Why crumbling West must humble itself to shape the post-pandemic world order

The wealthy West – and the US in particular – must be able to admit there are equals and peers in power that want to reset the rules of the game
We need many conversations involving everyone, from the strongest to the weakest, before deciding what the new order should look like

Andrew Sheng

Published: 6:45am, 23 Oct 2021

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As tensions over the Taiwan Strait mount, everyone needs to think through whether war is inevitable. Leon Trotsky is credited as saying, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” If we slip into war by what historian Barbara Tuchman called the “march of folly”, can the great powers step back from mutual nuclear annihilation?

When the world’s only superpower suffers more Covid-19 deaths than any other country – more than 730,000 at the last count – and left Afghanistan in defeat, no one should be surprised if people ask whether America, and by extension Western civilisation, is in decline.

Foreign Affairs magazine devoted three issues this year to the topic – “Can America Recover?”, “Decline and Fall” and “Can China Keep Rising?”. Given the steady barrage of invective between the United States and its rivals, it certainly feels like the Cold War has returned with a vengeance.

However, for Greta Thunberg and other climate activists, surely world leaders’ priority should be to work together to address our looming climate disaster. Why are people fighting over a burning planet? Shouldn’t we call time out and collectively address the urgent, existential issues of human and planetary distress?

03:38

COP26 Glasgow, the UN Climate Change Conference: last chance to save the planet?

The World Economic Forum meets in Dubai next month with an agenda to move to a “grand narrative” initiative “to shape the contours of a more prosperous and inclusive future for humanity that is also more respectful of nature”.

Narratives might sound like a media invention, but the reality is that the masses are unlikely to buy an elite-driven dream until they are part of the conversation.

Take Harvard historian Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations. Written in 1996, Huntington seemed prescient in predicting the clash between Western civilisation and the rest.

He wrote, “The central issue for the West is whether, quite apart from our external challenges, it is capable of stopping and reversing the internal process of decay. Can the West renew itself or will sustained internal rot simply accelerate its end and/or subordination to other economically and demographically more dynamic civilisations?”

The truth about the US-China clash of civilisations? There isn’t one

Huntington reflected the worry of British historian Arnold Toynbee, who posited that since civilisations are born out of primitive societies, the key is whether elites can respond effectively to new challenges.

Toynbee saw clearer than other Western historians that collapses are not necessarily because of barbarian invasions but about whether the ruling elite can overcome their own self-interest to address the new challenges.

The West remains superior in economic, financial, technological and military terms – almost all aspects aside from population numbers.

According to the latest Maddison projections, rich countries – western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan – will have a combined population of 947 million people and about 36 per cent of world GDP by 2030. Meanwhile, China, India and the rest of Asia will have a population of 4.7 billion and almost half of global GDP.

In the coming decades, the wealthy West must contend with the rising powers of China, India and other countries that have very different cultures and ideologies.

07:02

China tackles challenges posed by its ageing population

If the planet heats up as expected, more people from the developing world will arrive at the West’s borders. At the same time, with the demonisation of Russia and China pushing them closer together, the United States faces conflicts on several fronts alongside a fractious domestic arena, where political polarisation prevents policy cohesion and continuity.

This situation might remind some in Islamic countries of the rising and falling cycles the Islamic caliphates experienced, as documented by the great historian Ibn Khaldun. When social cohesion was strong, the state grew its legitimacy and empires rose. When it was weak, dynasties collapsed and empires were lost.

The Chinese historians Sima Qian, in Records of the Grand Historian, and Sima Guang, in Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance, similarly documented in their work that empires fell not so much from external invasion as from internal decay.

Has the US finally arrived at the point of “imperial overstretch”? Yale historian Paul Kennedy coined the term in his 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, describing the point when a country’s global ambitions and responsibilities exceed its financial and industrial capacity. US government debt has reached levels not seen since the end of World War II without even starting World War III.

The ugly reality of the American empire

But all historians know that rising or falling is never preordained. The past is not a linear predictor of the future. The unipolar order has weakened without any grand bargain between the great powers on what the new world order should look like.

Any such grand bargain requires the incumbent hegemon to admit that there are equals and peers in power that want to reset the rules of the game. This does not necessarily mean that anyone will replace the US any time soon because everyone wants to buy time to set their own house in order after the pandemic.

In short, before any new grand narrative, we need a whole series of conversations with all sides, from the weakest to the most powerful, on what the post-pandemic order should look like. There can never be one grand narrative by the elite until there is enough dialogue between the many.

When the meek are weak, they suffer what they must. But when the strong are insecure, that is when war begins.

Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective