In 1956, the news that Nikita Khrushchev had recounted the crimes of Stalinism in a ‘secret’ speech provoked widespread shock and intellectual paralysis across the Soviet bloc. The Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg was among those “shaken” by it, not because he was unacquainted with some widely known facts about Stalinism but because these had been uttered “by the first secretary of the party”. For Ehrenburg and many others compromised by a broken system, the confession forced a destabilising question: What made us suppress what was long obvious?

Many in the free world today face a similar reckoning. The earthquakes of recent weeks – beginning with Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro, his threats to Europe over Greenland, ongoing strangulation of Cuba, and the lurid revelations of predation in the Epstein files – have confronted an Anglophone elite with a reality they either ignored or actively denied.

Hannah Arendt wrote that if the fundamental problem of postwar intellectual life after 1918 was death, then after 1945 it was evil. Today, the fundamental problem is complicity: reckoning with our acquiescence to a political system that suddenly appears criminal. These shocks all expose something rotten beneath the surface of liberal respectability: how elites participate in atrocity while maintaining prestige; how institutions supposed to safeguard justice in fact protect the powerful and exploit the vulnerable; how mass consent is secured through careful distribution of access and silence. The names in those Epstein files – political leaders, corporate titans, academics and cultural impresarios – are shocking because their continued authority and uninterrupted careers make undeniable what we have known but perhaps refused to fully concede: that the moral vocabulary of the US-led liberal international order became a cover for domination and kleptocracy.

The Epstein outrage and Trump’s demolition of American prestige have alike led the collapse of enforced silence. Mark Carney’s admission at Davos that the US-led order had passed was applauded by the very Atlanticist elites who championed it for decades. Trump’s obscenity has made the system impossible to defend with the usual pieties. That these same commentators were unmoved by Biden’s sponsorship of genocide shows what actually troubles them: not the order’s concealed violence, but the loss of its dignified facade. It is now a scramble to salvage reputations amid general collapse.

The geography of these recent revelations is not incidental either: it’s a short hop from Epstein’s island to Caracas, a reminder, much like Trump’s threats to Greenland, of how Washington treats territories outside the sanctuary of that same order, subject to extraction, interference, or outright seizure. Trump's “America First” slogan merely makes explicit the credo that has long driven US power in this zone of impunity.

Aimé Césaire observed that fascism became objectionable to Europeans only when it unleashed in Europe the brutality they had inflicted on the “inferior” peoples of Asia and Africa. Such insights are verified today at dizzying speed by the contrast between European alarm over Greenland and official indifference to a loudly proclaimed campaign of extermination against Palestinians. Western leaders still smilingly pose for pictures with wanted Israeli war criminals.

For decades after 1945, and especially after 1989, a powerful myth took hold: that all societies, whatever their starting points, were converging on a Western-style modernity. This was a metaphysical assertion more than it was a geopolitical claim. The US-led liberal international order functioned not just through military and economic power but through the management of the political imagination. Dissent from this consensus, the suggestion that societies might modernise along different paths, and that American power was neither benevolent nor inevitable, was treated as a kind of intellectual heresy.

The passing of this illusion reveals something crucial about elite complicity. It was never just about individual moral failures but about institutions and networks organized around a teleology that placed Washington at the end of history. Those who dared to counter these orthodoxies were marginalised, their warnings dismissed as anti-American radicalism or naive utopianism. The machinery of complicity and elite preservation worked precisely by policing acceptable thought, insisting that there was no alternative to Anglo-American models of democracy and capitalism.

Now that trajectory has revealed itself as a fiction. The old chroniclers and bards of Atlantic power are struggling to reposition themselves but lack the categories to comprehend a world no longer organised around what Perry Anderson once called “the civilisation of the OECD”. This is why the task of understanding our moment cannot be left to them. Many came of age in the triumphalist moment after 1989, when the ‘End of History’ seemed self-evident, and have spent three decades mistaking this fable for immutable truth. They have been generously remunerated for their conformism, but it has rendered them incapable of clear-eyed analysis. These bewildered centrists can only blurt out prophecies of doom or fantasise about recuperating the liberal order in some form, all the while losing ground to an insurgent far right offering more brutal forms of domination.

The question of complicity is not primarily about assigning individual blame. It is about understanding how systems of power secure participation and allocate benefits and burdens in ways that make resistance feel impossible or even unthinkable. The Epstein network functioned through networks of complicity. Lawyers won favorable legal outcomes, prosecutors offered lenient deals, academics accepted donations, politicians maintained ties, and associates refused to question what was going on. Each individual decision, perhaps understandable in isolation, together formed a protection racket.

The same is true of our relationship to the US-led liberal international order, as can be seen most clearly in Gaza. We are not all equally complicit or responsible for Israel’s genocide. But we are all implicated in systems that require us to not fully register certain realities, to maintain forms of ignorance, and participate in rituals of denunciation that leave underlying structures of western impunity intact.

“All of the western nations are caught in a lie,” James Baldwin warned in 1963. “The lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and the west has no moral authority.” Those caught in this lie can no longer sustain it. What do we do with this now undeniable knowledge?

We are now in a world wholly emptied of the moral and spiritual meanings once generated by American narratives of universal progress. We must make it habitable for future generations and confront its injustices. This requires more than critique. It requires the construction of new intellectual and cultural infrastructures capable of making sense of a post-American world; not from nostalgia for what was lost but from recognition of complexity we have been freed to see. It requires acknowledging our own complicity not as paralysis but as the beginning of genuine thought.

“Something extraordinary is happening,” a student told Ehrenburg in 1956. “Everybody is arguing – and moreover, absolutely everyone is beginning to think.” Today, millions are arguing and starting to think about what their own visions of the future should be. They find themselves in a geopolitical reality no longer defined by stabilised blocs and familiar divisions, confronting a world whose multiplicity and heterogeneity can no longer be forced into a single story of inevitable western convergence.

History will be made increasingly outside the West, conforming to none of the rational designs posited by intellectual frameworks originating in a relatively small and uniform part of the world.

Our task is to participate in this dialogue without pretending to escape complicity, to build new forms of solidarity while admitting our implication in systems of oppression, to envision futures that do not replicate the violence of the past while registering how deeply that past has shaped our present capacities for imagination. This is the work that confronts us: the difficult practice of learning to think and act without the guarantees and certainties that made our complicity possible.