Yes, this is the Asian Century. But there’s still cause for Western optimism...
If the world is getting better, why is the West becoming more pessimistic? The simple answer is that the West has pursued a deeply flawed strategy since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Like the British defenders of Singapore in World War II, they had their guns pointed out to the sea in the South when the Japanese came by land from the North.
To put this point even more starkly, the West thought it had won a colossal and epic struggle with its dramatic victory in the Cold War. As a result, it didn’t notice that an even bigger struggle had begun with the “return” of Asia at the same time. China decided to re-join the world economy in the 1980s. India did so in the 1990s. The return of 3 billion Asians was obviously going to shake up the global economy. The West didn’t notice.
It didn’t notice because Western minds were intoxicated with an unhealthy opiate of triumphalism. Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay “The End of History” captured this well. As a result, the West developed a flawed interventionist strategy towards the rest. Many of the interventions led to disaster. Michael Mandelbaum notes that “the Clinton administration’s track record was not encouraging: it has promised order in Somalia and left chaos. It had gone to Haiti to restore democracy and had left anarchy. It had bombed in Bosnia for the sake of national unity but presided over a de facto partition.”
And 9/11 made things worse. It seduced the Neo-Con advisers of George W Bush to invade Iraq, after invading Afghanistan. A decade later, Europeans saw two-thirds of their refugees coming from three countries: Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.
But that was not where the real disaster was. As Western strategic thinkers were distracted, they didn’t see that the most important event in 2001 was not 9/11. It was China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. The entry of almost a billion workers into the global trading system would obviously result in massive “creative destruction” and the loss of many jobs.
Trump and Brexit are therefore the natural and logical results of a flawed Western strategy of not dealing with the real economic challenges to the West. While the West was distracted, China emerged. According to IMF statistics, in 1980, in PPP terms, America’s share of global GDP was 25% while that of China was 2.2%. In 2016, America’s share has shrunk to 15.5% while that of China has risen to 17.9%.
The relative decline of the WestThere are therefore sound strategic reasons for Western pessimism: From 1820 to roughly 1980, Western economic power either grew steadily or maintained a huge globally dominant position. In the past three decades, the combined GDP of North America and Western Europe has shrunk from 51.5% in 1990 to 33.45% in 2014.
An even more destructive strategic change happened at the same time. While the workers in the West suffered job losses and deteriorating incomes, the Western elite became super rich from accelerated globalization and the return of Asia.
RW Johnson describes well how American workers suffered: “Between 1948 and 1973, productivity rose by 96.7% and real wages by 91.3%, almost exactly in step. Those were the days of plentiful hard-hat jobs in steel and the auto industry when workers could afford to send their children to college and see them rise into the middle class. But from 1973 to 2015 – the era of globalization, when many of those jobs vanished abroad – productivity rose 73.4% while wages rose by only 11.1%. Since 2000 the wages paid to college graduates have fallen.”
A reason to be optimisticThe existential questions that the West faces today are quite simple. Is everything lost? Will Western power and influence steadily decline? Or is there hope for the West? Can the West also benefit from the resurgence of the rest?
The simple answer is that the West can benefit from the surge of the rest. 12% of the world’s population can be pulled along by the remaining 88%. To achieve this,
Western leaders and pundits need to make many significant psychological adjustments.
Instead of constantly trying to retain control of the world, the West should learn to share power. Asians should be allowed to run the IMF and World Bank. Equally importantly, Western pundits must drop their traditional condescension when speaking about the rest. Emerging Asian entities, like China, India and ASEAN, should be treated with more respect. India should be immediately given a seat on the UN Security Council, with the UK and France stepping aside.
All this sounds inconceivable to many Western minds. But until recently, it was also inconceivable that the rest could be more optimistic than the West. The West must now do the inconceivable to prepare for
the inevitable inconceivable world.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/ ... line-west/ 
