A More Dangerous World
My Asian, African and Latin American friends will be troubled by my call to the West to be cunning: they will fear that that I am trying to prolong Western domination of our global order. That’s not my reason for calling for more strategic cunning. I am doing so because a naïve and ideological West is dangerous. The failure of the West to make major strategic adjustments is responsible for many of the mishaps the world has experienced recently. The world will become more unstable unless the West radically changes course.
Democracies are not designed to take on long-term challenges. They can respond to immediate threats, like Hitler or Stalin. However, even if the threat is going to be faced by the grandchildren of the voters, voters will not vote for a politician who says: ‘Let’s sacrifice now to save our grandchildren.’
Western thinkers are right to speak about the many virtues of democratic political systems. They are also right in saying that democracy is the worst form of government, except for the alternatives. It is also true that because of their many checks and balances, democracies have demonstrated long-term resilience. However, the West is wrong in believing that democracy is a necessary condition for economic success. If it were, China could not and should not have succeeded. But it has. This is also why many in the West deeply resent China’s success. It undermines many key pillars of Western ideology.
The shortcomings of democracy are dominating Western societies at a time when these societies have to make major strategic changes. And failures to make strategic changes at the right time do lead to disasters.
Many of the problems the West is encountering now are the result of the strategic misjudgements of yesterday. Chas Freeman, a distinguished former American ambassador, has made the same point:
The risks the world now faces were not (and are not) inevitable. They are the product of lapses of statesmanship and failures to consider how others see and react to us. The setbacks to America’s ability to shape the international environment to its advantage are not the result of declining capacity on its part. They are the consequence of a failure to adapt to new realities and shifting power balances.76
A few examples will drive home the point. In early 2017, Europe was startled by President Erdoğan’s efforts to use Turkish populations in Europe to vote in favour of constitutional changes to entrench his power. All the blame was heaped on Erdoğan, one man. But how much of Turkish anger was a result of being insulted by Europe for decades? Turkey applied for EU membership in 1987 and never got in. Austria, Cyprus, Malta, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia applied later and did. You don’t insult a country and not face consequences. Even more stupidly, the Europeans kept Turkey out and allowed Turks in (who want to vote for Erdoğan). It would have been wiser to keep Turks out and admit Turkey into the EU (with restrictions on free movement of labour). The jobs generated inside Turkey would have kept Turks at home.
Similarly, it was a folly for Europe to launch the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 1962. It enriched a few European farmers. It impoverished millions of African farmers, especially in North Africa. Why are millions of Africans trying to get into Europe illegally? Because Europe lost its strategic common sense. By not exporting jobs to Africa, it designed policies that would inevitably import Africans into Europe.
This is why the Rest should wish and hope for a more cunning and calculating West to manage the next thirty years. Here are some key economic forecasts about the world in 2050. In 1950, the American-European (UK, France and Germany) share of World GDP was 43 per cent.77 By 2050, it will have shrunk to 24 per cent.78 The population figures are even more stunning. As Swedish physician and epidemiologist Hans Rosling has documented, in 1950, Europe’s share of the world’s population was 22 per cent, while Africa’s was 9 per cent. By 2050, Europe’s share will have shrunk to 7 per cent, while Africa’s will have exploded to 39 per cent. If Europe continues on autopilot, or sinks into despair or racially and religiously motivated ideological approaches to declining power in population shifts, this will be an act of collective suicide. It will also be hugely damaging for the Rest, as Europe and America flail around.
The explosive expansion of Western power into every nook and cranny of the world has done both good and evil (including the genocidal disappearance of many peoples), yet the 88 per cent of the world’s population outside the West have absorbed a great deal of Western wisdom. They can and are forging ahead and building their own futures.
By a remarkable accident of history, the most distant Asian society from Europe – Japan – became the first non-Western society to modernize, through the Meiji Reformation in the 1860s. A century later, more Asian societies emulated Japan. All this has led to the great and unstoppable Asian resurgence. Now, through another accident of history, the virtues of modernization are poised to enter Arab, Turkish and Persian societies, because all these societies are genuinely amazed by the spectacular success of Asia, from China to India, and keen to replicate such success. It is not an accident that the custodian of the two holiest Islamic sites, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, decided to make a month-long trip to Asia, instead of Europe, in early 2017 as his first overseas tour. By looking East instead of West, these Islamic societies will slowly transform and modernize.
The West can accelerate a two-way street of learning between Western and Eastern Muslims by quietly terminating its two-century-long policy of interfering in Islamic societies. A good start, as indicated earlier, will be to stop all bombing of Islamic countries. After a few painful bumps in the road, the Arabs, Turks and Persians will reach various mutual adjustments. Europe’s shining example of the culture of peace, which has been replicated in the more diverse Southeast Asia, will slowly seep into the Middle East too. This is the most significant advantage that will come from a strategic and cunning withdrawal of Western power from this region.
Few Western minds can conceive of a peaceful Middle East. Sam Huntington, one of America’s most thoughtful analysts, famously declared that ‘Islam has bloody borders.’ 9/11 only accentuated the belief that Muslims are inherently violent. If this were true, I should live each day in extreme fear. Singapore is a small, predominantly Chinese state surrounded by two large, mostly Muslim states: Malaysia and Indonesia. Despite having had multiple problems with both of them over the decades, the chances of Singapore going to war with either state is practically zero today. Why? All three countries have learnt that wars don’t make sense. We are focused on economic growth and working together to promote it. The sort of sensible decisions that Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia have made are being replicated everywhere. A Middle East region with less Western meddling will ultimately be a predominantly peaceful region.
Similarly, the 1.3 billion people of India (who will become 1.66 billion by 210079) will benefit from a graceful withdrawal of Western power. One of the manifest absurdities of our time is that the UK and France remain as ‘permanent members’ of the UN Security Council (UNSC), passing mandatory resolutions that the rest of the world has to comply with. They are only there because of their nineteenth-century prowess, not their twenty-first-century promise. Indeed, in 2045, on the 100th anniversary of the UNSC, if the UK and France remain permanent members and India is out, the UNSC would have lost all its credibility. No serious country would then comply with its resolutions.
As the Western share of the global population and of global power recedes, the West should calculate that it is in its best interests to have a stronger rules-based order. One way to do this is to strengthen, not weaken, the UNSC. The best way to strengthen the credibility of the UNSC is for the UK to give up its seat to India and, as I argued in The Great Convergence, for France to share its seat with the EU.80 What I am advocating here is plain common sense for long-term European interests. Yet, it shows how far away the Europeans are from strategic cunning that the most obvious solutions for their long-term interests are neither conceivable nor mentionable in European discourse.
Western humility would be good for the 1.4 billion people in China, too. The biggest act of strategic folly that America could commit would be to make a futile attempt to derail China’s successful development before China clearly emerges as number one in the world again. Barack Obama avoided this temptation from 2009 to 2016. Trump is unpredictable. It is truly dangerous that there is a significant group of thinkers, policy-makers and activists in Washington DC who are quietly plotting and planning various ways of derailing China. Such activity can only give credence to the hawkish voices in the country and result in the emergence of an angry nationalist China.81
Today, under Trump, America is focused on military competition. He has announced that he will increase the US naval fleet from 272 ships to 350.82 This is strategic folly. A more cunning America would focus on reducing its navy, not expanding it. And would the world collapse? Would trade routes be threatened? And if trade routes suffer, would America suffer more or would the world’s number one exporter, China, suffer more? In short, some strategic common sense would encourage America to be more prudent than expansionary in its military spending. It is an even bigger folly for Trump to announce a nuclear arms race, as nuclear weapons remain the only force that could destroy the world.
Instead of igniting an arms race with China, America should heed the cunning advice given by Bill Clinton when he spoke at Yale in 2003. This is what he said:
If you believe that maintaining power and control and absolute freedom of movement and sovereignty is important to your country’s future, there’s nothing inconsistent in that [the US continuing to behaving unilaterally]. [The US is] the biggest, most powerful country in the world now. We’ve got the juice and we’re going to use it … But if you believe that we should be trying to create a world with rules and partnerships and habits of behaviour that we would like to live in when we’re no longer the military political economic superpower in the world, then you wouldn’t do that. It just depends on what you believe.83
Bill Clinton was bravely advising his fellow Americans to begin preparing for a world where America is no longer number one. It was brave for him to do so, as it is almost taboo in America to speak of America becoming number two (although it will inevitably become number two). So what is the best outcome for America when it becomes number two? The best outcome would be a number one power (namely, China) that respects ‘rules and partnerships and habits of behaviour’ that America could live with.
And what would be the best way to slip on these ‘handcuffs’ of ‘rules and partnerships and habits of behaviour’ onto China? This is where Bill Clinton was being cunning. He was advising his fellow Americans to slip the handcuffs of ‘rules and partnerships’ onto themselves. Once America had created a certain pattern of behaviour for the world’s number one power, the same pattern of behaviour would be inherited by the next number one power, namely China. The good news is that China, for its own reasons, is happy to live in a world dominated by multilateral rules and processes. Xi Jinping explained why in the two brilliant speeches he gave in Davos and Geneva in January 2017. Xi said, for example, in Geneva:
Economic globalization, a surging historical trend, has greatly facilitated trade, investment, flow of people and technological advances … 1.1 billion people have been lifted out of poverty, 1.9 billion people now have access to safe drinking water, 3.5 billion people have gained access to the Internet, and the goal has been set to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.84
However, what Xi did not say is that China, unlike America, does not have a messianic impulse to change the world. If order abroad facilitates order at home, China would be happy. Hence, by following Bill Clinton’s cunning advice, America would be laying the foundation for a more orderly world.