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.

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 leading 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.

The re-legitimization of the UN is therefore another simple step away from the current flawed and arrogant Western strategies. There is no better opportunity to do this than now. In a somewhat miraculous move, the UN elected António Guterres as UN Secretary-General in 2016. It was a miracle because he is shrewd and experienced. Even better, he is European and comes from a NATO state – Portugal. If the West cannot work with a staunchly pro-Western Secretary-General like him to revive and strengthen the UN, who can it work with?

Yet, altruism never works in international affairs. The West will only change course and work to strengthen, not undermine, multilateral institutions when it concludes after hard-headed analysis that it is in its long-term interests to do so. This is why the third prong of a new Western strategy has to be based on a Machiavellian approach. What approach will best serve the long-term global interests of the West?

Machiavelli is both one of the best-known and least understood Western figures. In the popular imagination he is seen as a personification of evil. Yet, most serious philosophers regard him as one of the wisest thinkers of all times. The great philosopher Isaiah Berlin reminded us in his classic essay that Machiavelli’s key goal was to promote virtù (‘virtue’). His goal was to generate a better society that would enhance the well-being of its citizens.71

In our rapidly changing world, the West needs to learn more from Machiavelli and deploy more strategic cunning to protect its long-term interests. Strategic cunning is as old as the hills. Two thousand five hundred years ago, the legendary Chinese strategist Sun Tzu advised, ‘Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.’ The most difficult part of this piece of advice is ‘Know thy self’. Few in the West are aware of how quickly the Western share of global power has shrunk, as documented in the opening charts.

A general going into a battlefield with an army twice the size of his opponent’s will adopt one strategy. However, if his army shrinks to half the size of his opponent’s and he maintains the same strategy, he is committing a strategic folly. This is what the West is doing. Its global power is rapidly shrinking, but it proceeds on autopilot.