Owen Jones Charts a Quarter Century of Western Decline

Owen Jones's new book, The Fall of the West, traces a quarter century of geopolitical hubris and economic overreach, arguing that the certainties of the millennium generation — free market ideology, US military supremacy, a rules-based global order — came crashing down between 2000 and 2025.

Jones, a journalist and Guardian columnist born in the 1980s, writes from generational experience. Like many Britons of his cohort, he came of age with Tony Blair's platitudes ringing in his ears. Politics at the turn of the millennium, he argues, rested on temporary dispensations mistaken for eternal truths.

The book revisits the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, reminding readers not only of their horrific death tolls — totalling half a million by conservative estimates — but also of their total strategic failure. The 2021 evacuation of Kabul airport, Jones writes, was "among the starkest images of American decline yet broadcast to the world."

The title's central term itself has shifted in meaning. "The west" — shorthand for the US plus the wealthier western European nations — feels almost quaint today, given the increasing unilateralism of the administration in Washington. In the 2000s, by contrast, the word belonged to the standard lexicon, treated as if the hemisphere were a political actor in its own right.

Jones frames the past 25 years as a succession of economic failures, foreign policy disasters and political crises that dismantled the post-Cold War settlement piece by piece. The book bills itself as a bracing history of the changing world order rather than a lament, and it arrives at a moment when Washington's unilateralism has made its core question — what remains of western power — harder to answer in the affirmative.

For readers of contemporary political history, The Fall of the West offers a chronological accounting of how quickly established orthodoxies collapsed, and a prompt to consider which of today's assumptions may prove equally temporary.