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

Author:Kishore Mahbubani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 21st Century, Business & Economics, Diplomacy, Economics, Geopolitics, Globalization, History, International Relations, Political Science
ISBN: 9780241312940
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2018-04-05T03:00:00+00:00

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.

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