I WAS moved recently to begin rereading Arundhati Roy’s article “Democracy’s Fading Light” (first published in the Indian magazine Outlook in July 2009 and recently republished in a collection of essays, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy) 

In the piece, Roy asks whether there will be life after democracy and, if there is, what sort of life will it be?

Roy makes it clear that she is not talking about an ideal or aspirational democracy that many of us might yearn for but the variants on the old Western liberal democracy that we see failing in front of our very eyes.

I wasn’t just moved to read this because I love the writing of Roy. Nor because of the frightening rise of the far right in street and electoral politics – including the victory of the neonazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) this week in the regional election in Saxony-Anhalt, eastern Germany. 

I also didn’t pick up the book because of the increasing way that ultra-rich people such as Elon Musk have money and the technology to decide elections as well as wars. Neither was my choice merely to assist my latest book project about the way people have and are shaping the new Eurasian-led multilateral world.

It was perhaps a combination of all of those things. But the spark to write this article comes from the events of September 11 2001 and the United States-led illegal “war on terror” that followed.

I believe that history plays a key role in current events. The events currently unfolding owe their existence to the increasing belief among the ruling classes that democracy is a major inconvenience to their pursuit of profit.

This move began way before the events of what the US refers to as 9/11.

Another staging post, in the long retreat from a genuine belief that democracy was necessary never mind important, was the betrayal and fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Targeting Islam

This left the Western warlords in search of an alternative enemy for it to demonise.

Islam was chosen even though many client individuals and states in the Middle East had been all too willing to do the dirty work of Western elites in suppressing the region’s working-class and progressive movements.

Samuel Huntington predicted that clashes between civilisations would replace Cold War rivalries. Even though most Muslims condemned 9/11, the die was already cast for Muslims to be the fall guys.

My point here is not to dissect the causes of 9/11 but to show that it is important to recognise its importance in understanding why notions of even Western styles of democracy are under attack.

There is clear evidence that the response of the US and its allies to the 9/11 attacks abandoned even the pretence of a rules-based international order.

The covert undermining of this pretence established by the US, Britain and other Western nations, particularly after the second world war, was replaced by an open contempt and targeting of any nation or individual that dared to challenge the line.

The abandonment of this charade of a rules-based international order that meant anything that the US wanted it to mean, was at least now in the open. 

Even though there was little doubt that the 9/11 attacks were launched from Afghanistan, Iraq was also put into the crosshairs over claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, allegations that were later proven to be completely false. 

When the US was unable to gain the agreement of the United Nations (UN) security council for its illegal war, it colluded with Britain and other nations to falsify intelligence to justify its war against Iraq.

To his credit, then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan was brave enough to describe the invasion of Iraq as illegal and in breach of the UN Charter.

US president George W Bush insisted that America’s liberty depended on the liberty of others, because repressive states produce terrorists.

Spreading democracy – or rather creating regime subservience to the US – became a national security imperative. 

In its obsessive hunt for anyone it regarded as a terrorist, the US held thousands without due process, tortured detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, kidnapped suspects in one country and sent them via extraordinary rendition to another, and sanctioned assassinations even in countries where it was not at war.

The US did all of this and still insisted it led the “free world” and was the champion of democratic ideals. What the US succeeded in doing was mobilising a new generation of jihadis. 

On the domestic front, the US and its allies poured billions into the Western military-industrial complex. This diverted much needed resources away from public services at home and increasingly people struggled to meet the soaring cost of living.

Confidence in political elites and experts was eroded by policy failures at home (including the 2007–08 financial crisis in which millions of ordinary people lost their homes, while governments bailed out the bankers) and abroad (including the wars in the Middle East, sowing the seeds for terrorism as well as the creation of millions of refugees). 

Donald Trump’s hostility to trade alliances, international law, and multilateralism – and his unhinged tirades against Muslims, immigrants, and terrorists – propelled him to the White House.

He led the wave of far-right leaders who began to make electoral progress across the world supported by the funds of mega-rich donors such as Musk.

The fact is that the kind of US-driven regime change we saw in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya, to name but three, did not, and probably was never meant to, lead to liberal democracy. It was entirely about creating regimes subservient to the US.

The primary US national security excuse is no longer terrorism – if it was it would have dealt with the demonstrably main danger within its own borders – the far right.

The main concern is now, and likely always has been, about great-power competition. Primarily, the US wishes to crush China as a competitor on all levels.

Although the US clearly remains a powerful military and economic force, its international reputation and legitimacy as the self-appointed standard-bearer of democracy has been destroyed by more than two decades of fighting without winning since 9/11, by its hypocritical human rights violations, and by its own political dysfunction. 

All of this has destroyed whatever lingering public trust there was in democracy, as the mass of people get poorer and the rich get richer, and has turned millions to support the far right.

I fully accept that there are many other factors involved in the slow, lingering death of Western liberal democracy but I do think we can point to the response of the US and its allies to the events of 9/11 as one of the key factors.

The upside is that it has forced the global majority to seek an alternative to the hegemony of the US. We see this search taking place in front of our eyes with the brick-by-brick building of the new multilateral world. There appears to be a gradual eviction of the US from the Middle East as the penny drops, with many of its former client regimes, that Washington’s time is up.