This is why the Rest should wish and hope for a more cunning and calculating West to manage the next thirty years. Here are some key economic forecasts about the world in 2050. In 1950, the American-European (UK, France and Germany) share of World GDP was 43 per cent.77 By 2050, it will have shrunk to 24 per cent.78 The population figures are even more stunning. As Swedish physician and epidemiologist Hans Rosling has documented, in 1950, Europe’s share of the world’s population was 22 per cent, while Africa’s was 9 per cent. By 2050, Europe’s share will have shrunk to 7 per cent, while Africa’s will have exploded to 39 per cent. If Europe continues on autopilot, or sinks into despair or racially and religiously motivated ideological approaches to declining power in population shifts, this will be an act of collective suicide. It will also be hugely damaging for the Rest, as Europe and America flail around.
The explosive expansion of Western power into every nook and cranny of the world has done both good and evil (including the genocidal disappearance of many peoples), yet the 88 per cent of the world’s population outside the West have absorbed a great deal of Western wisdom. They can and are forging ahead and building their own futures.
By a remarkable accident of history, the most distant Asian society from Europe – Japan – became the first non-Western society to modernize, through the Meiji Reformation in the 1860s. A century later, more Asian societies emulated Japan. All this has led to the great and unstoppable Asian resurgence. Now, through another accident of history, the virtues of modernization are poised to enter Arab, Turkish and Persian societies, because all these societies are genuinely amazed by the spectacular success of Asia, from China to India, and keen to replicate such success. It is not an accident that the custodian of the two holiest Islamic sites, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, decided to make a month-long trip to Asia, instead of Europe, in early 2017 as his first overseas tour. By looking East instead of West, these Islamic societies will slowly transform and modernize.
The West can accelerate a two-way street of learning between Western and Eastern Muslims by quietly terminating its two-century-long policy of interfering in Islamic societies. A good start, as indicated earlier, will be to stop all bombing of Islamic countries. After a few painful bumps in the road, the Arabs, Turks and Persians will reach various mutual adjustments. Europe’s shining example of the culture of peace, which has been replicated in the more diverse Southeast Asia, will slowly seep into the Middle East too. This is the most significant advantage that will come from a strategic and cunning withdrawal of Western power from this region.
Few Western minds can conceive of a peaceful Middle East. Sam Huntington, one of America’s most thoughtful analysts, famously declared that ‘Islam has bloody borders.’ 9/11 only accentuated the belief that Muslims are inherently violent. If this were true, I should live each day in extreme fear. Singapore is a small, predominantly Chinese state surrounded by two large, mostly Muslim states: Malaysia and Indonesia. Despite having had multiple problems with both of them over the decades, the chances of Singapore going to war with either state is practically zero today. Why? All three countries have learnt that wars don’t make sense. We are focused on economic growth and working together to promote it. The sort of sensible decisions that Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia have made are being replicated everywhere. A Middle East region with less Western meddling will ultimately be a predominantly peaceful region.
Similarly, the 1.3 billion people of India (who will become 1.66 billion by 210079) will benefit from a graceful withdrawal of Western power. One of the manifest absurdities of our time is that the UK and France remain as ‘permanent members’ of the UN Security Council (UNSC), passing mandatory resolutions that the rest of the world has to comply with. They are only there because of their nineteenth-century prowess, not their twenty-first-century promise. Indeed, in 2045, on the 100th anniversary of the UNSC, if the UK and France remain permanent members and India is out, the UNSC would have lost all its credibility. No serious country would then comply with its resolutions.
As the Western share of the global population and of global power recedes, the West should calculate that it is in its best interests to have a stronger rules-based order. One way to do this is to strengthen, not weaken, the UNSC. The best way to strengthen the credibility of the UNSC is for the UK to give up its seat to India and, as I argued in The Great Convergence, for France to share its seat with the EU.80 What I am advocating here is plain common sense for long-term European interests. Yet, it shows how far away the Europeans are from strategic cunning that the most obvious solutions for their long-term interests are neither conceivable nor mentionable in European discourse.
Western humility would be good for the 1.4 billion people in China, too. The biggest act of strategic folly that America could commit would be to make a futile attempt to derail China’s successful development before China clearly emerges as number one in the world again. Barack Obama avoided this temptation from 2009 to 2016. Trump is unpredictable. It is truly dangerous that there is a significant group of thinkers, policy-makers and activists in Washington DC who are quietly plotting and planning various ways of derailing China. Such activity can only give credence to the hawkish voices in the country and result in the emergence of an angry nationalist China.81
Today, under Trump, America is focused on military competition. He has announced that he will increase the US naval fleet from 272 ships to 350.82 This is strategic folly. A more cunning America would focus on reducing its navy, not expanding it. And would the world collapse? Would trade routes be threatened? And if trade routes suffer, would America suffer more or would the world’s number one exporter, China, suffer more? In short, some strategic common sense would encourage America to be more prudent than expansionary in its military spending. It is an even bigger folly for Trump to announce a nuclear arms race, as nuclear weapons remain the only force that could destroy the world.
Instead of igniting an arms race with China, America should heed the cunning advice given by Bill Clinton when he spoke at Yale in 2003. This is what he said:
If you believe that maintaining power and control and absolute freedom of movement and sovereignty is important to your country’s future, there’s nothing inconsistent in that [the US continuing to behaving unilaterally]. [The US is] the biggest, most powerful country in the world now. We’ve got the juice and we’re going to use it … But if you believe that we should be trying to create a world with rules and partnerships and habits of behaviour that we would like to live in when we’re no longer the military political economic superpower in the world, then you wouldn’t do that. It just depends on what you believe.83
Bill Clinton was bravely advising his fellow Americans to begin preparing for a world where America is no longer number one. It was brave for him to do so, as it is almost taboo in America to speak of America becoming number two (although it will inevitably become number two). So what is the best outcome for America when it becomes number two? The best outcome would be a number one power (namely, China) that respects ‘rules and partnerships and habits of behaviour’ that America could live with.
And what would be the best way to slip on these ‘handcuffs’ of ‘rules and partnerships and habits of behaviour’ onto China? This is where Bill Clinton was being cunning. He was advising his fellow Americans to slip the handcuffs of ‘rules and partnerships’ onto themselves. Once America had created a certain pattern of behaviour for the world’s number one power, the same pattern of behaviour would be inherited by the next number one power, namely China. The good news is that China, for its own reasons, is happy to live in a world dominated by multilateral rules and processes. Xi Jinping explained why in the two brilliant speeches he gave in Davos and Geneva in January 2017. Xi said, for example, in Geneva:
Economic globalization, a surging historical trend, has greatly facilitated trade, investment, flow of people and technological advances … 1.1 billion people have been lifted out of poverty, 1.9 billion people now have
access to safe drinking water, 3.5 billion people have gained access to the Internet, and the goal has been set to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.84
However, what Xi did not say is that China, unlike America, does not have a messianic impulse to change the world. If order abroad facilitates order at home, China would be happy. Hence, by following Bill Clinton’s cunning advice, America would be laying the foundation for a more orderly world.
A Better World – for Americans and Europeans
All these recommendations are based on a fundamental assumption that Western minds need to understand that, for over two centuries, they have been aggressive and interventionist. Now it is in their strategic interests to be prudent and non-interventionist. This will benefit the world, as outlined above. It will also benefit Western populations.
The West was the first civilization to break out of the clutches of superstition and ignorance that dominated the feudal eras of human history. The West also deserves the credit for carrying humanity to our current era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Yet instead of celebrating these achievements, Western populations are pessimistic and despondent. According to the 2017 Deloitte Millennial Survey, ‘Millennials in emerging markets generally expect to be both financially (71 per cent) and emotionally (62 per cent) better off than their parents. This is in stark contrast to mature markets, where only 36 per cent of millennials predict they will be financially better off than their parents and 31 per cent say they’ll be happier.’85 Similarly, according to the 2014 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, ‘Most of those surveyed in richer nations think children in their country will be worse off financially than their parents. In contrast, emerging and developing nations are more optimistic that the next generation will have a higher standard of living.’86
A less adversarial relationship between the West and the Rest will help to dispel the clouds of pessimism that now envelop Western societies. Erstwhile adversaries, like China and the Islamic world, will be seen as strong potential economic partners, not threats. When the global middle-class population explodes from 1.8 billion in 2009 to 4.9 billion in 2030,87 it will present new opportunities for the competitive Western economies.
There is no doubt that the Western elites failed to prepare their populations for the inevitable ‘creative destruction’ that flowed from China’s admission into the WTO in 2001. As a result, the elites have lost the trust of their populations. Martin Wolf described it well: ‘The elites – the policy-making, business and financial elites – are increasingly disliked. You need to make policy which brings people to think again that their societies are run in a decent and civilized way.’88
Fortunately, this problem can be solved. Many societies, from Sweden to Singapore, have devised various social safety nets to help the working classes handle the disruptions of globalization. The solution is not to close the doors to free trade. The theory of comparative advantage still holds true. Asia is rising because it remains committed to this theory. The Western elites need to regain their intellectual confidence and explain again to the masses how it works. To do so, however, they have to overcome their current bitter divisiveness.
Unfortunately, the current political environments in both America and Europe are not conducive to deep, long-term reflection. In theory, this reflection should come easily to the liberal and open-minded elites. However, on both sides of the Atlantic, they are now consumed by different kinds of civil wars.
America has never been as deeply divided as it has become since Trump’s election. Trump is clearly ignorant about the world. His constant emphasis on ‘America first’ is alienating. However, the liberal opposition is not making matters any better. None of the liberal bastions of thought are prepared to contemplate the possibility that they, too, may have been part of the problem.
The New York Times, for example, remains unrepentant. It takes no responsibility for failing to explain why so many working-class – especially white – Americans had become so disconnected with the messianic worldview of American elites. The elites clearly enjoyed the rich pickings they got from surfing on the globalization that America launched. They refused to see the pain that the same massive change had wrought upon the masses. There is one glaring statistic to sum this up: 63 per cent of Americans don’t have enough savings to cover a $500 emergency.89 In short, while America is wasting trillions fighting unnecessary wars and deploying unnecessary aircraft carriers, 200 million Americans live on the edge. This defies common sense.
Trump was not wrong when he advocated the goal of ‘America first’. This is what his people want. However, his methods of achieving this are totally flawed. If he cuts off America from global trade flows, he will deliver an ‘America last’. What America needs is a strong degree of bipartisan consensus on how to engage the world intelligently so that all Americans, especially working-class Americans, are better off. Instead, at a time when the country should come together, it has never been more divided, and it is badly divided because both sides are being ideological. If both sides were to become more Machiavellian in their calculations, they would agree on some obvious and fundamental things that America needs to do. However, to reach any such agreement, they have to understand the Rest better.
Unfortunately, any such understanding is undermined by American insularity. Every fortnight, my home in Singapore receives, by mail, a copy of the New York Review of Books (NYRB). It is probably the best-written magazine in the world. It is such a joy to read. But every time I pick it up, I wince when I look at the table of contents. Almost all the writers are Western. There are 4.43 billion Asians out of a global population of 7.12 billion people, and the NYRB apparently can’t find any Asian writers. Perhaps it cannot find ones who reinforce the Western Weltanschauung (‘worldview’). One of Asia’s best novelists is Amitav Ghosh. He told me that his relationship with the New Yorker, another great magazine, came to an end when he resisted their attempts to get his writing to fit into their traditional worldview.90
As long as liberal Americans believe that they have the most liberal minds in the world, they will never wake up and understand the closed mental universes they have boxed themselves into. Liberalism has created an attitude of intellectual superiority, especially towards the rest of the world. Most European intellectuals, who are more aware of their own troubled history and the damage that European colonization did to the world, do not share the messianic impulse of American intellectuals. Nonetheless, there is a similar reluctance to accept the new reality that Europe must also make structural adjustments to cope with a resurgent Rest.
So – Has the West Lost It?
The crux of the problem facing the West is that neither the conservatives nor the liberals, neither the right wing nor the left wing, understand that history changed direction at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The era of Western domination is coming to an end. They should lift their sights from their domestic civil wars and focus on the larger global challenges. Instead they are, in various ways, accelerating their irrelevance and disintegration.fn1
It is not inevitable that China will lead the world, even though it is inevitable that China will have the world’s largest economy. Nor is it inevitable that the past two centuries of Western domination of world history will be replaced by two centuries of Asian domination, even though it is inevitable that the Asian share of the global GDP will far surpass that of the West.
It is inevitable that the world will face a troubled future if the West can’t shake its interventionist impulses, refuses to recognize its new position, or decides to become isolationist and protectionist.
This is why this book is intended, ultimately, as a gift to the West. It reminds the West how much it has done to elevate the human condition higher than ever before. And it would be a great tragedy if the West were to be the world’s primary instigator of turbulence and uncertainty at the hour of humanity’s greatest promise. If this were to happen, future historians will be puzzled that the most successful civilization in human his
tory failed to exploit the greatest opportunity ever presented to humanity. A simple dose of Machiavelli is what we need to save the West and the Rest. Otherwise, the West really has lost it.
Notes
1 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/machiavelli/works/prince/ch25.htm
2 https://www.siemens.com/content/dam/internet/siemens-com/customer-magazine/2017/industry/february/other_assets/mckinsey-asia-and-the-new-infrastructure-opportunity.pdf
3 https://www.lrb.co.uk/2016/11/14/rw-johnson/trump-some-numbers
4 https://www.ft.com/content/1c7270d2-6ae4-11e7-b9c7-15af748b60d0
5 https://archive.org/stream/LeoStraussThoughtsOnMachiavelli_201411/%5BLeo_Strauss%5D_Thoughts_on_Machiavelli_djvu.txt
6 Isaiah Berlin, ‘A Special Supplement: The Question of Machiavelli’, New York Review of Books, 4 November 1971: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/11/04/a-special-supplement-the-question-of-machiavelli/ (accessed 6 June 2017).
7 https://newrepublic.com/article/77728/history-violence
8 Steven Pinker, ‘A History of Violence’, New Republic, 19 March 2007: https://newrepublic.com/article/77728/history-violence/ (accessed 28 November 2017).
9 Max Roser, ‘Proof that Life is Getting Better for Humanity, in 5 Charts’, published online at https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/12/23/14062168/history-global-conditions-charts-life-span-poverty
10 Peter Diamandis, Twitter post, 11 November 2016: https://twitter.com/PeterDiamandis/status/797119982224097281/
11 Johan Norberg, ‘Despite Many Obstacles, the World is Getting Better’, Guardian, 14 February 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/feb/14/despite-many-obstacles-the-world-is-getting-better
Has the West Lost It?: A Provocation Page 6