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Has the West Lost It? A Provocation, by Kishore

Mahbubani
A useful ‘gift’ to western elites comes in unfortunate wrapping

Chinese president Xi
Jinping and US president Donald Trump: two leaders of a new bipolar world order? © Reuters

Review by Joseph Nye JUNE 3, 2018 41

Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s distinguished former

ambassador to the UN, is well known for writing books
designed to needle western readers. He even subtitles this new
book, “a provocation”. That is a pity, since his desire to
provoke skews his analysis and diverts attention from the good
advice he provides. His new book is “intended, ultimately, as a
gift to the west”, but unfortunately, the packaging gets in his
way.

The west — or some caricature of it — is an easy target for Mr

Mahbubani, while China gets a free ride. For example, is it
really the case that “western minds” do not understand that
“now it is in their strategic interests to be prudent and non-
interventionist”? Or that western elites “display little humility”
when they write in the pages of the New York Times or the
Financial Times?
Is it true that China, which rejected a 2016 Law of the Sea
tribunal regarding its claims in the South China Sea, “is happy
to live in a world dominated by multilateral rules and
processes”? And is Chinese president Xi Jinping really an
exemplar of “rational good governance”, despite the fact that
he tore up his forerunner Deng Xiaoping’s reform that set term
limits on Chinese leaders?

According to Mr Mahbubani, in the early 21st century history

“turned a corner, perhaps the most significant corner
humanity has ever turned”. For most of history, China and
India were the world’s two largest economies, but because of
the industrial revolution they were displaced by Europe and
America for 200 years. As I have argued, the return of Asia is
one of the two great power shifts of this century — the other
being the information revolution that started in Silicon Valley
in the 1960s (and which receives scant attention here).

In 'Has the West Lost It?', Mr

Mahbubani offers a version of
history that no 'western
historian has put across'

Mr Mahbubani is correct about the recovery of Asia, but it

began not with China and India but with Japan. Not only did
Japan use western industrial tools to defeat imperial Russia in
1905, but Japan remains the world’s third largest national
economy (using current exchange rates).Yet when Mr
Mahbubani argues that the “emerging seven” economies have
outstripped the G7 in contributing to global growth, Japan is
treated as part of the west, not Asia. Only three of his
“emerging seven” are in Asia. It is odd to characterise Russia as
emerging.

Moving to the US, Mr Mahbubani offers a “brief post-world

war II version of history that no major western historian has
put across”. It is also a distorted version.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the US had about a fifth

of world gross domestic product, but in the aftermath of the
second world war, which strengthened the US economy while
devastating others, the US had nearly half of world GDP. As
other countries recovered and grew, partly as a result of US
policy, the American share returned to about 25 per cent.
President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser
Henry Kissinger interpreted this rebalancing as a decline and
that belief paved the way for the Nixon doctrine and opening to
China in 1971.

In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton helped China enter the

World Trade Organization. This policy is now regarded as
controversial, but it was not the myopic resistance to China’s
rise that Mr Mahbubani suggests when he writes that “no
major western figure has had the courage to state the defining
truth of our times”.

Where Mr Mahbubani is correct is in his diagnosis of the

hubris that some Americans succumbed to after the collapse of
the Soviet Union. The US was not a global hegemon before
1991. In a bipolar world, US military power was balanced by
Soviet power. When the USSR collapsed, the unipolar
temptation proved too strong and the way was clear for foolish
interventions as in Iraq. He is also correct that the US
president Donald Trump “is clearly ignorant about the world”,
although, ironically, Mr Trump has been critical of past
interventions.

Mr Mahbubani rightly concludes that it is not inevitable that

China will lead the world or that the past 200 years of western
domination will be replaced by two centuries of Asian
domination. He is also correct that the west needs to learn to
share with “the rest”. We should heed his advice, despite its
unfortunate packaging.

The reviewer is a professor at Harvard University and author

of ‘Is the American Century Over?’

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