THE slim 100-page Penguin paperback Has the West Lost It? can be read in two sittings.
Professor Kishore Mahbubani argued the West can avert a potentially catastrophic geopolitical clash by astute accommodation.
The engine of economic growth returns to the East. It is futile to resist this tide of history.
“Minimalism, Multilateralism and Machiavellian” is Kishore’s prescription for the “West” to deal with the rising “Rest”.
In the post-Cold War context, that refers primarily to the face-off between the United States and China, with the Russian bear growling and India in the background.
The dicey rebalancing needs wisdom to manage.
MACHIAVELLIAN GUILE
By “minimalism” Kishore counsels non-interference in conflicts except as part of a synchronised effort to restore peace, through multilateral consensus forged at the United Nations.
He urged reinforcement of multilateral institutions, for a robust framework of rules that will constrain all superpowers tempted to solo adventurism.
That is the Machiavellian “strategic cunning” he urged the declining West to leverage while it still can, through multilateral engagement, and rules-based behaviour, to lock the rising superpower into the same universal code.
History is cycling away from the West. Nothing can stop or reverse that. Kishore’s book is a wake-up call.
China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001. The Chinese entering the global labour force was a game-changer.
Western corporations embraced lower costs and higher profits. The Western working class was abandoned, which intensified inequality, and provoked distrust of ruling elites. Populism triggered Trump and Brexit.
MISGUIDED WARS
The 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks in 2001 freaked the US into the “War on Terror” and rash interventions in other countries.
Kishore pointed out that the Islamic world is not the primary enemy.
China is what the US should be focusing on as the prime economic competitor.
There is strategic confusion. US adventurism was funded by the “extraordinary privilege” of printing more dollars through persistent budget deficits, without gold reserves to back up.
The greenback is the de facto currency of world trade. Globalisation entrenched that “extraordinary privilege”, which will be difficult to sustain if the US global trade dominance declines.
THE US SQUANDERS GOODWILL
When I raised the cluelessness of the average American about international matters, Kishore replied, “The American public is ignorant and disengaged from geopolitics. On the other hand, the American Security Establishment is ignorant and fully engaged.”
The US squanders its wealth and goodwill on needless wars abroad.
World history has reached a point of major economic and military disruption.
He refers to the “aberration” of the brief 200 years of Western colonisation.
From AD 1-1820, China and India dominated global economic wealth.
The McKinsey historical chart of World GDP, maps that starkly.
Another chart of national wealth from 1980-2022 measuring PPP (purchasing power parity) cited by Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, shows China and India restoring their natural global leadership.
That will revert the balance of world power to what was, as the “new normal”.
Kishore does not see this as necessarily a zero-sum game.
CHINA MODEL FOR GROWTH?
The break-up of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, in Kishore’s reckoning, led to a smug triumphalism for the US and its European allies.
Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated essay, “The End of History?” further compounded that hubris, rendering the West “brain dead” in Kishore’s view. They fell asleep on Fukuyama opium.
Fukuyama declared the end of the Cold War as confirming the ideological superiority of Western liberal democracy and free market economics, which he argued, will be the default global benchmarks for governance.
In the heady euphoria following the collapse of the Soviet threat, Fukuyama indeed seemed the final word.
The rocket-rise of China however, stumped the Fukuyama thesis. China showed the fastest developmental acceleration as Deng Xiaoping dumped the failed communist economic orthodoxy. It worked because of — not despite — an authoritarian, distinctly illiberal one-party state, with scant regard for human rights.
China’s meteoric rise is a seductive model for the developing worlds in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with large populations living in abject poverty.
The new social contract Deng defined was not about ideology but state accountability to deliver the basics.
China raised 800 million citizens out of poverty. That is miraculous.
EFFECTIVE RULERSHIP
I expressed reservations about promoting Machiavellian ideas to liberal Western thinkers.
Kishore says that is a popular misreading of the man. Serious philosophers, he avers, like Isaiah Berlin, understand that Machiavelli equates rulership with the public good.
Machiavelli gained fame as an evil plotter, when he advised the Medici prince on rulership, rejecting the idealised concepts of nobility and justice, for a crass “ends-justify-the-means” power principle. He prioritised destroying enemies, to focus on effective rulership.
Kishore says his book is a gift to re-position the West for the shifting geopolitics.
Kishore was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Michelle Obama is the other personality elected this year.
The writer, a Malaysian who resides in Hong Kong, is the publisher of ‘Asia Magazine’