In my opinion, “the West” is (nearly) a synonym of “the imperial core”. I have met a lot of non-white people who live in “the West” and embody a lot of what I hate about “white people” (the selfishness, for example). My point is that apart from people who actively fight against it (most leftists, for example), people who live in the West in general adhere to, follow, promote, etc, Capitalist Ideology. This is less the case for those living in the Global South (in my experience).
Yes, both whiteness and "the West" are primarily political terms and who is counted varies. I think on the flip side, Japan is sometimes counted as Western.
Sometimes I use westerners, sometimes white people, and sometimes just Anglos (when talking about monolingual English speakers). For me each term covers a slightly different (though overlapping) group of people/idea