by Dr. Shahridan Faiez
AT the Munich Security Conference on Feb 16, 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a speech that was less a diplomatic overture and more a colonial manifesto.
His audience was deliberate: a nervous transatlantic ruling class searching for a new imperial mission. And Rubio gave them one: a “new Western century” built on market capture, strategic coercion, and the quiet burial of the so-called rules-based order.
It was the first public articulation of a post-liberal, openly imperial grand strategy. Leaders in the Global South should pay attention.
The colonial playbook has been reopened. Rubio’s language – “Western civilisation,” “our markets,” “no time for politeness”- echoes the 19th century’s great carving exercises.
The ‘Great Game’ saw Britain and Russia treat Central Asia as a chessboard, with local populations as disposable pawns. The 1884 Berlin Conference sliced Africa into colonial fiefdoms without a single African present.
Sykes-Picot (Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot) in 1916 amputated the Middle East with a ruler, its scars still bleeding today. And the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 severed the organic unity of the Nusantara – splitting peoples, trade routes, and histories into artificial colonial compartments whose legacies still shape Southeast Asia today.
Rubio’s “new Western century” is the same logic, upgraded: digital supply chains replace gunboats, financial coercion replaces direct rule, and AI-driven influence operations replace missionary propaganda.
The objective is identical – to ensure the Global South remains a resource colony, not a rule-maker.
That same week at Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared the international order “ruptured.” He admitted the “rules-based order” was always a partial fiction – the strong exempt themselves while the weak comply.
His warning was unambiguous: “If we are not at the table, we are on the menu.”
But here is what the West does not want you to remember: it has a weak underbelly.
For decades, the Global South was told that resistance was futile – that sanctions, military threats, and institutional pressure would always break any nation that defied the Western order.
Iran proved otherwise. For over 40 years, Teheran has faced the most sophisticated economic warfare in modern history: crippling sanctions, asset freezes, diplomatic isolation, covert sabotage, and multiple campaigns for regime change.
The West threw everything at Iran. It did not collapse or capitulate. Iran built indigenous defence industries, developed ballistic missiles, forged regional alliances, and created alternative financial mechanisms.
It learned to absorb pain and convert it into resilience. The West’s underbelly is exposed every time a country like Iran refuses to break.
Sanctions fatigue sets in. European allies defect. Public opinion in the West tires of endless confrontation.
The United States has spent decades trying to “fix” Iran, and today Iran remains standing, more formidable than ever.
If a nation of 85 million with a fraction of Gulf oil wealth can outlast the combined might of Nato’s financial arsenal, what excuse does the rest of the Global South have?
The West is powerful but not omnipotent. Its power relies on the belief that resistance is futile. When nations refuse to kneel, the imperial machine hesitates, divides, and often retreats.
Enter former Indonesian President Megawati Soekarnoputri. Drawing on her father’s 1955 Bandung legacy, she has issued a direct counter-call: organise a Second Bandung Conference.
Her diagnosis is precise – neocolonialism has not ended; it has mutated. A united Global South, she argues, must build its own table, not beg for scraps from the Western one.
Megawati’s warning is the political immune system the Global South desperately needs. Without it, Rubio’s “new Western century” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
With it, the Global South can replicate Iran’s resilience at a continental scale.
Can the Global South prevail? Yes – but only if it wakes up. Today’s West is weaker, internally divided and constrained by deeper structural headwinds.
The Global South holds the demographic majority, the fastest-growing economies, most of the world’s critical resources, and – crucially – the historical memory of colonial oppression.
It has institutions: BRICS+, the African Union, Asean, the Non-Aligned Movement’s residual architecture. If aligned, these can rewrite financing, trade, and security on fair terms.
But many leaders still hedge, still wait for Western permission, still believe that “strategic autonomy” means sitting quietly. That passivity is precisely what Rubio is counting on.
A Second Bandung Conference would be a strategic counter-mobilisation: a forum to coordinate alternative payment systems bypassing SWIFT, joint currency arrangements, dispute resolution mechanisms, and a unified position on UN Security Council reform.
It would signal that the Global South is no longer a passive theatre of great-power competition. Iran proved that one nation, properly organised, can outlast the empire.
Imagine what 100 nations could do.
* The writer is chairman of Citizens International, a non-governmental organisation based in Penang dedicated to promoting internationalism, peaceful coexistence and global cooperation for a better world
