Has the West Lost It?: A Provocation

by Kishore Mahbubani

  Putin was elected President in 2000 and re-elected in 2012, and he also served as Prime Minister from 1999 to 2000 and 2008 to 2012. Yet, even while Putin was in office in the 2000s, the West threatened to expand NATO into Ukraine, despite the fact that eminent American statesmen like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski cautioned against it. Speaking of Ukraine, Kissinger said, ‘… I don’t think it’s a law of nature that every state must have the right to be an ally in the framework of NATO.’52 Brzezinski said, ‘Russia should be assured credibly that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.’53 These warnings were ignored. America supported the demonstrations against President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine when his regime collapsed in 2014. Putin knew that the next Ukrainian government might push Ukraine into NATO. The result would have been that Crimea, which had been part of Russia from 1783 to 1954, would have been used by NATO against Russia. Putin felt that he simply had no choice but to take back Crimea. Even Gorbachev supported him.54

  The Crimea episode showed that there is only so much humiliation that any nation can take. It was inevitable that the Russian people would say: enough is enough. Putin’s election reflected the will of the people. They wanted a strongman ruler who could also poke the eyes of the West. He did this by invading Crimea and supporting Assad in Syria. There are no saints in geopolitical games. There is only tit for tat. If the West had shown respect for Russia instead of humiliating it, Putin would not have happened. In the summer of 2017, Putin was vilified by the American media for having interfered in American elections. Such interference is clearly wrong. Yet no American leader asked the obvious question in this 2017 debate: has America interfered in other countries’ elections? Dov Levin of the Institute of Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University has compiled a database documenting that it has – more than 80 times between 1946 and 2000.55 The West is no saint either, though it is regularly in danger of believing itself to be so.

  And so to the West’s third error: thoughtless intervention in the internal affairs of several countries. It is not a coincidence that the end of the Cold War saw a flurry of so-called ‘colour’ revolutions. A partial list includes the following: Yugoslavia in 2000 (Bulldozer), Georgia in 2003 (Rose), Ukraine in 2005 (Orange), Iraq in 2005 (Purple), Kyrgyzstan in 2005 (Tulip), Tunisia in 2010 (Jasmine), Egypt in 2011 (Lotus). Many of these colour revolutions were internally generated. However, when they surfaced, the West rushed to support them because in the minds of Western policy-makers, especially American ones, the export of democracy was an inherent good. Hence, they believed that they were living up to the highest moral standards of Western civilization.

  Few in the Rest are convinced that the West’s post-Cold War encouragement of democracy abroad represents a moral impulse. Instead, they see this as a last futile attempt to continue the two-century period of Western domination of world history through other means. They also notice the cynical promotion of democracy in adversarial countries like Iraq and Syria and not in friendly countries like Saudi Arabia. Most disastrously, when the intervention turns sour, as in Iraq or in Libya, the West walks away and takes on no moral responsibility for the adverse consequences. One painful truth that cannot be denied is that this thoughtless attempt to ‘export democracy’ has increased, not decreased, human suffering in many countries.

  The West has lost its way significantly in the past three decades. It needs to change course. But before formulating a new strategy, the West needs to accept the changed mind-sets of non-Western populations. A resurgent Rest will not wear the same degree of Western intervention as it did in the past. Until the West understands this, it will not understand why it needs a new strategy to remain successful.

  One recent major event illustrates how ignorance of history causes misunderstandings between the West and the Rest. When 9/11 happened, most Americans felt they were innocent victims subject to an unprovoked attack. Most thoughtful international observers saw it as an inevitable blowback against the West’s trampling on the Islamic world for several centuries. It was not just Muslims who believed that. One of Latin America’s best novelists, Gabriel García Márquez, asked Americans:

  How does it feel now that horror is erupting in your own yard and not in your neighbor’s living room? … Do you know that between 1824 and 1994 your country carried out 73 invasions in countries of Latin America? … For almost a century, your country has been at war with the entire world … How does it feel, Yank, knowing that on September 11th the long war finally reached your home?56

  The West must recognize that all of humanity is one. Seven billion people live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat. The big problem is that while we have captains and crews taking care of each cabin, we have no captain or crew taking care of the whole boat. We can and should strengthen multilateral institutions of global governance, like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the WHO to take care of common global challenges.57

  It is unhelpful that America is led by a President who refuses to recognize that we belong to a single human tribe living together on a fragile little planet, the only habitable place within the universe that we know of. If we screw up the only planet we have, we don’t have a planet B to go to. Fortunately, the spread of modern reasoning by the West has made the rest of the world more rational and responsible.

  Hence, even though Donald Trump, the leader of the best-educated society on Earth, is today making unwise decisions on climate change and triggering a new nuclear arms race, his kind of ignorance will eventually be overwhelmed by the broader, well-informed human community, which will rebel against such erroneous thinking. The West did the world a favour by sharing its culture of reasoning with the Rest. Now the Rest, after gaining the same access to the best sources of information, will be able to educate the West on the virtues of working together to protect and preserve planet Earth. Just as Donald Trump has pulled America backwards in the battle against climate change, the two most populous nations, China and India, have moved forward instead of blaming the West for creating the climate crisis (which is technically correct). And guess what? The Chinese and Indian people are supporting their governments. With greater access to information, they know that China and India will suffer if climate change worsens. There was no guarantee that China and India would continue to be reasonable on climate change after Trump made America unreasonable. The fact that they are is a clear cause for celebration.

  A New Strategy: Minimalist, Multilateral and Machiavellian

  Against this backdrop of a better-educated and more rational global community that will no longer wear Western meddling and condescension, the time has come for the West to abandon many of its short-sighted and self-destructive policies and pursue a completely new strategy towards the rest of the world. This new grand strategy can be described as the 3M strategy. The three Ms refer to Minimalist, Multilateral and Machiavellian.

  The Minimalist approach is a critical first step. Many in the West believe that the West is an inherently benign force that is constantly trying to improve the world. Hence, they will be puzzled by this call to do less rather than more.

  To understand why less will be better, the West needs to achieve a new consensus on its role in world history. When the West was overwhelmingly stronger than the rest of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it had an explosive impact across the globe. Western boots trampled everywhere. The Rest had no choice but to bend to Western power. Now, as Western power recedes, it is perfectly natural for the Rest to ask for new terms of engagement. Many parts of the world, especially Asia and Africa, would welcome a more restrained Western role.

  Take the Islamic world, for example. They feel that the West has become trigger-happy since the end of the Cold War, and they resent it. Even worse, most of the countries recently bombed by the West have been Muslim countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. This is why many of the 1.5 billion Muslims believe that Muslim lives don’t matter to the West.

&nb
sp; As indicated earlier, the West needs to pose to itself a delicate and potentially explosive question: is there any correlation between the rise of Western bombing of Islamic societies and the rise of terrorist incidents in the West? It would be foolish to suggest an answer from both extremes: that there is an absolute correlation or zero correlation. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. If so, isn’t it wiser for the West to reduce its entanglements in the Islamic world?

  Some of these entanglements have been very unwise. During the Cold War, the CIA instigated the creation of Al-Qaeda to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The same organization bit the hand that fed it by attacking the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Sadly, America didn’t learn the lesson from this mistake. In an effort to remove Assad in Syria, the Obama administration transported ISIS fighters from Afghanistan to Syria to fight Assad.58 To ensure that the ISIS fighters had enough funding, America didn’t bomb the oil exports from ISIS-controlled zones in Syria to Turkey. Through all this, America declared that it was opposed to ISIS. In fact, some American agencies were supporting them, directly or indirectly.59

  It is truly difficult to understand why America, a distant country protected by two oceans, decided to intertwine its destiny with the Islamic world. It may have made some strategic sense in the Cold War to prevent Soviet domination of the Middle East. Post-Cold War, especially with America becoming self-sufficient in energy, it makes no strategic sense. America should withdraw from its military engagements in the Middle East. Henceforth, there should be zero American bombs dropped in Islamic countries (though there is, perhaps, a case to argue in Afghanistan, because of the danger of the Taliban returning). Instead, America should enhance its diplomatic engagement and work with Europe to find geopolitically wise diplomatic solutions.

  Will the Middle East become a darker place if America disengages militarily? Most American strategic thinkers are sure it would. Yet they also believed that the non-communist states in Southeast Asia would collapse like dominoes after the American forces withdrew ignominiously from Vietnam in 1975. The region appeared doomed to them then. Many British observers had long described Southeast Asia as ‘the Balkans of Asia’, because it is the most diverse corner of Asia, even more diverse than the actual Balkans.60 No international observers expected Southeast Asia to become an oasis of peace and prosperity. But ASEAN kept progressing as the West kept retreating from the region.61 More amazingly, while the West tried and failed to manage the transition away from absolute military rule in Syria, ASEAN did the same successfully in Myanmar. The thousand ASEAN meetings that the Myanmar military officials attended in neighbouring ASEAN capitals made them aware of how backward their country had become. So Myanmar switched course peacefully, without Western military intervention. The Rohingya killings and exodus were a tragedy, but they also reflected a last-ditch effort by the Myanmar military to embarrass Aung San Suu Kyi, both domestically and internationally.62

  The Rest does not need to be saved by the West, educated by it on governmental structures, or shown the moral high ground. It most certainly does not need to be bombed. Stepping back will improve relations with many parts of the world – not only the Islamic world, but also China and Africa, which chafe under Western haughtiness. The Rest will continue to learn from the West in many areas. The EU’s greatest achievement is that there is zero prospect of war between any two EU member states. ASEAN is trying to replicate this EU gold standard. The Nordic countries continue to excel in providing a good balance between economic growth and social harmony. This Nordic model will gradually become universalized. The United States continues to excel in higher education and entrepreneurship. The world will copy American best practices. Chinese university presidents regularly visit American campuses to learn from them. A minimalist global strategy by the West would promote even greater learning. It is always easier to learn from someone who doesn’t exude an attitude of superiority.

  The West also needs to understand the Rest better. This is where the second leg of the new strategy swings in: the Multilateral leg. Some leading Western minds accept the fact that the world has shrunk inexorably. We are reminded of this every year as each new crisis requires coordinated global actions. From the financial crisis (2008–9) to the Ebola outbreak (2014–16), from the Climate Change Summit in Paris (2015) to the terrorist attacks in leading capitals (2017), we learn that all cabins on the global boat must work together.

  To work together, we need stronger and more effective global councils. Fortunately, as the eminent British historian Paul Kennedy has reminded us in his book The Parliament of Man, we do have a global parliament. It is the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Few Americans know that this is primarily an American creation; it was forged by President Truman in 1945. Truman was inspired by the following two lines from Tennyson’s famous poem Locksley Hall:

  Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d

  In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.63

  Having served as Ambassador to the UN twice (from 1984 to 1989 and from 1998 to 2004), I know first-hand how debates in the UNGA can provide a good flavour of the thinking of 7.3 billion people. When ambassadors to the UN speak, they would be excoriated by their populations if they didn’t express the points of view of their people. As a result, a real cacophony of voices is heard.

  Since many criticisms of the West are expressed in the UNGA, the West, especially America, has tried to both marginalize and ignore UN debates. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, US Ambassador to the UN in the 1970s, wrote in his memoirs: ‘The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.’64 The American political scientist Edward Luck has said: ‘The last thing the US wants is an independent UN throwing its weight around … [The US isn’t] going to allow the organization to dictate things inconsistent with the objectives of US leadership.’65 America marginalizes the world’s voices. Here again, let me ask a politically sensitive question: would there have been fewer terrorist attacks on Western capitals had they paid more heed to the voices of the Rest? Why did the first Iraq invasion by father President Bush in 1991 succeed spectacularly, while the second Iraq invasion by son President Bush in 2003 failed miserably? The most essential difference is that the elder Bush sought and obtained the support of the UN. Virtually the whole world, including China and Russia, supported this invasion. By contrast, his son went against the consensus of the UN. Virtually the whole world, including China and Russia, opposed the invasion.

  There is an obvious lesson to be learned from these two Iraq wars, yet few American intellectuals dare to admit publicly they were wrong in supporting the second Iraq War. Someone should start a ‘mea culpa’ movement in America. Each leading American intellectual who supported the war in 2003 should publish an essay on why he or she failed to listen to the overwhelming sentiments of the rest of the world. In so doing, they will expose some of the strong self-deception that has characterized American foreign-policy thinking over the past fifteen years.

  One myth that surprisingly many Americans believe is that America is often prevented from doing the right thing in the UN (for example, in Syria) because of the opposition of non-democratic states like Russia and China. The remarkably sanctimonious statements made by the American Ambassadors to the UN Samantha Power and Nikki Haley reinforce this belief. Nikki Haley said, after Russia and China blocked sanctions on Syria in February 2017, ‘They put their friends in the Assad regime ahead of our global security … They turned away from defenceless men, women and children who died gasping for breath when Assad’s forces dropped their poisonous gas.’66 But American intervention in Syria is also opposed by the world’s largest democracy, India, and the world’s third-largest democracy, Indonesia. Why is America not listening to its fellow democracies? Or do the opinions of non-Western democracies not matter? This is what a lead
ing Indian official, Shyam Saran, wrote about Western intervention:

  In most cases, the post-intervention situation has been rendered much worse, the violence more lethal, and the suffering of the people who were supposed to be protected much more severe than before. Iraq is an earlier instance; Libya and Syria are the more recent ones. A similar story is playing itself out in Ukraine. In each case, no careful thought was given to the possible consequences of the intervention.67

  He also wrote, ‘[Europe] has added to instability and disruption in West Asia with its ill-considered interventions in Libya and Syria.’68

  This is why multilateral institutions and processes matter. They provide the best platform for hearing and understanding the views of the world. The next time the West wants to get on its moral high horse and intervene in another non-Western country it should first convene a meeting of the UN General Assembly. This is the only forum where all 193 sovereign countries can speak freely. And it is where the West will get a good understanding of what 88 per cent of the world’s population thinks.

  Over the past thirty years, as Western power has waned, instead of listening to the majority opinions of humanity the West has regularly tried to justify its ignoring of majority worldviews by attacking the UN. There has been a dedicated American campaign – supported by European cowardice – to delegitimize the UN, especially the UNGA.69 Yet, as Margaret Thatcher shrewdly observed, ‘The United Nations is only a mirror held up to our own uneven, untidy and divided world. If we do not like what we see there’s no point in cursing the mirror, we had better start by reforming ourselves.’70 We need to build a new global consensus. The beautifully written Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which espouse many noble universal values, can provide the foundation for the values of this new consensus.