When the Cold War ended, the Western world breathed a sigh of relief due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. So much so, Western political thinkers, such as Francis Fukuyama, declared that was the "end of history."
During the Cold War, although both the Atlantic and the Warsaw Pacts occasionally designed and supported coup d'états in a number of countries, they still had to legitimize their military interventions and occupations through a principle of rightfulness. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has no longer been required to legitimize its military occupations. They have occupied Afghanistan and Iraq with impunity and dragged these two countries into wholesale political chaos that has lasted for two decades. Their future still looks unstable and bleak.
As opposed to their ostensible mission of spreading democracy, Western states had, in fact, been colonialists for 300 years. During this historical period of so-called savage capitalism, Western colonialism spread from Africa to Latin America and Asia. During the last century, they seemed to be occupied essentially with the colonization of Islamic countries.
In European lands, it is undoubtedly true that there exists operating democracy and economic welfare. Within most of the countries in the rest of the world, however, poverty, exploitation, hunger, ignorance and pro-Western dictators reign.
Now serving as tourist sites in Zanzibar and Ghana in Africa, former prisons that used to keep slaves bear witness to one of the most dramatic periods of world history. Hundreds of thousands of slaves died of hunger and torture in those prisons, while they waited to be transported by ships. Today, the corrosion of their iron sculptures represents the eternal decomposition of their poor bodies.
Old tales narrate alien creatures with malformed bodies. In particular, one of their ears is told to be much bigger than the other. According to these tales, when they go to sleep, they put their bigger ears on themselves like a blanket. The Western states resemble these malformed creatures. Democracy is their bigger ear that serves to cover all of their cruelties and injustices. Yet, it is all the more difficult to hide the ugly truth in our current information age.
Each European country still holds on to the exploitation of at least one colony in Africa or Asia. Even the kings of those countries do not seem to deserve the same respect the Europeans paid to animals on their continent. The humanitarian discourse of Western states turns out to be mere hypocrisy in the face of the history of colonialism in Africa.
In the 1960s, we could still have talked about the globalization of Western democracy, thanks to the rise of the European left. In those years, Western states replaced colonialism with trade and believed that they could protect their national interests without militarily occupying other countries.
Since the U.S. has emerged from the Cold War unrivaled, they have seen no harm in returning to the period of primitive capitalism. Apart from trade wars waged against a number of countries, the U.S. administration has condemned Russia and Iran to embargos, simply because Russia re-emerged on the world stage as a rising power and Iran has long adopted expansionist foreign policy behavior.
Recently, American President Donald Trump openly desires to overthrow the elected government in Venezuela. While the whole world sees Trump's recklessness, Western states have returned to the period of savage capitalism by switching from exporting democracy to exporting coup d'etats and dictatorships.