Suicidal Western Wars

In the field of governance, we are witnessing a paradox. Asians learnt the virtues of rational governance from the West. Yet, many Western populations are losing their trust in governance, while Asian levels of trust are increasing. According to the Government at a Glance 2013 survey conducted by Gallup, India ranked second in trust in national government among the countries surveyed. An OECD Report based on the survey said that ‘Trust in government in all BRIICS [Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China, South Africa] countries was higher than the OECD average (40 per cent).’18

This rising belief in rational governance is happening not just in Asia. It is happening in Africa too. During the Cold War, America strongly supported strongman rulers like President Mobutu of Zaire, who did little but fleece their countries. By contrast, many strongman rulers in Africa today are focused on rational governance of their societies. This is why President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and President Paul Kagame of Rwanda have delivered remarkable economic and social development to their countries. From 1990 to 2015, life expectancy improved significantly – from 45 to 58 in Uganda and from 33 to 64 in Rwanda. The infant mortality ratefn1 decreased from 111.4 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 37.7 in Uganda and from 93.2 to 31.1 in Rwanda.

But the Rest have not sent a ‘thank you’ note to the West. Initially – indeed, for centuries – the West used its military and technological prowess to conquer and dominate the planet. Modern science and technology were harnessed to create powerful weapons. By the end of the nineteenth century, Western power had exploded into every part of the planet. Virtually every society on Earth – including the two previously greatest economic powers, China and India (which had almost half of the world’s GDP in 1820¹⁹) – was subjugated by the West. Every other human civilization had no choice but to bend before Western power. And this domination could have carried on for many more centuries if not for the two suicidal world wars which the Western powers indulged in in the first half of the twentieth century.

These wars, and the rejuvenation of non-Western societies using Western best practices, explain the political liberation of the rest of the world from Western domination in the second half of the twentieth century. This liberation was visible in the new flags flying all over the world. What was not visible was the real intellectual liberation that came more slowly and only gathered pace towards the end of the twentieth century. It took a few decades, but the rest of the world eventually figured out how they could replicate Western success stories in economic growth, health, education, and so forth.

The West either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Why not? This liberation of billions of non-Western minds coincided with another moment of Western triumphalism: the end of the Cold War. Moments of triumphalism are inherently dangerous. The giddy spirits of the West were ready to ingest any form of seductive opium. Conveniently, they found this in Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay ‘The End of History?’ In it, he boldly argued: ‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’20 Western rulers fell in love with his essay and began to believe that their societies had reached the top of the metaphorical Mount Everest of human development and would not be dislodged.

Partly as a result of imbibing Fukuyama’s opiate, triumphalists in the West didn’t notice that the end of the Cold War coincided with a more fundamental turn of human history, which triggered a new historical era rather than ending history. China and India – the two sleeping giants of Asia – were waking up. Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations policy – reforming the fields of agriculture, industry, national defence and science and technology – gathered pace in the 1980s. Prime Minister Narasimha Rao opened up the Indian economy in 1991, ushering in foreign investment, reducing import tariffs and duties and deregulating markets.

The sound of the Western celebratory drums at the end of the Cold War was not the only event hiding the return of China as a major player in the international order. The Tiananmen Square events happened in June 1989. The mass demonstrations and the killings that followed convinced the West that the Chinese communist regime was another corrupt regime about to collapse. As a result, the West didn’t notice the remarkably bold decision of Deng Xiaoping to carry on with the opening of the Chinese economy despite the huge political challenge posed by Tiananmen. A more nervous Chinese leader would have shuttered China again. Deng didn’t. As a result, Chinese economic growth continued steadily in the 1990s. This gave China the confidence to apply to join the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Then another event distracted the West: 9/11, in 2001. Instead of reacting thoughtfully and intelligently, the prevailing intellectual hubris led to the disastrous decision to invade Iraq. America has the world’s best universities and think tanks, as well as the most globally influential professors and pundits, yet none of them highlighted or highlight now the fact that the most historically consequential event in 2001 was not 9/11. It was China’s entry into the WTO. The entry of almost a billion workers into the global trading system would obviously result in massive ‘creative destruction’ and the loss of many jobs in the West. In August 2017, a Bank for International Settlements report confirmed that the introduction of new workers from China and Eastern Europe led to ‘declining real wages and a smaller share of labour in national output’. It added that this ‘naturally meant that inequality [within Western economies] rose’.21

This was one major reason why Trump and Brexit happened fifteen years later. The working-class populations could feel directly what their elites couldn’t. Their lives were being disrupted by fundamental changes taking place in the world order, and their leaders had done nothing to explain to them what was happening, or to mitigate the damage. Sadly, most elites in the West still view with contempt all those who voted in favour of Trump and Brexit. Hillary Clinton revealed this when she described Trump’s supporters as a ‘basket of deplorables’.