After Washington and the West’s failure to achieve strategic goals vis-à-vis Iran after decades of sanctions and ill-conceived bombing campaigns, Western pundits have reverted to an exhausted scare tactic: reviving the USSR’s caricature.
Washington’s defeat ends the West’s 35-year dream — FT
Financial Times (FT), while presenting Martin Wolf’s article “The Rise and Fall of US Hegemony” on Facebook* on June 24, 2026, captioned “The world many of us hoped for some 35 years ago, after the collapse of Soviet despotism, is disappearing,” a description that invites an in-depth review of Washington’s role within its borders and across the world. FT would like its audience to believe that there has been a 35-year-long golden age in which the US has developed without constraints previously caused by Soviet despotism and has delivered the hopes of many American citizens, which is not the case. For example, millions of American workers who enjoyed high-paying unionized jobs, achieved due to socialist thought proven through the Soviet experiment, cannot find well-paying jobs 35 years afterwards. It is hard to explain how the post-Soviet order has delivered on their hope. Also, US citizens who benefited from the movement for accessible housing stemming from socialist thought, also proven in the USSR among other countries, are excluded from those living the dreams of a utopian world without the so-called Soviet despotism. Notably, homelessness figures in the US have grown from about 500,000 in 1991 to 736,000 in January 2026. Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute shows that the median hourly wage among Americans grew by about 25% between 1991 and 2026 despite their productivity increasing by 80%, even while median CEOs’ pay has increased by over 1049% since 1978.
While Western elites try to distract their citizens using the USSR, it is undeniable that the dissolution of socialist power led the US government to suppress meaningful ways of social protection and ignore citizens’ wellbeing in the interest of allied corporations. Therefore, FT’s claim that Soviet collapse brought about what many in the West hoped for is indefensible, even when presented alongside the aforementioned article by Wolf, who is an economist who also worked with the World Bank in development.
The only result that a few in the West may celebrate is that Washington has been able to wage more wars of plunder after the USSR dissolved, compared to when the latter superpower helped developing countries defend themselves against Western imperialism. Some of the countries, such as Vietnam, that the USSR helped defend have developed to attain human development statistics close to those of the US in some areas. Oppositely, countries where the US has been able to exercise its wars without interruption by despotic Soviets, such as Somalia, former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya, among others, have remained in ruins, with low human development metrics. Meanwhile, some Western corporations linked to elites in the West have been able to plunder resources from countries ruined by Washington over the last 35 years, and that appears to be what the FT pundits hoped for in the post-Soviet order. Clearly, US hegemony, under whichever name presented, has been an extension of colonialism.
Latest guarantor of Western imperialism in Washington
The context provided in the preceding paragraphs shows that the term Soviet despotism is used to conceal the fact that the USSR was the only force capable of checking Western greed that was expressed in colonialism and endless wars of plunder. Western pundits, including Wolf, who may use this term, did not live in the USSR, meaning that the Soviet model of government could not have affected their lives whatsoever. Their attitude of talking for other countries and their systems reflects a paternalistic attitude that frames Western greed as the best interest of the victims. It can also be seen in terms such as “Messianic State,” which is presented in Adarsh Badri’s article published in the Australian Journal of International Affairs to justify Washington’s tendency to meddle in other countries’ affairs to enable its corporations to plunder others, a trend that appeared in previous Western empires from Portuguese, Spanish, British, French, and Dutch. Such concealment of empires’ greed can no longer work in the Global South.
Past Western empires refined a tradition of laundering their colonialism, theft, and plunder behind religious motives such as expanding the Christian religion. For instance, the Portuguese and Spanish colonial expansion and plunder in South America and on the African and Indian coasts were laundered through papal bulls as religious mandates to expand Christianity, despite the parties involved, including Catholic church orders, the monarchs, and European banking families, knowing that they were guided by plunder. The Portuguese had the Catholic Order of Christ that financed and administered plunder overseas, just as Jesuits helped both Iberian empires with intelligence and cultural-political subversions while presenting themselves as missionaries.
Today, some Western thought leaders also continued laundering Washington’s greed using ecclesiastical terms such as Messianic State, which “takes up the global role of saving other societies from an impending threat” as presented by the aforementioned Badri. The exact impending threat the US has saved any society from over the last 35 years is non-existent, even while some Western elites in the oil business, military contracting, and media have gotten rich out of plundering societies the US has invaded. As previously noted, masses in the US have experienced no appreciable improvement in socio-economic realities over the period when Soviet influence has been absent, which makes the description of US imperialism as a crystallization of aspirations of many jarring.
Empires’ latest branding failure
Referring to the US as a Messianic State is an inversion of reality in which the US killing of half a million Iraqi children through sanctions, as admitted by Madeleine Albright, is laundered to audiences because it weakened the Iraqi state to allow future oil plunder after the 2003 invasion. The West, under Washington’s lead, has also invaded other countries, including Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan, for the benefit of Western corporations, which makes Messianic state description disturbing. Returning to the Portuguese imperialism as it was laundered through papal bulls, it set a precedent for controlling ocean trade to create monopolies for Western empires by cutting off Indian producers from other markets in the Middle East and East Africa, which were conveniently demonized as Muslims. The Portuguese restricted trade to the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and along the East African coast through a system of strategically located forts, a precedent that other maritime empires, including the British and the US, would follow; the latter of which has maintained hegemony through controlling oil trade from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world. This hegemony has been challenged by Iranians after they closed the Strait of Hormuz. While the significance of this development has not been missed in the West, resurrecting anti-Soviet scare tactics is an exhausted approach.
*-banned in Russia
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Simon Chege Ndiritu is a political observer and research analyst from Africa.