Kishore Mahbubani

Eeuwenlang waren China en India de twee grootste economieën. Pas in de afgelopen 200 jaar werden Europa en Amerika succesvol. Er is geen westerse leider die durft te zeggen dat er nu aan deze periode van westerse hegemonie een einde komt. Maar de bevolking ondervindt wel dagelijks de gevolgen van deze aardverschuiving. Trump als president, de Brexit en andere politiek opmerkelijke gebeurtenissen kunnen er voor een deel door worden verklaard.
Van een coherente strategie om met de nieuwe situatie om te gaan is geen sprake. In plaats daarvan slaat het Westen wild om zich heen door Irak aan te vallen, Syrië te bombarderen, Rusland sancties op te leggen en China op te hitsen.
In dit polemische boek stelt Kishore Mahbubani dat het Westen niet langer zijn wil aan de wereld als geheel kan opleggen. Het moet leren zijn huidige positie te delen of zelfs af te staan. Gaat dat lukken? Het klinkt paradoxaal, maar alleen door de neergang te erkennen kan het Westen op lange termijn succesvol blijven, zo betoogt Mahbubani. Zijn geopolitieke analyse en aanbevelingen moeten iedereen wel stof tot nadenken geven.

‘Een verontrustend boek (...) en geen aangename boodschap.’ Paul Kennedy, auteur van The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

‘De koude douche die dringend nodig is om het Westen nieuw leven in te blazen.’ Fareed Zakaria, auteur van The Post-American World… (mehr)

The subtitle of this extended essay is "A Provocation" and it is certainly provoking.

Whilst there is much in what Singaporean academic Mahbubani says about the attitudes of the West and their collective failure to come to terms with their declining position in the world, there is also a disdainfulness in his assertions that both rankle and smack of history as a cherry picking exercise designed to illustrate an exaggerated and skewed/biased analysis.

His basic premise is that China and India always had the largest economies for 1800 years and that the West's last 200 years of hegemony was an aberration that was doomed always to be relinquished but that the West have precipitated its own demise by a series of missteps and hubris post the end of the Cold War. I think some of the criticism of the West - he is especially critical of the US and to an only slightly lesser degree Europe - is justified in that the obsession with regime change, the imposition of values and interventionism has lead to a distraction in foreign wars that has lead to the West sleeping whilst China in particular has risen.

Where he fails in his analysis however is by the untested assumption that the sheer scale of gross numbers matter above all else. I give a simple illustration.
If China has an economy of $1.6 trillion dollars with a 1.6 billion population it has a larger economy than
Germany with an economy of $1 trillion dollars and a population of 100 million but it is in no fair assessment a richer country. Germany would be in mathematical terms 10 times richer. (the numbers are illustrative not accurate).

He also fails to appreciate that it is largely by the West's own push to globalisation and free trade that the economies of China and India have been freed and, whilst recognising their own efforts is capitalising on these opportunities, it is clear that they weren't and aren't entirely self generated.

Mahbubani also states that China and India is leading the world in environmental change and preservation which is a frankly extraordinary and unsustainable position to take and does so without any empirical evidence to support this claim. He also (as an ex-delegate to the UN) lauds the role of the UN General Assembly (which has generally been signally ineffective) whilst complaining about the USA's undermining of its institutions when it is the USA that has to a very great extent bankrolled the whole thing.

That said he does make many telling points that I concur with and especially those about the West's propensity to interference. He makes especially prescient comments about the West's humiliation of Russia and the effect this has had solidifying support there for Putin and the gross errors of NATO expansion especially with regards to Ukraine.

"Contrary to the implicit assurances given to Gorbachev and Soviet leaders in 1990, the West expanded NATO into previous Warsaw Pact countries........Tom Friedman was dead right when he said 'I opposed expanding NATO towards 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.'" 56pp

Essentially, he is correct in that the West has squandered the good will and frankly the supremacy bestowed upon it by victory in the Cold War. This has been due to economic complacency - free trade when one side has things rigged is never free trade - but also by extremely poor foreign policy decisions exemplified mainly by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the nonsensical expansion of NATO.
Where he over-eggs the pudding though is in his dismissal of the West as a spent force that must accept that China is now the "new number one" as his method of measurement is flawed and also in his glorification of that same China which has since e foisted COVID on the world and slaughtered the Uighars. Xi is not the enlightened hero painted in these provocative but timely and worthwhile pages.… (mehr)