Has the West lost it? A provocation.

Reading Kishore Mahbubani’s  book, Has the West lost it? it’s like taking a cold shower. It is intelligent, thoughtful, creative and provocative. The West’s two-century epoch as global powerhouse is at an end, he says. A new world order, with China and India as the strongest economies, dawns. How the West will respond to the new world order? The biggest gift the West gave to the Rest of the world was the power of reasoning, writes Kishore Mahbubani, professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and a diplomat in the Singapore diplomatic service for over thirty years. It led to an enormous improvement in the human condition. It led to a world that absolute poverty has fallen dramatically. Almost every child gets vaccinated and go to school. It led to a world where the prospects of a major world war are practically zero. The biggest truth of our times is, in objective terms, that the human condition has never been better, and that is because of the gifts of the West to the Rest of the world. And that’s why what happens to West matter to the Rest. But somewhere the West went wrong, says Kishore Mahbubani. In the past three decades, the West made three critical strategic mistakes. The first it was in 1990. It was the end of the Cold War and the End of History, according to Fukuyama's famous essay. This essay “did a lot of brain damage to the West”, argues Mahbubani. “It provided the opium to justify a complacent autopilot strategy at the precise moment when the West  should have switched to its competitive engines.” Because that was also the moment that China and India were waking up. The second strategic mistake it was in the year 2001. 9/11 happened in 2001, but this is not the only important-or the most important-thing that happened that year. China joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001, entering one billion new workers to the world economic system. It was inevitable that jobs would be lost in the US and Europe, says Mahbubani. Trump and Brexit happened because the West didn’t pay attention to China’s admission to WTO, he argues. The third fundamental mistake is more recent, in 2014. In 2014 China became the world's largest economy, putting USA in second place. Again, nobody in the West paid much attention. Even today, the West has not realised that the world has changed, fundamentally. And when fundamental changes happen, you have to adjust.

Has the West lost it? Is a call to the West to wake up and pay attention to the Rest. Kishore Mahbubani says that the Western intellectuals have become so arrogant and confident that they know the world better than anybody else that “they have lost the art of listening to the Rest.” This attitude does not earn respect of the rest of the world. The time has come for the West, says Mahbubani, “to abandon many of its short-sighted and self-destructive policies” and pursue a completely new strategy towards the Rest. He offers three suggestions, described as the 3M strategy, of how to create a better world for the West. The three Ms refer to Minimalistic, Multilateral and Machiavellian. The Minimalistic approach is a call to the West to do less rather than more. Stop intervening so much in the affairs of other countries, in the Middle East, for example. Mahbubani's advice for the West is to step back. The second approach is Multilateral. We live in a smaller, interdependent and interconnected world. That’s why we have global problems, like climate change, global terrorism, etc, etc. That’s why we need multilateral institutions and processes. To provide the best platform for hearing and understanding the views of everyone in this interconnected world. So the next time the West wants to get on its moral high horse and intervene in another non-Western country it should first convene a meeting of the UN General Assembly, says Kishore Mahbubani. Hardeep Singh Puri has also argued that  the UN have an important role to play in the new world order. At the  40th Anniversary Session of UN General Assembly, 1n 1985, Margaret Thatcher said:

“The United Nations is only a minor held up to our own uneven, untidy and divided world. If we do not like what we see there’s no point in cursing the mirror, we had better start by reforming ourselves.”

The world needs more multilateralism not less. Where we are today? The West is doing exactly the opposite. If Donald Trump continues in his way, he is going to destroy one of the most important organisations we have, the World Trade Organisation. Perhaps it’s time for the EU to draw up a Plan B. The last M-word is Machiavellian. It is a provocative approach. Machiavelli is a controversial figure, he often is seen as a personification of evil. But as the great British philosopher Isaiah Berlin reminded us in his classic essay, The question of Machiavelli, Machiavelli’s key goal was to promote Virtù (virtue). His purpose was to generate a better society that would enhance the well being of its citizens. You have to achieve to right goals and sometimes you need to use different means to achieve the right goals, Machiavelli argued.  What basically Kishore Mahbubani suggests, is that you need to know what your long-term interests are and stick to them and not be led by ideology.

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China's and India's scientific achievements have been improved dramatically over the past few decades. China's research and development spending in fields of genetic engineering, quantum computing and communications,brain science, artificial intelligence, agriculture has also grown rapidly. It’s now second only to the United States. China’s quest for global scientific leadership is driven by its top political leader, President Xi Jinping who encourages scientists to "boldly innovate, learn from the world's most advanced science, and put new ideas forward." Please, read this book, especially if you live in the West. It is time to wake up, the world has changed.