Restoring Western Confidence

American Thinker 

Many Americans are puzzled by the rise of newly naturalized citizens who quickly ascend to high office. Figures such as Ilhan Omar and Zohran Mamdani have achieved political prominence in a timeframe that contrasts sharply with earlier immigrant families -- such as the Kennedys -- who spent generations establishing roots before seeking national leadership. To some observers, these newer officeholders appear less focused on representing the country as it is and more intent on confidently reshaping it according to very different ideological visions.

Moreover, this pattern of boldly imposing alternative values is even more pronounced in the United Kingdom and parts of Western Europe where expansive hate-speech and public-order laws have narrowed the boundaries of acceptable dissent, discouraging open debate about immigration, national identity, and cultural change.

Consider the controversy surrounding the co-owner of Manchester United who, facing considerable backlash, was forced to apologize after describing Britain as having been “colonized.” Clearly Britain -- and a wider Europe -- are increasingly uneasy about asserting its own cultural norms, wary of offending, and uncertain of the legitimacy of inherited traditions.

Little wonder then, that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was dispatched to the 2026 Munich Security Conference to deliver a measured but unmistakable warning: without a recovery of civilizational confidence, Europe risks “civilizational erasure,” with consequences not only for its internal cohesion but for the transatlantic alliance itself. In an effort to re-engage leaders who seemed uncertain and defensive, Rubio outlined the steps necessary to restore the transatlantic alliance and secure its future.

His remarks hinted at a deeper problem -- one rooted less in policy failure than in an intellectual climate embedded in academia which is mired in postcolonial guilt that has sapped the West’s confidence and left it trapped in self-doubt and strategic paralysis.

It's time to examine the intellectual frameworks through which we understand empire, identity, and historical responsibility.

Selective Guilt: Postcolonialism’s Silence on Islamic Conquest

Since the 1960s the field of postcolonial studies, starting at Columbia in NYC but spreading throughout Europe, has focused overwhelmingly on the “unjust” legacy of Western empire. Its founding figure, Edward Said, argued in Orientalism that western scholarship systematically distorted -- even “exoticized” -- the cultures of the Middle East and Asia. Such representations, he contended, served to assert European cultural superiority and to furnish moral justification for imperial expansion.

This exclusive focus on western culpability has shaped generations of students and policymakers. Since the 1960s, these postcolonial programs have contributed to a pervasive sense of civilizational guilt in the West, often accompanied by a crisis of cultural confidence. In public life, this has manifested in skepticism toward assimilationist policies and a growing reluctance to articulate shared national norms.

Into that vacuum entered alternative value systems, including forms of Islamic supremacism cloaked in the language of religious liberty and free speech, to press for parallel norms within Western societies.

Our task now is to expand the cultural frameworks through which the legacy of colonialism is examined.

A genuinely critical postcolonial studies would not confine itself to Western sins alone. It would examine imperial power wherever it arose, subjecting all civilizational projects -- European, Ottoman, Mughal or otherwise -- to the same historical standards. Only then can the discipline move beyond moral asymmetry and towards a more intellectually coherent account of the past -- and a clearer understanding of the present.

 Reclaiming “Narrative Control” of History

As Marco Rubio observed, the West, basking in the glow of the Berlin Wall’s collapse, accepted too readily the notion -- popularized by Francis Fukuyama -- that this marked “the end of history.” Liberal democracy, with its protections for individual liberty, its free markets, and its openness to the movement of goods and peoples, was presumed to have triumphed. The ideological contest was over.

It was not.

In the following decades, western leaders failed to articulate a coherent post-Cold War civilizational narrative. Narrative control over history was ceded to post-Edward Said theorists who framed Western history as uniquely colonial and uniquely culpable. Within that narrow framework, other imperial traditions -- including Islam’s -- received scant attention. The result is not balance but asymmetry.

If postcolonial studies is to mature as a discipline, it must widen its scope. Islamic empires, like European ones, combined achievement with coercion. AsTrevor Barnes notes in The Two Legacies: How European and Islamic Expansion Shaped Our World Differently, Islamic expansion produced periods of intellectual and architectural brilliance, but also entailed military conquest, coercive rule, legally enforced hierarchies, economic restrictions, and the cultural subordination and humiliation of conquered peoples.

Two areas in particular deserve scrutiny.

First, the treatment of non-Muslims under classical Islamic rule. Dhimmicommunities were accorded protected but subordinate status, marked by legal disabilities and the payment of the jizya tax. While practices varied across time and place, the system institutionalized religious hierarchy -- a reality rarely explored with the same moral intensity applied to the West or their colonial administrations.

Second, slavery. Western curricula understandably devote considerable attention to the transatlantic slave trade and its enduring consequences. Yet far less attention is paid to the Arab-Muslim slave trade, spanning from the seventh to the twentieth centuries and, by many estimates, introduced millions of Africans and others across North Africa, the Middle East and beyond. Enslaved persons were employed in domestic service, military roles, and as concubines; male captives were often castrated, extinguishing progeny.

Nor is there sustained recognition that Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, thereafter deploying the Royal Navy at considerable cost to suppress the trade globally. The historical record is complex -- implicating African, Arab, and European actors alike -- yet Western institutions have tended to focus moral reckoning almost exclusively inward.

The Way Toward Reclaiming Cultural Confidence

The point is not competitive victimhood, nor the minimization of western wrongdoing. It is intellectual consistency. If “empire” is to be scrutinized as a category, it must be scrutinized everywhere.

Cultural confidence rests on knowledge -- of western achievements in science, law, and constitutional government, as Rubio emphasized, but also of the full historical record of other imperial systems. That work must begin where the prevailing orthodoxy took root: inside the academy -- in America, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy alike.

On the other side of the ledger, the failures and coercions of Islamic imperial history must be examined with the same candor applied to Europe. A civilization unwilling to confront uncomfortable facts -- whether about itself or about others -- forfeits narrative authority.

If the West continues to shrink from that task, the warnings about civilizational erasure will cease to be rhetorical and become sober descriptions. There is little time left for hesitation.