The Problem With Third Worldism
A new way of understanding America’s enemies obscures more than it reveals.
Remember Islamofascism?
For many neocons at the height of the War on Terror, this was the term of choice to describe America’s enemies. Compared to the alternatives, the label had much to recommend it. As William Safire noted in the New York Times in 2006:
Islamic radicalism seems long, bookish and weak, because a radical need not be any kind of terrorist…[and] militant jihadist is redundant if you take jihad to mean “holy war.” Plus some Muslim scholars translate the Arabic word as “spiritual struggle,” from jahada, “to strive,” and besides, jihad is too unfamiliar to many English speakers to register quickly as a label.
(Another option, “Terror,” was tried out for long enough to give its name to the entire enterprise, until enough people remembered the U.S. government’s remarkably poor track record fighting broad concepts like Poverty and Drugs.)
Islamofascism, though, sounded strong and unmistakably evil. It recognized the terrorists’ particular religious motivations, while attributing to them the vast power, reach, and organizational competencies of Hitler and Mussolini. And it suggested that, like their 20th-century antecedents, the Islamofascists could be brought to battle and cleanly dispatched by the decisive application of hard power. In other words, it made them nails for the hammer of the U.S. military.
Today’s hawks are looking for something similar. Particularly in Latin America, where operations against Cuba seem perpetually in the offing, there is a need for a neat label, a master concept that can both rationalize regime change and bundle the bad guys in Havana with those in Managua, Tehran, and wherever else bad guys are powwowing.
After casting about for some time, they seemed to have finally found one fit for purpose: Third Worldism.
In his X post rolling out a new departmental report on the Cuban Menace, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the island’s government as “the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States.” The concept is invoked several times in the report itself—a clunky, rambling document overwhelmingly concerned with events that occurred during the last century—but never defined. But it is clear from context that this term is meant in the sense articulated by the analyst and commentator Zineb Riboua. (Helpfully, Riboua herself took credit for Rubio’s word choice.)
Riboua did not invent the phrase “Third Worldism,” nor is she the first to describe it as an ideological tendency. (It is in some sense coeval with the expression “Third World,” which was coined in the early ’50s to describe the largely undeveloped countries that stood outside the American and Soviet blocs). But she has repopularized the term, developing a novel interpretation that has become quite influential on the interventionist right.
Here is Riboua’s own explanation of the concept, from a piece published earlier this week:
The central claim of the Third-Worldist cosmos is that the fundamental division in world politics runs between a dominating North and a dominated South, that this cleavage precedes and explains every other political fact, and that every conflict resolves into a single story of colonizer and colonized. What the ideology fundamentally demands, but also delivers in a way that is hypnotic, is a totalizing moral hierarchy in which victimhood confers legitimacy and power confers guilt, a formula that can be applied to any dispute anywhere, indefinitely.
Third Worldism, then, is a kind of Nietzschean ressentiment, the bitter envy and anger of the planet’s losers directed against the successful societies of Europe and North America—plus, of course, Israel. Indeed, Israel is a major part of this story. Riboua claims that “anti-Israel politics” offers Third Worldism its “core axis of moral meaning;” longer term, she argues that “Israel has always been the entry point in the longer argument against the United States.” The global backlash against Israel is essentially unrelated to specific criticisms of its actions in Gaza (or the West Bank, or Lebanon, or Iran); rather, it is an ineluctable consequence of a deep-seated resentment and a fetishization of victimhood.
Actually, nearly everything and everyone we don’t like can be explained by reference to Third Worldism. Mojtaba Khamenei, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and Zohran Mamdani are all playing on the same team and actuated by the same motives: to throw down Western civilization and seize its spoils for themselves. Our adversaries have no positive vision, and hatred for our success is the lodestar of their conduct.
The aforementioned State Department report shows what this analytical framework looks like in action. In its concluding pages, the document offers a striking characterization of Cuba:
These various threads can only be understood through the prism of the Cuban regime’s ideological foundation, imbued by its founder with the singular goal of conquering the neighboring United States. Since 1959, Cuba has been—and without fundamental, radical reforms, will always be—less a nation-state than an all-encompassing intelligence and subversion operation, focused around its existential revolution against the United States.
You might think that a country mired in grinding poverty, unable to feed its people or keep the lights on, might have other concerns; or that such a country’s leaders—corrupt, repressive, and sclerotic as they are—might worry more about clinging to power than overthrowing the richest and most powerful society in human history. Apparently not!
At its core, “Third Worldism” relieves us of the burden of thinking. An incredibly complex and difficult world is turned into a just-so story. We don’t have to addle our brains trying to assess whether, for instance, Israeli interests might diverge from those of America, or learning about the contours of Iranian or Cuban society. Nor do we have to engage our domestic political opponents in earnest debate or attempt to persuade the American people of our views. It is enough to know who is on which side. (In this way, it resembles the liberal fixation on “democracies” and “autocracies.”)
The Third Worldists hate us for who we are, just as the Islamofascists of yore hated us for our freedoms. With such antagonists, negotiation or compromise is impossible. The only solution is to win.
Of course, as we found out during the War on Terror—and are tragically discovering again in Iran—this is a very dangerous way to think about reality. The Islamofascist monolith was a myth; those enemies who did exist (and there were some, obviously) turned out not to be so powerful, threatening, or competent as we had supposed. What was more dangerous, what was vastly more costly in American blood and American treasure, was the response we undertook.
As a theoretical framework, Third Worldism is just as ridiculous as the outlook that got us into Iraq and Afghanistan—and potentially just as ruinous.
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