Recent events—the extrajudicial kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, by the United States; the illegal and unprovoked war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran; the unjust blockade of fuel shipments to Cuba; and, of course, the genocidal Israeli war against Gaza, with full US backing, has confirmed the reality of imperialism in our contemporary world.

If Western imperialism took the form of direct colonial rule from the European conquest of the Americas in the late 15th century until the mid-20th century, today it operates indirectly.

It now exerts economic, political, and cultural control over the global majority through persuasion, intimidation, threats, and intervention.

Even though the vast majority of the world has experienced formal decolonization, we remain subject to domination, particularly by the United States, through economic controls and political coercion.

This is precisely what President Sukarno referred to as neocolonialism at the 1955 Asian-African Conference, also known as the Bandung Conference.

Recently, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Iranian Foreign Minister Dr. Seyed Abbas Araqchi addressed separate international conferences, reflecting in their speeches two very different visions of how the world should be.

One was a grotesque display of imperialist ambition, while the other was a call for international order, respect, and peace.

Araqchi spoke at the Al-Jazeera Forum in Doha, held from February 7-9 of this year. He spoke about the Palestinians' right to self-determination, the need to uphold the highest standards of international law, and the importance of fighting against an order in which borders are temporary, sovereignty is conditional, and security is determined by military occupation.

He spoke in the context of the Israeli colonization of Palestine, but he could just as easily have been speaking about Venezuela or Iran. What the senior Iranian diplomat was calling for is the decolonization and de-imperialization of the world.

This comes at a time when the United States is working to consolidate imperialism and re-Westernize the world. This brings us to Rubio’s speech, delivered at the Munich Security Conference, a week after Araqchi’s speech in Doha.

Remember that Rubio was addressing Europeans. At the beginning of his speech, Rubio glorified the founding of the Americas, without mentioning at any point the genocide that European “discoverers” perpetrated against the Indigenous peoples.

Instead, he referred to the Christian faith as a sacred heritage brought from Europe by those who settled in what they called the “New World,” but which the Indigenous peoples knew as Abya Yala.

Rubio emphasized that “we are part of a single civilization: Western civilization. We are united by the deepest ties any nation could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our ancestors made together for the common civilization we have inherited.”

He went on to recount the great scientific and cultural achievements of Western civilization, without making any reference to the significant contributions of Chinese, Indians, and Muslims to the creation of the modern West, not to mention the European and American racism, misogyny, slavery, and colonialism upon which the modernization and industrialization of the West were based.

Rubio’s speech not only completely lacked multicultural sensitivity but also radiated xenophobia. He lamented having opened “our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our peoples.”

He glorified the bombing of Iran in June 2025, as well as the kidnapping of the president and first lady of Venezuela. Lamenting the anti-colonial movements that contributed to the decline of Western empires, Rubio called for the renewal and restoration of Western civilization to “build a new Western century.”

He referred to this as a five-century-long process. Western civilization had expanded thanks to the work of its missionaries and soldiers, colonizing continents and establishing empires. But the West began to contract after 1945.

Rubio explained to the audience in Munich that President Donald Trump and the United States wanted to collaborate with Europe to return to the era of Western dominance. For us in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this would be interpreted as a desire to re-Westernize us—that is, to reimpose Western modernity upon us.

The spirit that Rubio seeks to awaken among Europeans, the one that “sent ships to uncharted seas and gave rise to our civilization,” is decidedly imperialist. We fear that the recent US initiatives in Gaza, Venezuela, and Iran are a product of that spirit.

The reaffirmation of Western superiority and the expression of a desire to renew its dominant and imperialist role in the world likely reflect a perception of weakness and a fear of becoming a “faint and weak echo,” as Rubio put it, of its past. This is something the Third World, the global majority, and the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America must be wary of and avoid.

The anti-imperialist impulse has always been present, but it has alarmed the West due to certain changes and movements that have emerged in recent years.

These include the rise of the BRICS and the idea of dedollarization, regional realignments in the African Sahel that reject French and American control, the strengthening of ties between socialist states like China, North Korea, and Russia to counter Western dominance, and the Latin American pink tide—that is, the wave of political and governmental movements, leftist movements that emerged there from the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Iran’s firm anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist stance, and its staunch opposition to US interference in the affairs of West Asian nations, are part of global anti-imperialism.

The West, led by the United States, is therefore a declining hegemonic power. This is not only an objective reality, but also a perception shared by everyone, including Westerners. As long as it’s in decline, the West will fight to regain its glory and, in the process, will be reckless and bloody, driven by fear and growing insecurity.

We, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—our citizens, civil society movements, and governments—must decide which side of history to take.

Do we allow the erosion of international law and sovereignty, and the promotion of neocolonialism and imperialism, through active participation in this process or complicity through silence, or do we join the forces of anti-imperialism?

The time has come for us to consider these options.

* Syed Farid Alatas is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / Cubasi Translation Staff