From the Garden to the Forest!
Europe Facing a Post-Hegemonic World
(Translated)
Al-Rayah Newspaper - Issue 603 - 10/06/2026
By: Engineer Wissam Al-Atrash

In a world in which strategic certainty is eroding and America’s influence is declining, Europe presents itself today as a major economic power that wants interfere in every international matter, but the cultural anatomy of the Western geopolitical mindset shows that Europe is an aging demographic power, walking on fragile, uneven ground. The Iranian crisis not only revealed the limits of Western deterrence, but also exposed the fragility of the European project itself: a continent that fears war with America, refuses to move under the umbrella of NATO, fears peace on China’s terms, fails to deter Russia, is unable to achieve food, energy and military independence, and at the same time realizes that it no longer has the keys to the international order, that it once contributed to building.

The issue of Iran has turned into a revealing mirror of Western inferiority complex and European compound weakness. While threats related to international shipping, cyber wars, and agents of regional influence are escalating, Europe is content with political condemnations and limited defensive moves, without the ability to build an independent deterrence strategy or impose its own geopolitical vision. The reason is not a lack of military power or economic resources, but instead the absence of a unified geopolitical will within the continent itself.

European capitals fear that any large-scale clash with Iran will lead to a double explosion: a stifling energy crisis, and the collapse of the last remnants of fragile nuclear understandings. However, the deeper fear lies elsewhere; Europe realizes that any major confrontation in the Gulf will rededicate its complete security dependence on America, at a time when it is trying, at least in theory, to build what French President Emmanuel Macron calls “European strategic independence,” even whilst Poland and the Baltic states in particular cling to the American umbrella.

This internal discrepancy makes independence more of a slogan than an actual project. Moreover, the Old Continent is stuck between the hammer of American power, and the anvil of the Chinese rise: America is pushing its allies towards sharp alignment and open confrontations, while China offers massive economic partnerships conditional on increasing geopolitical silence. Between them, Europe finds itself lacking the ability to make an independent sovereign decision, especially in the Middle East where energy, security, trade, and sea lanes intersect.

However, Europe's crisis is not only geopolitical, but also civilizational. The Western political mindset, despite all the rhetoric of modernity and human rights, is still moving within a mental framework that views the world divided between a center, that has the right to define order and legitimacy, and peripheral actors that must accept compliance or containment. The European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief, Josep Borrell, expressed this arrogant view with shocking clarity on 13 October 2022, when he stated, “Europe is a garden. We have built a garden... Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden... The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.”

This was not just a diplomatic error, but instead an intense expression of a Western strategic unawareness that views itself as the bearer of civilization in the face of the chaos of others. From here, it is possible to understand the way in which Europe and the West in general deal with Iran, and with the non-Western world: either direct military intervention when the balance of power allows, or systems of sanctions, deterrence, and blockade when war becomes costly. In both cases, the implicit assumption remains the same: the West monopolizes the definition of legitimacy, while the rest of the world is required to submit to rules that it did not even participate in formulating, while the Jewish entity continues the path of destruction in the region.

However, the world is changing towards disengagement from the international order in its current form, as the violation of international law by America and its protégé, the Jewish entity, has become the catalyst that accelerates the course of these global changes. Iran, like China, Russia and other regional powers, no longer views the West as the sole center of the international order, but instead as a force that can be exhausted, circumvented, or balanced with alternative alliances. This is why Western sanctions no longer achieve the same decisive results as before, especially with the rise of parallel economic and financial networks led by Asian powers and blocs such as BRICS.

Europe is aware of this shift, but is afraid to fully acknowledge it. On the one hand, it needs the American military umbrella, and on the other hand, it depends economically on markets, energy, and supply chains coming from Asia and the Middle East. Therefore, Brussels moves within a narrow space of hesitation. It is neither capable of waging an independent strategic confrontation, nor is it psychologically and politically prepared to accept a world after Western hegemony. Outside the European Union, Britain found a wider space to move in search of at least pain relief for the economic bleeding, as it rushed to conclude a trade agreement, described as historic, with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

Europe has become a force that fears more than it initiates. It fears disruptions in energy and supply chains, waves of immigration, the growing ratio of Muslims in its societies, the rise of the populist right, its lag in the field of artificial intelligence, and the loss of the historical privilege it has accumulated over centuries of economic and colonialist control. Even the rhetoric of European values is sometimes used as an attempt to maintain symbolic superiority in a world ruled by the law of the jungle, and changing more rapidly than Western elites can comprehend.

The Iranian dilemma has revealed the crisis in Europe, which has become afraid of its shadow. However, the crisis goes beyond Europe and Iran together. What we are witnessing today is a gradual collapse of the moral and political center of the contemporary international order.

America runs the world with the logic of power and interests, and China is reshaping the global economy and brutal capitalism with the logic of silent influence, while Europe lives in a state of existential anxiety between the two parties. As for the Global South, it has begun for the first time in decades to refuse to be satisfied with the role of being the arena over which empires battle.

The era of unipolarity has ended, but the world has not yet succeeded in building a stable and just multipolar system. The chaos we are experiencing now is not a new international order, but instead a global strategic vacuum within which powers compete that possess the tools of power, but lack a comprehensive civilizational vision.

Hence, the real question is no longer how the West will respond to Iran? Instead, can the world produce a new perception of international relations outside the duality of hegemony and chaos? Is there an alternative capable of reformulating customs, systems and laws away from the products of Epstein’s civilization?

Perhaps the current moment, despite its danger, is a historic opportunity to give birth to a different international scale, and a new civilizational project, that redefines the meaning of security, cooperation, and independence in the twenty-first century. A project that is not based on bullying, plunder, and extortion, nor on subjugating peoples through the logic of sanctions or proxy wars.

The world that tramples on human dignity day and night, does not suffer from a crisis of power, but instead from a crisis of meaningful purpose. Therefore, the Ummah of Islam is called upon more than ever to be a partner in producing the international order on the basis of Islam, by restoring its ruling authority and state, the Khilafah Rashidah (Rightly Guided Caliphate), because it is the only one capable of restoring to human its humanity and dignity.