Civilisations rarely collapse because they are conquered. They collapse because they lose the will to defend themselves. That was James Burnham's warning in Suicide of the West. In his 1964 book, Burnham argued that the West was not primarily threatened by external enemies or economic failure. It was being destroyed from within by its own dominant ideology - what he called liberalism. In Burnham’s usage, liberalism was not simply support for free markets or limited government. It was a broader worldview characterised by universalism, egalitarianism and a deep reluctance to assert power or defend Western civilisation as superior to others. According to Burnham, this ideology had produced a profound loss of confidence. Western elites increasingly viewed their own civilisation through a lens of guilt and criticism, while treating non-Western cultures with a mixture of romanticism and moral deference. At the same time, the West’s managerial elite had become more concerned with administering decline than with preserving the cultural and political foundations that made Western success possible. Burnham was particularly scathing about the liberal tendency to dissolve hard distinctions - between truth and opinion, between civilisation and barbarism, and between friend and enemy. Without the willingness to make such distinctions and act upon them, he believed, no civilisation can long endure. What makes the book striking is its pessimism. Burnham did not believe the process was easily reversible. Once a civilisation loses the will to defend itself and begins to treat its own inheritance as a source of shame, recovery becomes extremely difficult. Suicide of the West reads like a warning that was largely ignored.