The apocryphal story has it that Napoleon, watching the Allies fall into a carefully laid trap, made the comment that you never should interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. This was Austerlitz, in 1805, his most impressive victory. A deliberately weakened right flank allowed a strike into the enemy’s vitals that caused him to make a further quip, that one sharp blow would end the war.

It didn’t end the war, not ultimately – sharp blows rarely do – but bought him a few more years and ensured a substantive entry in the history books. For our purposes, the better remark might belong to Woodrow Wilson who in 1916 suggested that you should never murder a man who is committing suicide.

In an age of renewed geopolitics, when the unipolar liberal international order we have taken for granted for decades seems under genuine threat, this is the mantra our recently resurgent rivals are following. We are in trouble, as the West plays whack-a-mole on three separate fronts, and all of Fukuyama’s optimism about the final victory of liberal democracy seems a little premature, as even he now admits. Our problems are deep and abiding, and most of them are internal. Unfortunately for us, our enemies seem to have a better handle on them than we do.

The West artificially inflates our declining demographics with mass immigration, but the cure might be worse than the disease, as we are now discovering, even if the only metric we can politely express revolves around property prices. States like China and Russia, who have the same problem but do not want the same solution, must feel the clock is ticking, as they try to undo the effects of second-hand feminism. They are wagering that our decline is more terminal than theirs. But, like a good Western lawmaker who seems to think legislating assisted suicide is the highest form of good, they are happy to help us along. We focus on the material, because the material has given us victory in the past; they focus on the ideational, for the same reason.

States that once enjoyed the Bolshevik Revolution, the Long March, or the rise of the Ayatollah can hardly be blamed for this.

Our philosophical declarations are muddy-headed, contradictory, and utterly ridiculous; nobody who has any brains really believes that diversity is our strength. This weakness is not a chink but a gaping chasm in our armour, one that these rivals hope might deliver them victory. We think in terms of carrier groups, GDP, and weapons development. They think in terms of animating myths, national spirit, and thumos (spiritedness). All are necessary to prevail. When it comes to capturing the imagination, they have Aleksandr Dugin, while we have the ABC, or in the United States, Stephen Colbert and Rachel Maddow. ‘Men without chests’ does not go far enough; we are also lacking the other necessary bits of equipment.

This explains why a TikTok video that went viral, presenting a white woman rejecting marriage as a life of drudgery, turned out to be produced in China. It is also why the Wagner group was helping African refugees cross the Mediterranean earlier this year, something that the Italian government called ‘hybrid warfare’. A time traveller from a century ago, arriving in any Western city, would be horrified by our recent demonstrations. They might wonder how we ended up occupied by Bedouins, and consumed by the tribal concerns of groups who were once merely anthropological curiosities for characters like Lawrence of Arabia. Our rivals are happy to aid our mistakes, and we are stupid enough to believe they are anything else.

The Dalai Lama said that sometimes the best teacher is your enemy. He didn’t mean it the way I mean it, though; he was talking to modern-day Mahatma Gandis, of whom there are many, and who are the only heroes we are allowed to have any longer, outside of one-dimensional celebrities. But Mahatma Gandis are the products of underdog or overmatched anti-societies who must reforge the conscience of their enemy as a sword against them. This was the weapon of choice for civil rights icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela or those promoting George Floyd, and provided your opponent has a conscience to begin with – however misguided – they are an effective means to leverage power. Gandi recommended the same strategy to undesirables living under 1930s Nazi Germany; you can imagine how this might have gone down. Against a society that knows what they are about, for good or ill, the political equivalent of gaslighting is unlikely to yield results. This is why colour revolutions fail in states that can look at Benjamin Barber’s globalist ‘McWorld’ with clear eyes. A degree of demoralisation, of undermined foundations, is necessary first; for us, this is homegrown, though our opponents are happy to add fuel to our fires.

Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai are examples of these latter-day AstroTurfed saints, that aim to tap into the eternally guilty consciences of Westerners, and hardly help to firm up our defences; but they are products of our zeitgeist, rather than the zeitgeists of our erstwhile rivals, even if, as in the case of Yousafzai, they occur in other places.  They are soldiers for a nasty liberal internationalist view of the future, the very view that led us into such philosophical decay. In this one might assume they share the goals of our rivals, even if they are not conscious of the fact, and their messaging and methods are very different, and often seemingly unrelated. There is a commonality of purpose between Western elites and some of our geopolitical foes, in that they both don’t have much love for the base substance that makes the West what it is, even if now it is watered down and looks very different, though never different enough to satisfy those elite compulsions. It is that historical quality – rather than anything we’ve done recently – that made the West great.

One aims to transform it from the inside, into something vaguely propositional and totally unrecognisable, following on from H.G. Wells’s An Open Conspiracy, a process well underway; the other wishes to undermine its geopolitical power from the outside. At least one is honest about what it is doing.

‘They have all the watches,’ said the Taleban, ‘but we have all the time.’ Indeed.