This column has previously written on how, in the mid-1980s, Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov warned the West that the ultimate weapon of modern warfare was not the nuclear missile, but the systematic corruption of the target nation’s mind. Bezmenov detailed "active measures". These were long-term, state-sponsored psychological operations designed to alter the perception of reality in an enemy nation. Today, the West faces an unprecedented crisis of internal division, marked by the rapid institutionalisation of radical social justice frameworks, strict equity rather than merit in hiring, and university admissions, and aggressive climate policies. While these concepts are presented domestically as moral progressions, a more rigorous analysis reveals something else: that these ideas function, whether by organic radicalisation or malicious external amplification, as engineered mechanisms of ideological subversion, designed to systematically dismantle the economic, institutional, and strategic competitiveness of the West.

The most quantifiable assault on Western dominance occurs under the banner of "climate justice", and radical environmentalism. In a globalised economy, industrial superiority relies entirely on access to abundant, cheap, and reliable energy. Over the past two decades, Western nations have aggressively adopted policies aimed at rapid deindustrialisation, penalising domestic fossil fuel production, and subsidising intermittent renewable energy sources.
This shift operates as a form of asymmetric economic containment. While the West voluntarily restricts its industrial capacity, geopolitical adversaries like China, India, and Russia face no such self-imposed constraints. Consequently, Western climate policy has achieved two net-negative outcomes: it has outsourced core manufacturing capabilities, and it has forced the West to rely on supply chains – such as lithium processing and rare-earth element mining – that are controlled by hostile regimes. What is framed as environmental stewardship is, in functional reality, the voluntary surrender of energy security, and economic sovereignty.

Simultaneously, the foundational pillar of Western innovation – strict meritocracy – is being systematically dismantled by "woke" institutional frameworks. For centuries, the West’s competitive edge in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and military leadership, was driven by objective excellence.

However, the modern shift from equality of opportunity to "equity" (equality of outcome) has institutionalised the lowering of standards. In corporate boardrooms, elite academic institutions, and national security agencies, diversity quotas, and identity-based metrics are increasingly prioritised over raw competence, and cognitive talent.

When fields vital to survival, such as aerospace engineering, medical research, and cyber defence, subordinate objective capability to ideological compliance, innovation inevitably stagnates.

While Western universities debate the inherent political biases of mathematics and lower testing requirements for entry, adversaries like China and India maintain hyper-competitive, merit-driven educational pipelines designed to produce world-class engineers. By abandoning meritocracy, the West is actively compromising its own human capital, ensuring a future where it can no longer out-innovate its global rivals.

This internal rot is not accidental; it is actively weaponised by third parties operating in the digital domain. By using automated bot networks, funding, and targeted disinformation campaigns, foreign adversaries systematically boost the most radical voices on both sides of Western culture wars – on both the left and the right – in pursuit of drowning out the pragmatic centrists. They “hyper-target” sensitive fault lines, such as race, historical guilt, and wealth inequality, to ensure that Western societies become increasingly divided, and thereby paralysed by perpetual internal conflict. A nation consumed by grievance, historical self-loathing, and endless internal debate is entirely incapable of projecting unified geopolitical power or identifying external existential threats.

Ultimately, the adoption of these destabilising ideologies represents the fulfilment of the subversion model warned about in an earlier Mahan essay. By transforming climate policy into economic self-sabotage, replacing meritocracy with institutional incompetence, and allowing foreign adversaries to dictate the parameters of public discourse, the West is actively engineered toward decline.

The true danger of modern active measures is that the target population becomes the primary driver of its own destruction, viewing its civilisational decay as a form of moral enlightenment. If the West is to retain its competitive dominance in an increasingly hostile multipolar world, it must urgently decouple genuine social progress from ideological subversion, restoring the foundational values of objective truth, unapologetic merit, and economic realism before the final phase of normalisation becomes permanent.

What about South Africa? It is an interesting case study among emerging markets in having adopted the full buffet of destructive climate ideologies, to its massive disadvantage. This makes it virtually unique among its peers. The consequences have been to stall the economy, maintain very high levels of inequality, and drive divisive race and class debates around that. In the process, the African National Congress (ANC) has lost its majority, and thereby the control the former liberation movement once commanded over a piece of immensely valuable geo-strategic real estate, and now the broader society around that is fragmenting too. Maybe that was all accidental, and the ANC simply suicidally adopted what was popular as policy in elite leftwing Western society. Maybe there was more to it.

Alfred Thayer Mahan was a United States Navy officer and historian in the 19th and 20th centuries and is considered by some to be one of the most important American strategists. His spirit writes an occasional column for The Common Sense.