Has the West Lost It?: A Provocation

by Kishore Mahbubani

  The re-legitimization of the UN is therefore another simple step away from the current flawed and arrogant Western strategies. There is no better opportunity to do this than now. In a somewhat miraculous move, the UN elected António Guterres as UN Secretary-General in 2016. It was a miracle because he is shrewd and experienced. Even better, he is European and comes from a NATO state – Portugal. If the West cannot work with a staunchly pro-Western Secretary-General like him to revive and strengthen the UN, who can it work with?

  Yet, altruism never works in international affairs. The West will only change course and work to strengthen, not undermine, multilateral institutions when it concludes after hard-headed analysis that it is in its long-term interests to do so. This is why the third prong of a new Western strategy has to be based on a Machiavellian approach. What approach will best serve the long-term global interests of the West?

  Machiavelli is both one of the best-known and least understood Western figures. In the popular imagination he is seen as a personification of evil. Yet, most serious philosophers regard him as one of the wisest thinkers of all times. The great philosopher Isaiah Berlin reminded us in his classic essay that Machiavelli’s key goal was to promote virtù (‘virtue’). His goal was to generate a better society that would enhance the well-being of its citizens.71

  In our rapidly changing world, the West needs to learn more from Machiavelli and deploy more strategic cunning to protect its long-term interests. Strategic cunning is as old as the hills. Two thousand five hundred years ago, the legendary Chinese strategist Sun Tzu advised, ‘Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.’ The most difficult part of this piece of advice is ‘Know thy self’. Few in the West are aware of how quickly the Western share of global power has shrunk, as documented in the opening charts.

  A general going into a battlefield with an army twice the size of his opponent’s will adopt one strategy. However, if his army shrinks to half the size of his opponent’s and he maintains the same strategy, he is committing a strategic folly. This is what the West is doing. Its global power is rapidly shrinking, but it proceeds on autopilot.

  The West on Autopilot: Europe and America Do Not Face the Same Challenges

  To put it bluntly, there may have been a time (perhaps at the end of the Cold War) when 12 per cent of the world’s population could afford to impose demands on China (20 per cent of the world’s population), anger the Islamic world (20 per cent of the world’s population), ignore the demographic explosion in Africa (15 per cent of the world’s population) and humiliate Russia (the world’s second largest nuclear power). That time has gone. The West will have to learn to be as strategically cunning as Mao Zedong (a good student of Sun Tzu). Mao succeeded in battle after battle against the Kuomintang and the invading Japanese by fighting with the primary enemy and setting aside the struggle against the secondary enemy. It was brilliant of him to invite Nixon to visit Beijing when his primary concern was a war with the Soviet Union.

  The reality that the West has to deal with is that the primary strategic challenge for America is not the same as the primary strategic challenge for Europe. For America, it is China. For Europe, it is the Islamic world at its doorstep. Facts are facts. Yet each year, when the best Western strategic thinkers converge at the Munich Security Conference in February, not one Western strategic thinker can state the most obvious and important thing: American and European interests have diverged. The election of Trump has brought this divergence out into the open. It may well go down as one of Trump’s biggest contributions to world history. Chancellor Merkel said in May 2017, ‘The times in which [Germany] could fully rely on others are partly over. I have experienced this in the last few days. We Europeans really have to take our destiny into our own hands.’72

  Both America and Europe would be better off if they were to become more strategically cunning in defending their respective interests. For Europe, it is clear that the primary threat is not going to come from Russia. Unlike during the Cold War, no Russian tanks threaten Europe. Russia is now a secondary challenge. Hence, Europe should make peace with Putin. Nor is Europe threatened by Chinese Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Instead, China’s economic development is good for Europe’s interests. Why? Europe’s primary threat is spillover instability from the Islamic world. As long as North Africa and the Middle East are populated with struggling states, migrants will come into Europe, stirring populist parties. However, if Europe helps North Africa to replicate the successful economic development stories of Malaysia (described earlier) and Indonesia, Europe will have built a strategic bulwark against unmanageable migrant flows. In short, it is in Europe’s strategic interest to import the East Asian economic success stories into North Africa. Hence, Europe should work with China, not against China, to build up North Africa.

  Fostering the economic development of North Africa is not an idle dream. The per capita incomes of Algeria and Tunisia were higher than those of Malaysia and Indonesia thirty years ago (see Figure 4), yet Malaysia and Indonesia have grown more rapidly in the past three decades. What Indonesia and Malaysia have accomplished today, Algeria and Tunisia can accomplish tomorrow. Young Algerians and Tunisians should be sent to East Asia to study. Europeans should feel a desperate sense of urgency in dealing with North Africa, because, behind North Africa, an even bigger demographic explosion is coming. Africa’s population will become as large as Asia’s by 2100. Then there will be 4.5 billion people in Africa. How will an ageing population of 450 million Europeans deal with this demographic explosion? Europe must become cunning and focus on its own existential challenge.

  The Europeans also need better leadership. Trump and his advisers are right when they say that Europeans have been free-riding on America by not paying their fair share for NATO. What they don’t add is that Americans have taken advantage of this European strategic passivity to hijack European states and get them to support various American initiatives that are against long-term European interests. Geopolitics is, at the end of the day, about geography. The Americans have destabilized Europe’s geographical neighbourhood.

  Figure 4. GDP per capita, 1980–9073

  The Europeans have not been cunning enough in protecting their own strategic interests in the Middle East and Russia. The Americans can walk away from the disastrous consequences of destabilizing Ukraine; the Europeans cannot. The Europeans were technically right in saying that Russians violated international law in Ukraine. Yet, as Ambassador Puri – the representative of the world’s largest democracy, India – has said, ‘It can be argued that given the impunity with which international law and state sovereignty were being violated all around, the Russian step was merely one – which the West now protests against the most – in a long list, including Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Syria and Yemen.’74

  Most countries in the world are bewildered by the American insistence on humiliating Russia. They are even more bewildered by European complicity. Trump and his team were initially showing strategic common sense by not antagonizing Putin, yet few European leaders have shown their support for this common sense, confirming once again the lack of strategic cunning in Europe. Senator McCain is right to rail against alleged Russian meddling in American elections. Western logic teaches us that McCain’s complaint implies a universal moral rule: no country should interfere in any other country’s elections. Would McCain agree to a similar rule for America not interfering in any other country’s elections? And if America exhibits double standards in such behaviour, would Europe point that out?

  America is an ocean away. It can and should walk away from its multiple engagements in the Islamic world to focus on its primary challenge: China. Future historians will wonder why America showered geopolitical gifts upon China as it was rising. In the early 2000s, in the most rapid phase of China’s development, America decided to invade Iraq and get mired in a swamp. And how did this strategic folly come about? It happened because America reacted emotionally, instead of rationally, to 9
/11.

  The Islamic world is not America’s primary strategic challenge. It is a secondary challenge. Hence, it should make peace with the Islamic world, not rile it. With the shale revolution, America doesn’t even need oil from the Gulf. Paradoxically, its naval fleet in the Gulf protects oil supplies to China, as China depends greatly on oil imports from the Gulf region. America has also demonstrated strategic stupidity in dealing with Iran. It has allowed the painful memories of the 1979 occupation of the American embassy in Tehran (which is now almost forty years ago) to trump cunning strategic calculations. Iran will never be a threat to America. Instead, it could enhance America’s strategic options. One of Obama’s biggest gifts to America was the nuclear deal with Iran. Trump should build on it by establishing diplomatic relations. The best way to transform Iranian society is to send thousands, if not millions, of American tourists to the country. In 2012, Christopher Thornton wrote in The Atlantic that ‘a 2009 World Public Opinion poll found that 51 per cent of Iranians hold a favourable opinion of Americans, a number consistent with other polls, meaning that Americans are more widely liked in Iran than anywhere else in the Middle East.’75 Shrewd American geopolitical policies should take advantage of this. Instead, foolishly, Trump is trying to derail this Iran agreement. The US Congress unwisely imposed new sanctions on Iran in 2017.

  The big danger that America faces if it wakes up and begins to deal with China is that it will make the same mistakes that the Soviet Union made when it dealt with the US. The Soviet Union saw America as a military competitor. In fact, America was its economic competitor, and it was the collapse of the Soviet economy that led to America’s victory. Similarly, for America, China is an economic competitor, not a military competitor. The biggest mistake that America could make is to step up its military deployments in East Asia to balance a resurgent China. The more that America spends on military expenses, the less effective it will be in the long run in dealing with a far stronger and bigger Chinese economy. In 2015, America spent 3.3 per cent of its GDP on defence; China spent only 1.9 per cent.

  This American tendency to outspend the rest of the world also has other negative consequences. The old adage says that if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Consequently, American strategic behaviour has been distorted. Brawn replaces brains. Strategic cunning is rarely deployed in American responses to global crises.

  In 2017, Trump experienced his first series of crises with North Korea. Kim Jong Un carried out tests and fired missiles. America reacted in a Pavlovian fashion. It sent a naval fleet led by USS Carl Vinson to be parked near North Korea. Rex Tillerson announced that the era of ‘strategic patience’ was over. Did these military responses work? Did they change North Korean behaviour? No.

  Kim Jong Un knew better than anyone that America didn’t have a military option. A military strike against North Korea (à la Syria) would have led to an artillery barrage against Seoul. A million people could have died, and the resulting war would not have been between North Korea and America; in a replay of 1950, China would have got involved.

  There were other options America could have deployed. There is one major historical fact that most American policy-makers do not seem to know. Diplomatic immunity was invented over 2,000 years ago to enable diplomatic envoys to visit enemy capitals without getting their heads chopped off by angry kings and queens. Hence, if North Korea is an enemy, the logical response is to establish diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. However, since Washington DC is often shrouded in political correctness, it is the only capital that believes that establishment of diplomatic relations is an act of approval. Actually, it is supposed to signal a lack of trust among nations. As a consequence, America under-uses its diplomatic opportunities.

  If it were to utilize diplomatic tools, it would first create a strategic alignment of interests between China and America on the Korean peninsula. How would this be done? Professor Robert MacFarquhar has advised that America could provide China with a strong assurance that a reunified Korean peninsula would be a neutral country (like Austria after the Second World War). All American troops and bases would leave a reunified Korea. And would this be a strategic defeat for America? Or would this be a cunning move by America to create a fiercely independent country on China’s doorstep? Just as history and geography made Vietnam fiercely independent of China after American troops left, the same would happen to Korea. In short, strategic cunning can be more effective than military brawn in solving complex geopolitical challenges.

  Sadly, this reliance on military brawn is not confined to the right wing in America. The left-wing liberals also feel a need to demonstrate their hawkish credentials. Hillary Clinton demonstrated this as Secretary of State in advocating the bombing of Syria. Even Obama felt a need to step up the bombings of Afghanistan and Pakistan with unmanned drones. Quite remarkably, the only time when the liberal intelligentsia praised Donald Trump was when he bombed Syria after an ostensible chemical attack by President Assad on 6 April 2017. America needs to engage in deep reflection on why American strategic behaviour relies more on bombs than brains. Ironically, China may be privately happy that America focuses on military solutions while it focuses on economic development.

  In theory, China will win in economic competition, because it has a much larger population: 1.37 billion, as opposed to America’s 321 million. Yet, America has outperformed every other economy in the world by being able to attract the best and brightest of the 7 billion people on Earth. This is why many of America’s greatest universities, schools and companies are led by American citizens born overseas. The H1B visa, which allows US companies to employ foreign nationals in certain occupations, is part of America’s strategic answer to China’s population advantage. Yet it is precisely at the moment when America needs more H1B visas to deal with China’s economic competition that America is reducing the number of H1B visas.

  All this is a result of the lack of long-term strategic cunning. This is why the Machiavellian dimension is so critical if the West is to successfully adjust and adapt to its new position in the world.

  A More Dangerous World

  My Asian, African and Latin American friends will be troubled by my call to the West to be cunning: they will fear that that I am trying to prolong Western domination of our global order. That’s not my reason for calling for more strategic cunning. I am doing so because a naïve and ideological West is dangerous. The failure of the West to make major strategic adjustments is responsible for many of the mishaps the world has experienced recently. The world will become more unstable unless the West radically changes course.

  Democracies are not designed to take on long-term challenges. They can respond to immediate threats, like Hitler or Stalin. However, even if the threat is going to be faced by the grandchildren of the voters, voters will not vote for a politician who says: ‘Let’s sacrifice now to save our grandchildren.’

  Western thinkers are right to speak about the many virtues of democratic political systems. They are also right in saying that democracy is the worst form of government, except for the alternatives. It is also true that because of their many checks and balances, democracies have demonstrated long-term resilience. However, the West is wrong in believing that democracy is a necessary condition for economic success. If it were, China could not and should not have succeeded. But it has. This is also why many in the West deeply resent China’s success. It undermines many key pillars of Western ideology.

  The shortcomings of democracy are dominating Western societies at a time when these societies have to make major strategic changes. And failures to make strategic changes at the right time do lead to disasters.

  Many of the problems the West is encountering now are the result of the strategic misjudgements of yesterday. Chas Freeman, a distinguished former American ambassador, has made the same point:

  The risks the world now faces were not (and are not) inevitable. They are the product of lapses of statesmanship and failures to consider how o
thers see and react to us. The setbacks to America’s ability to shape the international environment to its advantage are not the result of declining capacity on its part. They are the consequence of a failure to adapt to new realities and shifting power balances.76

  A few examples will drive home the point. In early 2017, Europe was startled by President Erdoğan’s efforts to use Turkish populations in Europe to vote in favour of constitutional changes to entrench his power. All the blame was heaped on Erdoğan, one man. But how much of Turkish anger was a result of being insulted by Europe for decades? Turkey applied for EU membership in 1987 and never got in. Austria, Cyprus, Malta, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia applied later and did. You don’t insult a country and not face consequences. Even more stupidly, the Europeans kept Turkey out and allowed Turks in (who want to vote for Erdoğan). It would have been wiser to keep Turks out and admit Turkey into the EU (with restrictions on free movement of labour). The jobs generated inside Turkey would have kept Turks at home.

  Similarly, it was a folly for Europe to launch the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 1962. It enriched a few European farmers. It impoverished millions of African farmers, especially in North Africa. Why are millions of Africans trying to get into Europe illegally? Because Europe lost its strategic common sense. By not exporting jobs to Africa, it designed policies that would inevitably import Africans into Europe.