FINANCIAL TIMES
5-6-18

Has the West Lost It? A Provocation, by Kishore Mahbubani

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

Review by Joseph Nye

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).

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?’