Has the West Lost It?

'A compelling warning ... It is hard to disagree with this advice from such a well-informed friend of the west' Martin Wolf, Financial Times

TheWest's two-century epoch as global powerhouse is at an end. A new worldorder, with China and India as the strongest economies, dawns. How willthe West react to its new status of superpower in decline?

InKishore Mahbubani's timely polemic, he argues passionately that theWest can no longer presume to impose its ideology on the world, andcrucially, that it must stop seeking to intervene, politically andmilitarily, in the affairs of other nations. He examines the West'sgreatest follies of recent times: the humiliation of Russia at the endof the Cold War, which led to the rise of Putin, and the invasion ofIraq after 9/11, which destabilised the Middle East.Yet, he argues,essential to future world peace are the Western constructs of democracyand reason, which it must continue to promote, by diplomacy rather thanforce, via multilateral institutions of global governance such as theUN. Only by recognising its changing status, and seeking to influencerather than dominate, he warns, can the West continue to play a keygeopolitical role.

'Kishore Mahbubani might well be the mostintelligent, friendly and doggedly persistent critic of the West. Inthis brief book, he delivers some of his trademark analysis and pungentobservations. We should all think of it as the cold shower that isurgently needed to revive the West' Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World

Değerlendirmeler

In the longer view, America's - and before that Europe's - dominance may come to be seen as a short aberration and the rise of China and other Asian nations as simply a reversion to the natural order of things. That at least is the key point of a provocatively titled book, Has the West Lost It?, by Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean academic and former diplomat. As many in America and Europe contemplate the dramatic changes to their world in the past few years, it's been getting a lot of attention.