Opinion | Unless the declining West learns to share power, a clash of civilisations may be inevitable

The Ukraine war has split the world into at least three blocs, with US-led alliances vs China and Russia, and a non-aligned bloc that includes India

Containing emerging powers to preserve the status quo is going about it the wrong way to protect Western civilisation

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A baby doll covered in fake blood is seen during a protest in solidarity with Ukraine outside the Russian Embassy in London on April 7. Daily demonisation of each other is fragmenting trust between nation states. Photo: Zuma Press Wire/dpa

Published: 3:30am, 27 Aug 2022

We have been here before – catastrophe, carnage, collapse, climate calamities, war. This hottest summer of discontent is a prelude to a freezing winter of gas shortages, inflation and more conflict.

As Europe, China and parts of America face heatwaves and drought, a global food calamity is looming. Without any exit strategy on the Ukraine war, we face a prolonged period of stalemate, devastation and less willingness to negotiate even ceasefires.

The rising global uncertainties mean that businesses around the world are taking short-term actions of self-preservation, rather than investing in the long term to support climate action, higher productivity and net-zero carbon goals. Huawei Technologies chairman Ren Zhengfei is just one of the corporate captains openly asking staff to prepare for tough times.

Is the clash of civilisations inevitable, as Samuel Huntington predicted three decades ago? It is no secret that French President Emmanuel Macron thinks Western hegemony is coming to an end. Recognising that democracy is fragile and the rule of law precarious, his recent speech reflected Europe’s growing pessimism about “this war that is thundering at our doors” and the “devastating climatic disasters”.

How did we shift so quickly from a “grand bargain” in which China and emerging markets provided cheap goods to the West in exchange for paper money that could be printed at will, into “sleepwalking into conflict”?

Perhaps the reality is that there is no free lunch. Huntington recognised that the “dangerous source of a global internationalised war is the shifting balance of power between civilisations and their core states”.