There is something wrong with today's Western discourse, and Argentina is experiencing it firsthand. While some insist on returning to the West as if it were a magic solution, the world is undergoing a much deeper transformation. It’s not a battle of ideologies. It’s a structural change in global power, and the West simply no longer occupies the exclusive center it held for two centuries.

Spengler saw it coming over a century ago: no civilization maintains its hegemony indefinitely. He wasn’t talking about abrupt collapses but recognizable patterns: loss of productive capacity, technological displacement, creative exhaustion. Today, that is not literary prophecy; it is empirical reality. The numbers are clear. Europe is aging rapidly, the United States is navigating chronic polarization and erratic protectionism. Meanwhile, India is the most populous country on the planet, China leads in patent applications, and Gulf countries control critical energy resources. Modernity has become polycentric.

But here’s the interesting part: in response to this loss of centrality, a characteristic reaction emerges. Western leaderships exalt Western civilization with moral discourses that serve as a substitute for real productive strategies. It’s not strength; it’s historical insecurity. When a hegemony loses economic capacity, it compensates with symbolic reaffirmations and, often, military pressure. More defense spending, indirect conflicts, geopolitical tensions, economic sanctions. All part of the same logic: maintaining coercively what can no longer be sustained through innovation.

The deep problem is not geopolitical. It’s civilizational. The West was not built on isolationism or permanent confrontation. It was built on institutional cooperation. That’s what enabled universities, modern science, law, and trade. And Christianity added something crucial: universal dignity, protection of the weak, ethical limits to violence. That shaped core institutions: human rights, the rule of law, universalism.

The problem is that current neo-Westernism invokes these values while practicing the opposite. It fragments the social fabric, turns political opponents into moral enemies, dehumanizes migrants, replaces institutional cooperation with identity polarization. It’s not civilizational restoration; it’s internal contradiction. And while the West bleeds in cultural wars, others advance by strengthening interstate coordination, technological planning, and strategic investment.

China is gaining centrality not through moral superiority but through planning in infrastructure, logistics, applied science, and the integration of public and private investment. India increases its international weight through active demographics, technical training, and large-scale productive expansion. If historical success depended on cooperation and material development, the West’s deficit is not outside; it’s inside.

And there is a key structural flaw that few mention: migration management. For decades, the West grew by integrating migrant populations as human and cultural capital. Today, migration flows are treated as explanations for insecurity, justifications for border closures, electoral tools. The result is fragmentation, ghettos, resentment, weakening social cohesion. It’s not a humanitarian dilemma; it’s a strategic failure of civilizational integration.

In this context, Pope Francis represents an uncomfortable but necessary voice. Not from ideological logic but from the Christian humanist tradition that shaped the ethical core of the West. His insistence on fraternity among peoples, rejection of war, and defense of multilateralism remind us that Western values did not emerge to justify armed blocs or cultural wars. They arose to limit power and humanize conflict.

This logic inspired international law after the great wars of the 20th century. The United Nations, humanitarian law, multilateral treaties, mechanisms for peaceful resolution. Despite its flaws, this framework allowed decades of conflict containment, reduction of direct confrontations, and limits on unilateral violence. It was the most ambitious attempt to translate civilizational cooperation into a global legal norm.

Today, that system is under pressure. Sober nationalism and axiological civilizational discourse tend to replace common rules with force. International organizations are relativized, courts weakened, unilateral action normalized. It’s not technical regression; it’s civilizational regression. And it especially affects middle and peripheral countries that depend on multilateral rules to avoid being caught between great powers.

Toynbee put it well: civilizations survive by creatively responding to challenges. Polanyi explained from political economy: no market order sustains itself if it destroys its social base. The central error of neo-Westernism is not ideological but strategic. It believes the crisis is cultural when in reality it is productive, technological, demographic, and institutional. Without infrastructure, energy, industry, applied science, and functional states, no civilization can sustain itself.

And here Argentina appears as an uncomfortable mirror. Argentina is not a consolidated Western power. It’s a peripheral country with an incomplete productive structure, fragile state, and strong territorial imbalances. Importing foreign cultural wars, automatically aligning with external geopolitical disputes, weakening state capacities under slogans of market efficiency—none of this brings us closer to any Western rebirth. It exposes us to greater strategic irrelevance. Today’s enclosure keeps us trapped in symbolic slogans while the world disputes critical minerals, redefines energy matrices, reorganizes supply chains, and competes for technological leadership.

This is not a moral debate. It’s a matter of real power. Spengler was wrong to believe that civilizational exhaustion implied fatalism. There are no predetermined destinies. But he was right about one essential thing: civilizations do not survive on nostalgia but on the capacity to adapt. Today’s enclosure is not inevitable if we manage to redefine our strategy.

The 21st century will not be defined by who shouts the loudest in the West. It will be defined by who manages to rebuild institutional cooperation, functional states, productive economies, and viable national projects in a multipolar world. True decline is not losing values; it’s betraying the cooperative, humanist, and legal principles that made those values possible. That is the debate we still avoid, both in the West and in Argentina. And today’s enclosure costs us every day we postpone it.