearing four years into this war, Russia fights a mere 75 or so miles off its own border. The conquest of Pokrovsk, a pre-war city of only 60,000 Ukrainians, has consumed more than 18 months of combat and tens of thousands of Russian dead; it remains unsubdued.

Russia’s war of conquest may not constitute a comprehensive defeat, with Russia poised to take control of a portion of Ukrainian territory. But it has been a disastrously poor military performance against a much smaller, less resourced foe, resulting in catastrophic losses among Russian personnel and to Russian equipment while isolating an increasingly-stressed Russian economy.

Bottom line, Ukraine and its Western backers have largely stymied the Russian war machine despite the massive advantages it appears to have “on paper” over Ukraine. Russia’s incursion has also cemented a Ukrainian alliance with Europe, leaving a more militarized and antagonistic Ukraine as a buffer between it and the remainder of the continent. Putin’s bet against Ukraine and the West has failed, and he’s paid in gallons of Russian blood.

2. October 7, 2023 – Iran and its proxies.

The date is enough. On October 7, 2023, Iranian-backed Hamas undertook a massive surprise attack from the Gaza Strip, unleashing carnage and chaos across southern Israel. By the day’s end, over 1,000 Israeli citizens would be dead, and Israel’s confidence in its own ability to defend its people would be shaken to the core.

Within a month, Israel – whose military equipment and international support comes overwhelmingly from the USA and allied Western countries – struck back. For more than 18 months, the Israeli Defense Forces hammered Gaza, inflicting massive casualties on Hamas forces and literally turning “the Strip” into a coast full of rubble. The mastermind behind the October 7 attack – Yahya Sinwar – would ultimately be killed by Israeli forces in a scene befitting the war itself, seated in a dust-covered chair of a bombed-out building with only enmity and a piece of scrap left to hurl at his Jewish enemies.

Not content to confine its military victory to Hamas, Israel’s post-October 7 response to the attack from Gaza targeted the Iranian proxy Hezbollah, based out of its northern neighbor Lebanon. Precision bombing campaigns killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and the ingenious “pager attack” eviscerated much of Hezbollah’s human infrastructure. Hezbollah, not long ago the dominant force in Lebanon, has been left in tatters, resulting in …

3. November/December 2024 – The Fall of Bashar Assad.

During the Arab Spring in 2011, a number of opposition Syrian groups rose up to challenge the nation’s dictator Bashar Assad. Assad – with massive assistance from Iran and Russia – largely put the revolution down, at a catastrophic cost to the people of his country. Following the decapitation of Hezbollah, Syrian opposition forces located in the country’s northwest initiated an offensive against Aleppo, a city obliterated by Russian air power a decade before. In just days, Aleppo had fallen, and the previously obscure opposition had swept across western and southern Syria, forcing Assad’s flight to his patrons in Moscow.

While this is the only non-Western victory discussed, it was set in motion by Israel’s success and served as yet another disaster for the countries arrayed against the West.

4. June 2025 – Twelve Days of Hell and a Hellacious Aftermath.

With Iranian proxies in shreds, Israel turned its attention to Iran’s nuclear program, which it long viewed as an existential threat to the Jewish state.  Israel executed a surprise attack on various sites associated with the Iranian nuclear program, while also coordinating targeted assassinations amongst Iranian leadership.  Israel’s military operations succeeded, with Iran entirely unable to defend its own airspace against relentless Israeli bombing.  The United States would contribute to Israel’s efforts with devastating strikes against Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, where bunker busting bombs were utilized to hit sites deep underground.

Since the Iranian regime was outed as little more than a paper tiger last June, it has seen an upsurge in domestic challenges to its rule, culminating in large scale protests brutally repressed by the country’s security forces in early 2026, with reports of potentially tens of thousands of Iranians killed by their own government.

5.  January 3, 2026 – Nicolas Maduro Seized by US Forces.

For decades, the leftist regime in control of Venezuela and first headed by Hugo Chavez and later by Nicolas Maduro has vexed the United States.  From nationalizing private oil interests to supplying America’s enemies (such as Cuba) to crushing political opposition and stealing elections to unleashing a refugee crisis, Venezuela has been the largest source of chaos in the Western hemisphere since the late 1990s.  In a matter of mere hours on January 3rd of this year, American commandos helicoptered into a Venezuelan military base, inflicting literally hundreds of casualties on Venezuelan forces and Maduro’s Cuban guards without any losses.  Beleaguered Venezuelan survivors have subsequently made claims of US “superweapons” that put them out of commission before they knew the fight had begun.  Maduro now sits in an American jail awaiting trial on drug trafficking charges, the future of his nation’s governance a large unknown.

What is not unknown is the situation in Venezuela’s closest regional ally – Cuba.  Heavily reliant on dwindling supplies of oil from Venezuela, Cuba’s communist economic system has entirely collapsed.  In fact, some estimate 20% of the island nation’s population has fled since 2020, and those who remain are almost entirely impoverished and suffering from widespread malnutrition-related disease.  While the government hangs on, it increasingly appears to exist on borrowed time as the US amps up its pressure campaign for regime change in Cuba.

6.  2025 – A Booming Iraq.

The success of the Western order has not merely been the infliction of defeat and humiliation on those who sought to challenge its perceived weakness, the longstanding and much-derided project to “nation build” in Iraq finally appears to be bearing fruit.

Although little-discussed in the American media (much of which labors under the delusion that the US “lost” the Iraq War), Iraq just completed its sixth successful national election since Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003.  Sectarian tensions – along with the efforts of Al Qaeda, the primary cause of post-Saddam uprisings – have been navigated in a federal system designed to disperse power among Iraq’s competing ethnic groups.  Baghdad is booming, Mosul (devastated by ISIS) is being rebuilt, the country is in the midst of a baby boom (in sharp contrast to much of the world), the economy is growing rapidly, and this “cradle of civilization” now seeks to become a tourist destination.  Perhaps the end story of George W. Bush’s “misadventure” will be recorded differently than many, including the dominant factions in both US political parties, think.

7.  What of China?

As its allies flounder, China is quiet.  Its designs on a forced reunification with Taiwan remain shrouded in ambiguity.  Is China building a massive naval, air, and marine force sufficient to cross the Taiwan Strait in defiance of the West?  Or have such ambitions been tempered by the real fear that such an operation would leave its fleet at the bottom of the ocean?  These questions remain unanswered, but the successes of the Western order elsewhere compel Chinese attention.

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While Mark Carney is right to criticize Donald Trump’s dubious ambitions on Greenland, he is strategically wrong to assert – even promote –  a growing rupture between America and the Western alliance.  Carney owns a calendar, and knows his own term is eligible to run beyond that of the three years remaining in Donald Trump’s.  A less politically-interested and more practical look at the West shows that its avowed enemies have proven entirely incapable of inflicting even the slightest of defeats on a Western-led order possessing even a modest level of commitment to its values and ideals.