JUST when all the trend lines show us that the economies of the Global North will remain flat for another year, and that the economies of many of the Asian countries – in particular – will have slower but still higher growth rates, the leaders of the Global North go to their various forums to say – we are back! The most recent leader to do this conjuring trick has been Marco Rubio, Secretary of State for the United States. At the Munich Security Conference 2026, Rubio gave a speech – which received a standing ovation – that underlined the importance of the Age of Columbus for men like him. ‘For five centuries’, Rubio said, ‘the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe’. This Age of Columbus (from 1492 to 1945) began to face a defeat, Rubio said, ‘by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings’, which of course included the revolutions in Vietnam (1945), China (1949), and Cuba (1959) as well as the emergence of the Bandung Spirit (1955) and the Non-Alignment Movement (1961). For Rubio, this decolonisation and democratisation is precisely the problem that US President Donald Trump wants to repair. ‘Decline was a choice’, Rubio said, and it is one that Trump refuses to make. It is not only a Second American Century that Trump and Rubio want, but a Second Age of Columbus.

The term ‘Age of Columbus’ refers to the high period of imperialism, with the destruction of the communities in the Americas and the theft of their land to the colonisation of large areas of Africa and Asia. K. N. Panikkar’s 1953 book Asia and Western Dominance coined a different phrase, ‘the Vasco Da Gama Epoch’, referring to the Portuguese captain who brought colonial violence into the Indian Ocean in 1498, seven years after Columbus’ ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Whether we call that five hundred period the Age of Columbus or the Vasco Da Gama Epoch is not important, but what is significant is that large sections of the Western propertied class and their managers have a nostalgia for that structure and, despite the neo-colonial period that opened in 1945 and lasts till now, they would like to return to full-scale colonialism or at least to a new variant of it, hyper-imperialism.

Rebuilding the Pillars of Western Civilisation

In 2025, Argentina’s president Javier Milei went to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, to complain about the erosion of the ‘pillars of Western Civilisation’. Milei shared the same historical view as Rubio but was far blunter in his assessment. Everything that was good in the world in recorded history, he suggested, came from the ‘West’, which he said ‘represents the pinnacle of human achievement on the fertile ground of its Greco-Roman heritage and Judeo-Christian values’. The reason I have placed the word West in quotes is that it is not entirely clear what this political category refers to for Milei (born in Argentina in 1970). He does not see the West as Europe, per se, but as the inheritance of four elements of European history: ancient Greece and Rome, and the religious traditions of Judaism and Christianity. Where these traditions went through settler colonialism (the Americas, Australia, New Zealand), there the West lay its sword and its book. Milei bemoaned the decline of this European inheritance.

Why is this European inheritance so significant? Because, as Milei put it, it was this that – he argued – created the idea of individual liberty and it was this that ‘was able to unleash man’s creative capacity, initiating an unprecedented process of wealth generation’. There is absolutely no acknowledgment from Milei, or really even from Rubio, about the harsh history of colonial theft, the mountains of gold and silver dug out of the Americas and brought into Europe, the trans-Atlantic trade in human being (including to Argentina), and the construction of a colonial and then neo-colonial economic system that benefitted the Atlantic world’s finances. None of that is in the theory of Milei or Rubio. They focus, to slightly transform Max Weber’s Protestantism, on the Christian Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Why the Defence of Western Civilisation?

Why do men like Milei and Rubio come out in defence of Western Civilisation if it is indeed so powerful? There are at least three reasons.

First, over the course of the past two decades, the economies of the Atlantic world have seen a genuine slip in their place in the world economy. Growth rates have stumbled near zero, with finance providing whatever fuel has been available to keep the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) moving. For instance, the latest United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Global Trade Update (January 2026) shows that US growth is projected to slow from 1.8 per cent to 1.5 per cent, while China will be at 4.6 per cent, and at the same time, South-South trade has increased from $0.5 trillion (1995) to $6.8 trillion (2025). Today, as the UN points out, 57 per cent of developing-country exports go to other developing countries, up from 38 per cent in 1995, and the quality of the exports has also changed from raw materials to intermediate and finished goods. This transformation of the world economy from being designed around South to North raw material trade to South-South developmental trade has set off alarms in the Global North capitals. The call for the return of Global North power is not simply about culture and politics, but it is about the irreversible transformation of the geography of global trade and, slowly, of global finance. The Global North has used many instruments, most of them blunt, to try and reverse the South’s economic gains: first, through the United States tariff war, which has been partly dented by the US Supreme Court’s technical verdict about the president’s right to declare tariffs without Congressional approval; second, through denials of various intermediate goods to China so that its gains in technological development will be overturned (unsuccessful, as China has now developed most elements of the high technology supply chain); third, through forcing countries to reconstruct their trade relations to favour the West rather than the Asian behemoths (again, unsuccessful because of the low growth rates in the West and therefore the low purchasing power of its industry and its consumers).

Second, when Trump demanded that the countries within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) increase their military spending to 5 per cent of GDP, each of the countries agreed with different levels of enthusiasm. The proximate reason was the Russia-Ukraine war, but the real reason was to revive the Global North’s one major instrument of dominance, its military power. NATO has been cavalier in its use of this military alliance outside its area since it bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 and then went to war in Afghanistan (2001) and Libya (2011). It has threatened to expand its ambit into a Global NATO, a fiction that has seen resistance from within the United Nations system. NATO and its global partners are responsible for more than three quarters of annual global military spending, most of which is done by the United States. The genocide against the Palestinians by Israel and the United States and the destruction of Gaza sent a severe message to the Global South about the military capacity of the Global North and of its willingness to conduct a genocide regardless of global public opinion. The invasion of Venezuela on January 3, 2026, and the kidnapping of its President and a member of the National Assembly with a warning to the Acting President that the US has the capacity to turn Caracas into Gaza City is part of this belligerence. That the Global North’s main instrument for a return to the Age of Columbus is its military forces leads us to deploy the concept of hyper-imperialism (there are no inter-imperialist conflicts in our time, only the use of imperialist power by the Global North, led by the United States, against any perceived threat to its dominance).

Third, the far right of a special type arises in the West partly on the terrain of a crisis from the capitalist point of view of worker discipline. They argue that the growth of a form of social liberalism (which they call ‘wokeism’) has made workers less disciplined by the ethic of hard work and has made young people unwilling to have children. This has resulted in a society that has come to rely upon migration for a range of work. From the far right’s point of view, this migration has weakened society, and it has created a form of social laziness that needs to be confronted by iron discipline. A certain toughness is necessary: deportation of migrants in a public way will show the citizens that the state is committed to the enforcement of law, and the smashing of unions and of left organisations will show the citizens that the state will not tolerate interference in a project to advance the country to maintain its global position. This phenomenon is mostly visible in the United States at present, although these two forms have been part of European society for at least a decade.

Marco Rubio, Javier Milie, and Steve Bannon – the architect of this far right of a special type – are joined in this mission to revive a Second Age of Columbus. But they face a situation that is adverse for them. The transformation of the geography of global trade, despite the continued drain of wealth from South to North, is almost complete; the Global North’s ability to destroy countries is acknowledged, but its inability to invade them and control them is equally clear; and, the difficulty in reviving a Judeo-Christian capitalist ethos in their societies is constrained by longer term trends (low birth rate, necessity of migrants) that cannot be easily transformed.

We will hear more of these speeches about the Second Age of Columbus. But this time, the navigator will not prevail. The ghosts of the Taino people of Hispaniola are ready. They see the ships coming. They will not be exterminated this time.