Myths Without Muscles

Why Washington's New Strategy Rings Hollow

The latest National Security Strategy paper from Washington released this week is not simply clumsy or provocative. It is, in a very precise way, silly. Not amusing. Not trivial. Silly in the sense that it mistakes mythology for method, projection for power, and a kind of exhausted nostalgia for strategic imagination. It reads less like a serious attempt to navigate a world in flux than as a symptom of a civilisation that no longer understands the limits of its own story.

I am not American. I can’t imagine what a paper like this says to the American people. But as a futurist and strategist I am less concerned with this particular document as an isolated artefact and more interested in what it reveals about our collective condition. When a state as internally fragile as the contemporary United States presumes to “cultivate resistance” in allied societies, while declaring itself the “greatest” in human history, what are we actually witnessing? Is this the exercise of power, or the performance of a worldview that no longer matches the world-system it once helped to shape?

States moralise when their structural advantage begins to erode. Empires sermonise most loudly when they no longer have the quiet confidence of unchallenged capability. That’s not an observation confined to the US or Europe. We see similar gestures in Beijing’s civilisational rhetoric, in Moscow’s appeals to sacred history, in smaller states that claim unique destiny while wrestling with debt, degraded ecologies and a young population that refuses to inherit yesterday’s fears. The phenomenon is general: when material influence wanes, symbolic inflation steps in to compensate. The louder the proclamation of greatness, the more closely we should examine the underlying frailties.

This US strategy paper is steeped in an older Western myth: that reality can be commanded through declaratory language. Assert primacy and it will persist. Label allies as failing and they will fall into line. Invoke “civilisation” as if it were a fixed possession rather than a living, contested process, and perhaps your own doubts will be quietened. But civilisation is not a trophy and history doesn’t obey mission statements. It is shaped by the interplay of countless situated lives, technologies, ecosystems and stories that don’t ask permission from Washington, Brussels, Beijing or anyone else.

From a systems perspective, the silliness of the document lies in its refusal to recognise that the United States is now just one node in a dense and increasingly multipolar web of influence. Its financial leverage is still formidable, its military reach immense. Yet is it still structurally capable of choreographing the political evolution of other societies at will? When even domestic infrastructure, public health, social cohesion and basic governance are under strain, what does it mean for such a state to position itself as civilisational custodian for others? Is that credible, or is it an attempt to export unresolved internal contradictions?

The paper’s language about “civilisational erasure” and demographic anxiety illustrates another deeper confusion. Grand worldviews – whether American, European, Chinese, or any other – are not immutable essences. They are shared belief systems that congeal into world-systems: trade regimes, military alliances, border regimes, media ecologies, educational norms. These, in turn, are interpreted and reinterpreted through cultural mindsets at every level of society. When a government declares that a particular civilisation must be defended against demographic change, it is clinging to a static picture of identity that never truly existed. Every culture is already hybrid. Every border is already porous to flows of images, genes, ideas and codes. Any attempt to arrest this flow in the name of purity is not only ethically dubious; it is strategically illiterate.

In that sense, the “civilisational” framing in the US paper is not uniquely American. Variants of the same posture can be found in the Hindutva project in India, in ethno-religious nationalisms in parts of Africa and the Middle East, in the obsession with homogeneity in more than one East Asian society. The belief that survival depends on constraining difference is a recurring civilisational reflex. But it sits uneasily with the realities of a hyperconnected planet, where every local attempt to freeze identity triggers ripples in diasporas, markets and digital cultures that no central authority can fully control.

So the question becomes: why does a superpower with declining relative influence choose to double down on such a retrospective vocabulary? Why speak of “cultivating resistance” in Europe rather than, say, cultivating resilience everywhere? Why depict allies as wayward children instead of co-creative partners in reinventing the global order? One answer is psychological: systems under stress regress to simpler narratives. Another is institutional: bureaucracies are rewarded for reaffirming existing hierarchies, not for acknowledging that their own framing has become obsolete.

From the vantage point of futures practice, that is the most telling feature of this document. It’s a backward-looking text masquerading as strategy. Strategy, in any serious sense, involves engaging alternative futures, questioning assumptions, and acknowledging emergent actors whose power is not yet fully visible in the rear-view mirror. This paper, by contrast, tries to restore a fading pattern of Western centrality by castigating deviations from it. Rather than asking how Europe, the US and the rest of the world might reimagine coexistence in an era of planetary limits, cascading crises and accelerating technological disruption, it retreats into civilisational melodrama: “We remain great. They are losing themselves. We must correct them.”

The silliness, then, is not merely rhetorical. It’s systemic. A state that can no longer guarantee health care, safety and dignity to significant segments of its own population, that struggles with entrenched inequality, addiction, incarceration, and polarisation, nonetheless claims the right to tutor others in how to organise their societies. A polity whose electoral cycles are increasingly gamed by disinformation and money imagines that it alone can diagnose the democratic failings of its allies. Should any national leadership, under these conditions, be writing prescriptions for “civilisational renewal” abroad, or should it be experimenting with democratic deepening and institutional innovation at home?

This is not an argument for American self-flagellation. It’s a call to contextualise. Every major civilisation today is entangled in similar predicaments: ecological overshoot, technological disruption of labour and meaning, the corrosion of trust in institutions, and a widening disconnect between elite narratives and everyday experience. The US is not unique in this; it is merely more visible. The strategic opportunity – for Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, Latin Americans alike – is to recognise that no single centre can or should claim to be the unchallenged arbiter of global modernity. The strategic danger is that some will persist in pretending otherwise.

If we step back from the US–Europe drama for a moment, a broader pattern comes into view. Legacy powers, whether imperial, ideological or religious, tend to preserve their self-image long after the underlying conditions have changed. They cling to what I have previously called “civilisational habits” – routines of extraction, control, hierarchy and moral superiority – even as their capacity to enforce those habits ebbs away. This mismatch between story and structure generates turbulence. It can produce overreach abroad and brittle defensiveness at home. The new US strategy paper is one manifestation of that mismatch. There are many others: in the South China Sea, in the Sahel, in the digital surveillance architectures being normalised in cities across the planet.

For individuals and communities, this matters because grandiose documents do not stay on paper. They seep into funding priorities, alliance postures, covert operations, media narratives and educational content. They legitimise some identities and delegitimise others. They shape who is seen as worthy of empathy and who is cast as a threat. When a powerful state formally endorses ideas that echo fringe conspiracy theories about demographic replacement, how does that affect the safety of minorities, migrants, dissidents – not just in Europe and the US, but in any country where similar narratives can be repurposed by opportunistic elites?

A more intelligent civilisation-wide response would begin from an entirely different premise. Instead of treating demographic change, cultural hybridisation and contested narratives as existential dangers to be suppressed, we might treat them as signals that our inherited mental models are inadequate. We might ask: what forms of belonging could embrace plural identities without dissolving into chaos? What institutional designs could handle disagreement without resorting to either censorship or information warfare? What kinds of education would prepare young people to inhabit multiple worldviews without being captured by any single one?

These are not the kind of questions any one nation can answer in isolation. They require experimentation across cultures, learning from indigenous cosmologies as much as from scientific systems thinking, allowing for a plurality of civilisational futures rather than insisting on a single universal template. The US once had the chance to convene such a global inquiry in good faith. Perhaps it still does, in some post-imperial guise. But the recent strategy paper doesn’t move us in that direction. It reaffirms a centralised, exceptionalist frame at precisely the moment when centralised exceptionalism is least believable to those who live with its consequences.

If, therefore, I call this document silly, it’s not to trivialise its potential harm. Rather, it’s to highlight the absurdity of the gap between its tone and the reality it tries to govern. A wiser posture for any state – American, European, Asian or otherwise – would be humbler and more tentative: to see itself as one participant among many in a rapidly reconfiguring planetary civilisation. Instead of cultivating resistance to others’ trajectories, might it be more generative to cultivate reflection on one’s own? Instead of declaring oneself the pinnacle of history, might it be wiser to acknowledge that history is not interested in pinnacles, only in patterns that either adapt or fail?

In the end, what this episode reveals is not that the US is uniquely foolish, but that our dominant civilisational mindset is reaching the end of its usefulness. The belief that security can be achieved through dominance, that identity can be fixed through exclusion, that meaning can be mandated from above and projected indefinitely onto others, is breaking down everywhere. The challenge, for all of us, is to craft new narratives and new systems that do not require such silliness in order to sustain their legitimacy.

If we cannot do that, then every country – not just the US – will be tempted to retreat into its own mythology of greatness, to blame others for its disorientation, and to produce ever more inflated strategy papers as substitutes for genuine transformation. The real work, the work that matters to every living inhabitant of this planet, lies elsewhere: in redesigning the underlying world-systems and mindsets that gave rise to such documents in the first place.