The ‘Political West’ describes the combination of political, military and economic power that took shape after 1945 in the Atlantic region. This is a Washington-led alliance created during the first Cold War and shaped by cold war pressures. It is imbued with a logic of conflict designed to preserve the hegemony of the Political West in general and the primacy of the United States in particular. Following the end of the first Cold War, instead of dissolving into its constitutive elements, the Political West radicalised. In the absence of a peer competitor, it claimed to be the unique form of modernity towards which all other states and social systems should converge. This was universalism of a new type, although reminiscent of earlier religious forms (Catholic, Islamic). This is a secular universalism that in its very claims to be the dominant force in international politics eroded its domestic legitimacy and internal coherence. The values of high modernity endured in the Political West during the first Cold War, but after 1989 the radicalisation process accelerated the disintegrative tendencies associated with post-modernity. The more expansive the universalist claims of the Political West, the less coherent it became. This can be described as a slow-motion dissolution, as the social and political order eroded its own foundations. This was accompanied by the emergence and assertion of alternative models of social development and of international order, described in broad terms today as the consolidation of multipolarity and the rise of the Political East and a largely non-aligned Global South. By the second quarter of the twenty-first century the growing void at the heart of the Political West, the defection of the US from its own hegemonic order, and the escalating external challenges signalled the dissolution of the Political West and the emergence of new paradigms of international politics.