The Civilizational DEATH Of The US Empire Is REAL | Drs. A. Moeini & C. Mott

## Arta Moeini: civilization and American power What emerges from the conversation is a sharp diagnosis: recent, explicitly civilizational rhetoric coming from Washington is less a philosophical shift than a tactical rebrand of long-standing imperial aims. The discussion situates a high-profile speech delivered at a symbolic historical site as emblematic of this phenomenon. Rather than marking a turn toward humility or genuine pluralism, the speech is read as an attempt to cloak continued power projection in cultural language — to convert the language of civilization into an instrument for legitimizing intervention and containment. This reframing is important because it exposes how language that appears restorative or rooted can be deployed in service of continuity. The conversation argues that the liberal international order — for decades justified by universalist ideals — always contained an instrumental logic of primacy. When universalism faltered under the weight of costly wars and economic strain, the rebranding into a civilizational frame sought to salvage legitimacy. The key critique here is methodological as much as political: civilization is treated as a static essence to be defended, rather than a historically layered, plural, and evolving set of practices and identities. By recoding foreign policy in civilizational terms, the conversation suggests, policymakers can claim moral urgency while masking geopolitics as existential cultural defense. That move, the speakers argue, recycles old patterns — moralistic rhetoric, selective historicism, and strategic intervention — under a new veneer that appeals to identity politics at home and abroad. ## Limits of the liberal order The discussion wrestles candidly with the structural limits of the post-war order. Its analysis separates normative judgments from empirical descriptions: the unipolar moment produced a rules-based vocabulary that in practice rationalized hegemonic behavior. That vocabulary has been delegitimized both externally and domestically — exposed by protracted counterinsurgency campaigns, failed state-building projects, and the financial and political costs of overreach. This section of the exchange highlights two crucial developments. First, the global war on terror revealed the fragility of the moral claims that underpinned interventionist projects. Second, the material shift toward multipolarity — driven by economic realignments and regional assertiveness — has made sustained, unilateral power projection less feasible. What follows, the conversation warns, is not simply the triumph of a benign multipolarity but a contested transition during which states and elites will struggle over narratives and instruments of influence. The speakers emphasize that the rhetoric of civilizational struggle functions to deny the reality of these limits. It proposes a zero-sum existential framing that justifies continued intervention and bloc-making even as the material basis for unipolar enforcement erodes. In short, rhetorical innovation masks strategic continuity: when grand strategy cannot be defended on efficiency or cost grounds, it is dressed up in the language of survival and heritage. ## Support Neutrality Studies The debate also touches on the institutional and intellectual space occupied by neutrality and non-alignment as both concepts and practices. What the conversation pushes for is a recalibration of how scholars and policymakers think about coexistence in a multi-world environment. Neutrality studies, understood broadly, becomes an intellectual counterweight to civilizational crusades: a domain for exploring restraint, balance, and the political technologies needed to sustain plural regional orders without defaulting to ideological confrontation. This portion of the exchange does not romanticize neutrality as passive withdrawal. Instead, it presents neutrality as active, strategic restraint: a set of policies and norms that allow regional polities to pursue autonomy while managing interdependence. Supporting such approaches would require investing in institutions for regional dialogue, legal frameworks for coexistence, and credible mechanisms of mutual restraint — in short, a policy toolkit that privileges stability over domination. The conversation thus elevates scholarly engagement with neutrality from an abstract critique to a practical agenda. If civilizational rhetoric hardens into doctrine, analysts and practitioners sympathetic to nonalignment must be prepared to offer plausible alternatives — frameworks that can manage competition without escalating it into existential conflict. ## Chris Mott: civilizational states Shifting the analytic lens, the discussion explores what a civilizational state might actually mean when grounded in historical and geographic realities rather than rhetorical deployment. The conversation distinguishes between rhetorical appropriation and empirical civilizational continuity. A civilizational state, on this account, is not defined by a single regime or ideology; it is a layered political formation that integrates successive polities, ecological settings, and long-term cultural exchanges into a durable historical identity. The example offered is instructive: civilizational states often assemble around geographic cores — river valleys, plains, or strategic corridors — where enduring interaction produces institutional forms and cultural repertoires. These formations can encompass multiple languages, religions, and ethnicities; their unity rests more on shared historical experience and spatial coherence than on homogeneity. Importantly, such entities are dynamic: periods of fragmentation alternate with phases of reconstitution. The civilizational state endures not because it is unchanging, but because it can integrate discontinuity into a resilient narrative. This reconceptualization aims to rescue the analytic value of civilization from ideologues. It suggests scholarship should pay attention to the material and social processes that produce civilizational cohesion — trade networks, bureaucratic structures, military logistics, and patterns of migration — rather than treating civilization as an abstract moral quality to be asserted or defended. ## India, history and political identity The conversation then turns to South Asia to illustrate how civilizational memory can be mobilized in contemporary politics. It traces the long arc from premodern cultural complexes to large-scale polities like the Maurya empire, showing how historical consciousness can be reworked into modern political identity. Crucially, the speakers note that civilizational claims in such contexts are double-edged: they can provide legitimacy for inclusionary narratives that accommodate pluralism, or be converted into exclusionary ideologies that marginalize internal diversity. The Indian case underscores the contingency of civilizational self-fashioning. Empires emerge and recede; cultural continuities persist even through political fragmentation. When modern states invoke civility, they either draw on a capacious historical memory that can absorb difference, or they compress history into a narrow lineage used to justify contemporary hegemonies. The conversation highlights the political choices embedded in which aspects of the past are remembered and which are suppressed. From a policy perspective, this section cautions against simplistic readings of civilizational rhetoric. Regional powers will likely continue to reference deep time to bolster legitimacy, but whether that produces cooperative regional orders or intensified competition depends on the institutional forms accompanying such claims. ## Power, geography and coexistence A key contribution of the exchange is the insistence that geography matters — not as geographic determinism but as the material substrate of political possibility. Civilizational states grow where terrain, resources, and communicatio

The Civilizational DEATH Of The US Empire Is REAL | Drs. A. Moeini & C. Mott Enjoy the Empire while it lasts, for the outlook does not look good. Join two US analysts in their quest for understanding the trajectory of decline. Kyoto University Symposium 2026: "Geopolitics in the Time of Monsters" Presentation 7: Dr. Arta Moeini & Dr. Christopher Mott Arta Moeini and Chris Mott examine the language of civilization in American foreign policy and the possibilities of a changing international order. Moeini argues that Marco Rubio’s rhetoric repackages global primacy, while Mott explores historically rooted political communities through China, India, Iran and other examples. Their discussion considers geography, cultural difference, empire, ideology and coexistence. Audience questions challenge their definitions, examine American history and European militarization, and ask whether civilizational thinking can support peace without reproducing familiar forms of domination. Recorded at the Kyoto Symposium, 15 October 2026. CHAPTERS 00:00 Arta Moeini: civilization and American power 04:28 Limits of the liberal order 08:19 Support Neutrality Studies 12:50 Chris Mott: civilizational states 20:18 India, history and political identity 27:40 Power, geography and coexistence 34:19 Audience questions and discussion 51:00 Civilization, colonialism and the American republic GUESTS Arta Moeini and Christopher Mott — Institute for Peace & Diplomacy https://peacediplomacy.org/experts/ CONFERENCE https://neutralitystudies.com/events /kyoto-symposium-2026 NEUTRALITY STUDIES Newsletter: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Support: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Shop: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop #Arta Moeini Well, thank you. Thank you, Pascal, for organizing this. We're very happy to be here. And as it needed. #Arta Moeini Okay. #Arta Moeini Yeah, there's a reason. I was like, this is a very good map that I can use. No, but we're very happy to be here. And one of the things that, I mean, what we're going to do is we're going to talk about civilizations and what's happening in terms of the new grand strategy move in the United States. But we're going to do this in two ways. I'm going to try to deconstruct something that happened last week, which is a speech by Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State of the Trump administration. And -- 1 of 19 -- then we're going to talk about sort of the problems of what that speech was and what that represents. And then I'm going to switch the floor and give it to Chris to talk about what a proper civilizational theory could look like. And then we'll answer any questions. So, just because we have a lot to cover and we have 20 minutes, I decided late last night to type everything up, so bear with me. But... So, just last week, against the iconic monumental backdrop of the Acropolis in Athens, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a speech framing the current global inflection point not in terms of geopolitics or realpolitik, or even defense of democracy, freedom, or the rules-based order, but as an existential struggle to save Western civilization. Harkening to the Greco-Persian Wars, Rubio urged Europe to awaken from its long slumber, embrace the unapologetic pursuit of national power, and join Washington in a grand defense of Western identity. To the casual observer, or those enchanted by the populist Trumpian post-liberal right, this rhetoric sounds quite revolutionary. It presents itself as a decisive break from the liberal internationalist paradigm and discredited globalism of our past decades. It claims to retire the stale universalism of the post-Cold War era in favor of a rooted, sacred, and historical identity. But, my friends, do not be deceived. If the aspiring elites of the new right tell you that they are abandoning America's grand strategy of global primacy, they are simply lying to you. What we witnessed in Athens was not the birth of a post-globalist or interest-based grand strategy. It was a tactical rebranding, a cosmetic window dressing for the globalist American empire. In today's lecture, I want to unpack the deeply ideological and weaponized nature of this new right civilizationalism and argue that, rather than reflecting a genuine civilizational turn or civilizational pluralism, Rubio's framework reifies and subverts the very concept of civilization and its potential. It converts civilization into an exclusionary, Manichean ideological weapon designed to prolong American hegemony under a new identitarian banner. So, to understand Rubio's speech, we must first trace the structural crisis of U.S. grand strategy over the past eight decades. The defining feature of the post-war era was universalism, the ideological faith in the absolute superiority of Western Enlightenment ideals and values. Supported by an aberrant concentration of power following 1945, first in a bipolar and then unipolar structure, this universalism gave rise to what was dubbed the liberal international order, and more recently it was rebranded again as the rules-based order. But as many critical scholars have pointed out, myself included, this rules-based order was always a moral cloak and disguise to hide U.S. American hegemony and its violent nature. For generations, Washington's foreign policy establishment married itself to ideational and performative projects to rationalize its primacy. For neoconservatives and neoliberals alike, the central pretense was liberal democracy. But in practice, this pretense caused endless foreign military interventions and regime change wars, as well as nation-building and responsibility to protect according to humanitarian ideals. But the true strategic aim was never simply this abstract promotion of human rights and democracy, or whatever -- 2 of 19 -- good words you want to use today. It was to disrupt the natural balance of power across key Eurasian regions and undermine the rise or the endurance of autonomous regional powers. But this project has now reached its structural limit for two reasons. One, the global war on terror exposed the utter hollowness of the liberal premise, not just to the rest of the world, but to the American people. Second, the unraveling of unipolarity, accelerated by regional quagmires, economic shifts, and ongoing conflicts in Eastern Europe and now the Middle East, with this disastrous fiasco that's called the Iran War, has rendered unipolar power projection prohibitively costly, ineffective, and unsustainable. So we have actually now arrived at the dawn of a post-hegemonic, post-American, and post-liberal world. A world defined empirically by multiplicity, regionalization, cultural sovereignty, and multi-alignment. But faced with these tectonic structural shifts that are actually empirical, none of the things that I said so far is normative. I'm not arguing that multipolarity is something that we should go and protest for. But facing this, facing these shifts, how has the post-liberal New Right responded? They claim to reject the reckless hubris of neoconservatives. Yet rather than foregoing primacy and retreating to a constitutional or continental republic, seeing America as a continental nation, they have simply swapped terminology and rebranded America itself as a civilizational state. They have traded the squishy and abstract notions of freedom, human rights, and liberal democracy for equally amorphous and nebulous concepts like Western civilization or my favorite, Judeo- Christian heritage, which does not exist. Notice the ideological trick being played here. Instead of framing autocracies or the axis of evil as enemies of democracy, the transatlantic space is now framed as engaged in a permanent, existential, civilizational war against the Third World and an array of perceived barbarians from Tehran to Beijing. Some on the New Right flirt with bringing Russia into a concocted white Christian civilization, but they are divided, and others reject it. Nevertheless, the structural goal is the same. When Marco Rubio stands in Athens and speaks of an existential threat to our civilization, he is not referring to a retreat from empire. Instead, he is offering a rebranded rationale for global power projection. It is a semi-disguised form of white Christian identitarianism that acts as a new globalist ideological crusade. Think of it as a new right responsibility to protect, weaponized not for secular or liberal values, but this time for imperiled Christian minorities in Nigeria or Western inheritance across the globe. And this map that I kept, it shows how big this civilizational paradigm that they have actually looks like. And it's completely unfettered from any understanding of history and culture and civilizations in history. So... #Arta Moeini So instead of relinquishing Washington's self-appointed right to intervene, this rhetorical civilizationism arbitrarily divides the world into the civilized to be defended and the Third World other to be resisted. It perpetuates bloc thinking, containment, and Manichaean conflict under a brand- -- 3 of 19 -- new identitarian banner that can also be applied at home. The fundamental intellectual flaw and the chief danger, in my view, of New Right civilizationism lies in how it conceptualizes civilization itself. Historically, empirically, and analytically, the true essence of civilization as a geocultural category is multiplicity, is difference, its historical depth and embodied collective experience and existence. #Arta Moeini Civilizations and civilizational paradigms should have peaceful coexistence inherent within them. They are also organic, regionally rooted, dynamic ecosystems of human social life. They are inherently pluralistic. By contrast, the New Right performs a violent reductionism. It does a bait-and- switch. It first does a reification. It takes civilization, strips it of its complex, evolving, and open- ended geocultural history, and turns it into a static, essentialistic, reified monolith. Second, it universalizes it. It transforms a specific regional heritage that it concocts, in this case, into a grand abstract universalism. It then says our civilization represents the apex of human history, and it must assert hegemony to survive, weaponizing said civilization to continue the previous objectives. And finally, it subverts by reducing civilization, capital C, to a political weapon for state power projection. It subverts the very thing that makes civilizational study valuable: the recognition of coexistence, mutual respect, and genuine difference. So Rubio's speech is fundamentally disingenuous, precisely because it distorts the empirical reality of the post-unipolar era. The desire sweeping the non-Atlantic world and Eurasia today is not a desire to join the US-led civilizational war or re-engage in bloc thinking. It is a desire for cultural recognition, strategic autonomy, and regional sovereignty. But when the New Right treats civilization as a shorthand for its endless zero-sum ideological clash, not only does it betray the actual promise of civilization, it actually locks humanity into a self-fulfilling prophecy of catastrophic conflict. To conclude, when we listen to speeches like the one delivered at the Acropolis last week, we must look past the allusions and romantic references to Greek antiquity, the Roman Empire, and some sort of a mythical founding. Marco Rubio's civilizationism is not a defense of culture. It is an instrumentalization of culture, just as the multiculturalists also subverted culture. It is an attempt to repackage U.S. global hegemony into categories acceptable to post-liberal populist identitarianism. It subverts the true nature of civilization, which is rooted in heterogeneity, pluralism, regional nuance, and history, to forge a new weapon for global primacy. But in a kind of multi-world, as they have called it, peace is not achieved by imposing a single civilized standard from Washington or Brussel