Has the West Lost It?: A Provocation

by Kishore Mahbubani

  By a curious coincidence, the two regions that seem to be an exception to this broad trend are the two regions that the West has meddled in the most in recent times: North Africa and the Middle East. Is the relative failure of these two regions a result of bad luck? Poor leadership? Flawed societies and cultures? Or Western meddling?

  Twenty-five years ago, I warned Europe that if it didn’t take better care of North Africa, boatloads of refugees would cross the tiny sea that is the Mediterranean. I wrote,

  If something goes wrong in, say, Algeria or Tunisia, the problems will impact on France. In the eyes of the North African population, the Mediterranean, which once divided civilizations, has become a mere pond. What human being would not cross a pond if thereby he could improve his livelihood? Through all previous centuries, men and women have crossed oceans and mountains to seek a better life, often suffering terrible hardship in the process.36

  It didn’t take a strategic genius to see this coming. Yet Europeans were shocked when refugees began to arrive from North Africa.

  It is therefore vital to stress here that the stories from North Africa and the Middle East (especially Iraq and Syria) that hog Western newspaper headlines are the sharp exception to a larger global surge of functional governance. As the Dean of a School of Public Policy, I saw daily how the appetite and capacity for functional governance has spread globally.

  The Global Explosion of Travel

  Functional governance can improve people’s living standards significantly in a lifetime. By the rule of 72,fn1 if a country grows at 5 per cent a year (and many developing countries are achieving this rate of growth), a country’s per capita income doubles every fourteen years. Hence, in the next thirty years, if most of the states grow at this rate (and the three most populous states – China, India and Indonesia – are at least likely to do so), the standard of living of a vast majority of humanity will quadruple in the next thirty years. This statistic, more than anything else, should occupy the thoughts and approaches of governments and rulers around the world.

  We can see the impact of higher living standards in the global explosion of travel beyond borders. A popular Western expression is ‘people vote with their feet’. More and more people are voting with their feet nowadays. They are voting with their feet to travel overseas. And they are also voting with their feet to return home. These are the global figures. In 1950, the world saw 25.3 million international tourist arrivals.37 In 2015, the number had hit 1.16 billion – a 45-fold increase. The current projection is that by 2030, thirteen years from now, the number could hit 1.8 billion.38

  International tourism is the ultimate luxury. You have to ensure that you have taken care of all your immediate needs and the foreseeable needs of your family before you can afford to spend a significant amount of money on international travel. Airfares and hotels are not necessarily cheap, but they are getting progressively cheaper in the era of budget airlines and Airbnb. After you have saved enough money for travel, you want to travel to safe places. Clearly, Afghanistan and Syria are not going to get tourists for a while.

  A common refrain of Western leaders is that the world is a dangerous place. George W. Bush said in 2006, ‘The American people need to know we live in a dangerous world.’ Ten years have passed since he said this. If he had been right, we should have seen a sharp reduction in international tourist flows over the past decade, especially since tourists tend to be risk-averse. They do not travel overseas to endanger their lives. Yet in the period 2005 to 2014, while the world was ostensibly getting more dangerous, the number of international tourists jumped from 823 million to 1.16 billion.39

  The story of tourist flows from China is particularly telling. The Chinese are voting with their feet in ever greater numbers. In 1980, when I first visited China, there were zero Chinese tourists going overseas. Only officials travelled overseas. By 2015, there were 100 million Chinese tourists. Why is this figure remarkable? Many in the West still see the Chinese people as suffering because they are ruled by a repressive and harsh communist regime. If this Western perception were true, would 100 million Chinese people be able to travel overseas freely? (The old Soviet Union, also run by a communist party, never allowed Soviet citizens to travel overseas.) And more significantly, would 100 million Chinese tourists return home freely if they were indeed oppressed? The inability to see the explosion of new personal freedoms that the Chinese people are enjoying means that the West is also unable to see that Chinese civilization is beginning to experience the most glorious period ever in its 3,000-year history.

  A similar renaissance will occur in many societies as we become a world with universal access to information. As a young poor boy in Singapore in the 1950s, I wanted to own the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I never fulfilled this dream. Today, most young boys and girls will eventually get access to the contents of an equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Sometime in the next decade or two, we will live in a world where over half the world’s population will have access to a smartphone, and smartphones are getting smarter and smarter. As recently as 1990, there were close to zero mobile phones in India.40 By December 2015, there were almost a billion subscriptions, though most of them were for ‘dumb’ phones.41 Today, India is the world’s second-largest smartphone market, with more than 220 million unique users.42 According to the 2016 Ericsson Mobility Report, Indian usage is predicted to nearly quadruple to reach 810 million smartphone subscriptions by 2021.43 That is only three years away.

  Just as India took a major leapfrog over landlines to provide universal access to all phones, it will take another major leapfrog over ATMs to create a cashless society by enabling smartphones to make payments. China is already ahead of America and Europe in doing this. Many of life’s little inconveniences disappear with the smartphone. The smartphone also helps explain why we are experiencing the greatest advancements of the human condition: leapfrog technology is a critical ingredient.

  Future generations will also identify another critical historical turning point in our time: the information revolution. For most of human history, access to education and information was limited to small groups of elites. Now it has become almost universalized, as primary education is reaching each child. All this is also spreading the culture of modern reasoning gifted by the West. With functional governance, reasoning and smarter, more comfortable populations, wars will continue to diminish, violence will become less frequent, and economies will continue to grow steadily. More clinics and schools will be built, children will have access to smartphones, and we will see the best-educated generation emerge. Humanity will be better-connected and more integrated than ever before. Historians will look back at our generation and thank it for propelling humanity towards the most promising era in human history. And they will, of course, wonder why we didn’t realize it was happening and adjust our policy approaches accordingly. This is especially pertinent for the West.

  Why Hasn’t the West Noticed?

  Few leading Western minds are aware of – or if they are aware, they are not focused on – this explosive improvement in the human condition over the past three decades. The West needs to engage in deep self-reflection. In so doing, the West will see more clearly how and why it needs to change course if it is going to keep itself safe and prosperous in the twenty-first century. As George Orwell wrote, ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’

  Honest self-reflection is never easy. As an amateur student of psychology, I learned from a very young age how prevalent self-deception can be. To break through the natural tendency to deceive ourselves, we have to deal with painful and uncomfortable truths. For example, few in the West will openly acknowledge that one key word explains why the West lost its way at the end of the Cold War: hubris.

  As the spirits of Western leaders soared at their great victory over the Soviet Union, they switched off all the signals that could have alerted them to other big changes. This is, after all, a normal human response to a great victo
ry. Fukuyama’s essay ‘The End of History?’ did a lot of brain damage to the West. It provided the opium to justify a complacent autopilot strategy at the precise moment when the West should have switched on its competitive engines. To clarify this point, let me put across a brief post-World War II version of history that no major Western historian has put across.

  After the Second World War, the West remained focused and competitive. Western Europe worked hard to revive economies devastated by the years of war. America woke up and focused intensively on the new Soviet challenge. Both North America and Western Europe enjoyed healthy economic growth rates in the 1950s and 1960s. America’s GDP grew at an average rate of 4.28 per cent, while Europe’s grew even faster, at 4.87 per cent.44 Even so, the United States was shocked when the Soviet Union became the first country to send a man into outer space. The United States ramped up its R&D investments to become the first country to land a man on the moon in 1969.

  Through the 1970s and 1980s, as the Soviet threat gained pace, with Soviet-supported invasions in Cambodia and Afghanistan, the West remained alert. However, some seeds of complacency were taking root. After the massive decolonization of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the middle of the twentieth century, there were some concerns that these newly independent countries would challenge the West. Indeed, there were strong and vibrant Third World leaders – including Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia and Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia. Yet, as these two decades progressed, it became clear that, with the exception of the ‘Four Tigers’, most Third World economies were failing. The idea that any of these economies, including China and India, could challenge the West was laughable in Western eyes. As the Singapore Ambassador to the UN in the 1980s, I experienced the Western smugness over its inherent economic superiority. Western diplomats dispensed advice with thinly disguised condescension to the 88 per cent of the global population outside the West.

  When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it provided a massive boost to the sense of superiority that the West had begun to develop in the previous two decades (building on its highly developed sense of superiority over the past two centuries). This is why both American and European intellectuals believed that, having won the Cold War, the West could afford to relax and enjoy its good fortune. Western civilization had reached the final peak of human achievement. Other civilizations would have to struggle and work hard; the West need not. Willy Claes, the former Foreign Minister of Belgium, said in the early 1990s that: ‘The Cold War has ended. There are only two superpowers left: the United States and Europe.’45

  Western Hubris

  This precise moment of maximum Western hubris coincided with the engines revving up in the rest of the world, particularly in China and India. China got going first, with Deng Xiaoping’s breathtaking launch of the Four Modernizations in 1978. But Tiananmen in 1989 reinforced Western blindness. It strengthened Western governments’ conviction that only their societies had found the magical formula for economic growth and political stability. Similarly, when senior Indian figures like Manmohan Singh and Montek Singh Ahluwalia went with their begging bowls to the IMF in 1990–91 to seek Western assistance in resolving a major financial crunch in India, the West’s dominance seemed obvious.

  Another event around the same time that prevented the West from changing course was the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–8. In the mid-1990s, some in the West began to notice that a major Asian economic resurgence was happening. The desire to engage with Asia grew. I experienced this at first hand when I visited several European capitals to promote Singapore’s idea of having the first Asia-Europe (ASEM) Leaders Meeting. The first ASEM Summit was held in Bangkok with great fanfare on 1–2 March 1996. However, a year later, as soon as a string of Asian economies – including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and South Korea – suffered in the Asian Financial Crisis, Europe once again lost interest in Asia. Western condescension returned with a vengeance.

  In short, the two critical decades that saw the return of China and India, the 1990s and the 2000s, coincided with a period of maximum insularity and self-congratulation. Western leaders didn’t notice – or ignored – some significant milestones. In 2014, measuring GDP in purchasing power parity terms (PPP), India surpassed Japan to become the world’s third largest economy. China made even more impressive strides. In 2000, US GDP in nominal terms was nine times that of China. Owing to China’s rapid growth in the ensuing decade, by 2010, US GDP was just 2.5 times that of China.46 But in PPP terms, China emerged as the world’s largest economy in 2014, even though it had been 10 per cent the size of the American economy in 1980.47

  Strategic Errors: Islam, Russia and Meddling in World Affairs

  If the West had noticed this great renaissance, they would have concentrated on the real issues shaking up their societies. Instead, blinded by hubris, the West made a series of strategic errors: intervening in Islamic countries, underestimating Islam as a religion and failing to address the root of the problem when it comes to terrorism. The most unwise intervention was to invade Iraq in March 2003. In theory, Iraq happened because of 9/11. In practice, it was just a demonstration of Western, especially American, hubris and strategic incompetence. To say that this war was a massive act of stupidity is an understatement. It was an act of folly on several counts. The United States invaded Iraq in revenge against the attack by an Islamic militant, Osama bin Laden. Yet in doing so, it removed a strong secular leader who was opposed to Osama bin Laden: Saddam Hussein. The United States also declared that it was worried about Iranian power. By destroying Saddam and the Taliban, America gave Iranian power a major boost. George W. Bush said that the invasion of Iraq was meant to create a strong, stable democracy in Iraq. Instead, with the assistance of the graduates of the leading universities of the world, he created a royal mess. Iraq has now become a textbook example of how not to invade a country. Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, a friend of the United States, noted wryly that even the Japanese had done better in the Second World War.

  Iraq was a disaster. What made it worse was that it reinforced the conviction among 1.5 billion Muslims that the loss of Muslim lives did not matter to the West. A fair question that future historians may well address is whether the surge of Islamic terrorist incidents in Western capitals was an indirect consequence of this thoughtless campaign of bombing Islamic societies.

  The West makes one fundamental mistake in all its dealings with the Islamic world: it underestimates the religion of Islam. Western analysts survey the Islamic world and see a string of weak societies. They associate the Islamic world with failed states, like Afghanistan and Somalia, or broken states, like Iraq and Syria. Yet even though many Islamic societies are struggling, Islam itself is only growing in strength. Indeed, to put it bluntly, Islam may well be the most dynamic and vibrant religion on Earth. According to Pew Research Center,

  [The Muslim population] will grow more than twice as fast as the overall world population between 2015 and 2060 and, in the second half of this century, will likely surpass Christians as the world’s largest religious group. While the world’s population is projected to grow 32 per cent in the coming decades, the number of Muslims is expected to increase by 70 per cent – from 1.8 billion in 2015 to nearly 3 billion in 2060. In 2015, Muslims made up 24.1 per cent of the global population. Forty-five years later, they are expected to make up more than three-in-ten of the world’s people (31.1 per cent).48

  Islam is not just getting more adherents. Muslims are also becoming more religious. Since the Western mind likes to extrapolate Western assumptions into the human condition, it assumes that the modernization and economic development of any society will lead to less religiosity and more secularism. In the Islamic world, the reverse is happening: economic development and education are leading to greater religiosity. Greater numbers of women are wearing the hijab, even in parts of the world where it was rarely worn for centuries, including Central Asia and Southeast Asia. An
d, as the Islamic world becomes better educated and more religious, it remembers well the millennia of dealing with stronger and militarily superior Western societies. Many young Muslims resent the weakness of Islamic societies vis-à-vis the West. Many of them are therefore seduced by the violent rhetoric of Islamic clerics who point out the indifference of the West to the loss of Muslim lives. The young men who carried out terrorist attacks on 3 June 2017 in London were influenced by the Islamist preacher Musa Jibril, who tweeted: ‘No intervention in Syria for over 2 years b/c those being killed are Muslim! Yet France quickly intervenes to massacre the Mali Muslims!’49

  Let me put across a very sensitive point as delicately as possible. In going after a series of individuals who have been inflamed by such Islamist rhetoric, the West is pursuing a strategy as futile as that of cutting off the tip of the iceberg to save the Titanic. Until the iceberg is dealt with, the problem will never be solved. The West should engage in deep reflection on what it has done to the Islamic world for the past two centuries. This historical record will continue to haunt relations between Islam and the West over the next two centuries.

  The West’s second major strategic error was to further humiliate the already humiliated Russia. Gorbachev’s unilateral dissolution of the Soviet empire was an unimaginable geopolitical gift to the West, especially America. The Russia that remained was a small shell of the Soviet empire. After winning the Cold War without firing a shot, it would have been wise for the West to heed Churchill’s advice: ‘In victory, magnanimity.’ Instead, the West did the exact opposite. Contrary to the implicit assurances given to Gorbachev and Soviet leaders in 1990,50 the West expanded NATO into previous Warsaw Pact countries, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia. Tom Friedman was dead right when he said, ‘I opposed expanding NATO toward Russia after the Cold War, when Russia was at its most democratic and least threatening. It remains one of the dumbest things we’ve ever done and, of course, laid the groundwork for Putin’s rise.’51 The humiliation of Russia led to an inevitable blowback. The Russian people elected a strongman ruler, Vladimir Putin, to defend Russian national interests strongly.