As we enter the New Year, the international outlook is dire. A new conflict has broken out in the Red Sea. Ukraine's  situation is not looking good. Worse for us in the West, the rest of the world is not on our side any more. South Africa and Brazil have strongly distanced themselves from the West over Israel. They did not support us over Ukraine either. Nor does India. 

Lack of global support is one of the reasons why one western sanctions against Russia are not working. There are enough countries willing to help divert goods to Russia, or buy Russian oil. The US semiconductor ban on China is not working either because the US administration underestimated the intelligence of Chinese engineers. 

It is not hard to detect a pattern here. The big ongoing western delusion is the idea that the rest of the world thinks we are just wonderful and wants to be like us. Our version of liberal democracy topped the global popularity charts after the fall of communism. That lasted for a decade and ended for good somewhere around the time of the global financial crisis.

The West is currently embroiled in four gigantic battles: parallel proxy wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and soon, maybe in the Taiwan Strait; the fight against climate change; re-industrialisation; and the preservation of the liberal open society at home. We are not doing great on any of these four fronts right now. At most, I reckon, we can do two out of the four. My own preference would be the preservation of liberal democracy and on supporting technological innovation to help us reduce carbon emissions, as an alternative to the imposition of unworkable targets. 

We can no longer afford to act as the world's policeman. As for re-industrialisation, forget it. It would be better for us to forge strategic alliances with other parts of the world, like Latin America. This is what China did when it invested in Chilean lithium mines. Unfortunately, the EU overplayed its hand in trade negotiations on the so-called Mercosur agreement by trying to force its own environmental standards on them. The countries of Latin America have now pulled out of the talks - effectively killing this 23-year old project. The age of big trade agreements is over. The world is retreating into competing trading blocks. 

The West is also coming under attack from the inside. The Right is in the ascendance almost everywhere. Donald Trump has just taken a first big step to becoming the Republican Party's presidential candidate. 

I have sympathy with Bernie Sanders, who said in his interview in the Guardian that the underlying problem was "a belief that the government is failing ordinary Americans". This, in a nutshell, is what is happen all over the West. Governments are not solving problems. In the past, they did mot either, but the circumstances were more propitious. When economic growth is 3 per cent, as it used to be in 1980s and 1990s, and when levels of inequality were lower, many problems sorted themselves out. When you grow, there is enough money to go around - even to do multiple things at the same time. But when you stagnate, and inequality is high, an increase in financial aid to Ukraine comes at the expense of a railway that you are not building at home. Welcome to a world of zero-sum politics.

Incumbent liberal governments are in trouble everywhere: Joe Biden is in acute danger of being defeated in November. Rishi Sunak will soon be forgotten too. Perhaps the biggest surprise is Olaf Scholz. He started out well, and since has become Germany's least popular chancellor in memory because his government has no strategy to counter Germany's fast progressing de-industrialisation. In the Netherlands, the party of Mark Rutte, the liberal Dutch prime minister, was defeated by Geert Wilders' right-wing Party for Freedom in last year elections.  

The deep issues the west is failing to address are growth and  inequality. The backlash against immigration is a consequence of this failure. It is not the deep cause. We used to complain that the tax policies of the Thatcher era gave rise to inequality. They did, but this nothing compared to what happened since. In the late 1990s, the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, started to bail out the financial markets by cutting interest rates. Western central banks have since stepped up the support for financial markets through programs of quantitative easing in which they purchased government debt at unprecedented quantities. At the same time, governments imposed austerity to compensate for the central bank's financial bonanza. That combination turned into an inequality Doomsday Machine.

The prevailing attitude was best captured a comment from Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank. He said he would do "whatever it takes" to save the eurozone from the onslaught of financial investors. 

It has become fashionable among western politicians to use variants of that expression. Lord Cameron, the foreign secretary, said the UK would support Ukraine for "however long it takes". The political reality is that we can no longer make such promises. The west will continue to support Ukraine for as long as a political majority wants it. Support has already ended in the US. It will probably continue in Europe this year, but not indefinitely because there is simply not enough money to go around.

The West's collective affliction is best described as a lack of strategic focus. This sounds almost like the medical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. As the US National Institute of Mental Health informs us, humans afflicted with ADHD have trouble concentrating. They have a short attention span, and often act without thinking.