China and India are rising nations and the West has failed to come to terms with their ascension, former diplomat and Asia advocate Kishore Mahbubani said recently.

The West can no longer dominate the world

Mahbubani made these remarks about the shifting of the power base eastwards while speaking to Andrew Moody, a senior correspondent with China Daily, published on Jan. 28.

Mahbubani said the West "ought to understand that this is not a world it can dominate anymore", especially since "three of the top four economies in the world are now Asian":

"It needs to ask itself the question as to what practical and pragmatic changes it needs to make to get used to this world but it is not doing that."

Back to default position

In addition, Mahbubani argued that the world is returning to a default position that has existed for 1,800 out of the last 2,000 years -- with China and India being the two biggest economies.

He also believed the West should find a new way of engaging with China.

This is because the idea that China can be contained is a "great delusion".

China needs to communicate better

Shortly before the interview, the 70-year-old had attended the Third Understanding China Conference, where he lauded the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as the greatest effort of its kind in human history.

But he also said China needs to communicate like a "major global power", especially in the context of negative stories of debt overload and corruption on projects in Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

The West assumed wrongly

Mahbubani continued by saying that the rise of Asia was taking place at a time when the West was going through a moment of "absolute hubris" -- where an excessive sense of confidence has taken over:

"The assumption was that the West could keep going on autopilot, but it was precisely the wrong time for it to turn on that mechanism because it was when Asia began waking up in a serious way.

It was a time for the West to do a strategic U-turn and give up on the idea that it can keep dominating the world and intervening in so many conflicts."

He attributed this sense of "hubris" in the West to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the book, The End of History and the Last Man, written by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama.

While Mahbubani said that Fukuyama was a "wonderful person", his book did a lot of "brain damage" to the West.

"End of history" fallacy

This was because Fukuyama opined that Western liberal democracy would be the final form of governance standing in the world, therefore, bringing about "the end of history".

His views stand in stark contrast to Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilisations -- another one big-idea book written in response to Fukuyama's -- in which Huntington argued that humankind in the future would be fighting wars not between countries, but cultures.

Huntington also raised the fundamental differences in views between the West and most of Asia, arguing that the West's idea of a "universal civilisation" is directly at odds with the "particularism of most Asian societies".

Rising tensions between China and the United States in recent years have bolstered his claims, while Fukuyama has postponed "the end of history".

Both China & the West contributed much to humankind

Nevertheless, Mahbubani said the West is not necessarily in decline. 

Nor does he want to make light of the West's contribution to the humankind.

He told China Daily:

"We are living in a time where this great Western project to improve the human condition has succeeded.

The West should be celebrating and saying, 'Hooray! We did it!' but it is instead clearly depressed."

Last three decades good for humanity

He continued by saying that contrary to what most of the West think, "the last 30 years have been the best for human history since history began".

This is because while 75 percent of the world's population in 1950 were living in extreme poverty, including him, much of the people in the world have since been lifted out of poverty.

And a great deal of this achievement has to do with the contribution of China's former "paramount leader" Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up initiative, which brought 800 million people out of poverty:

"Deng Xiaoping will go down as the greatest leader of the 20th century, even greater than Churchill or anybody, because he picked his country up at a painful and even tormented time after the 'cultural revolution' and turned it around.

He carries out the largest and most revolutionary transformation of China and opens it up to the world."

You can read his interview with China Daily here.

Consistent with past views

Mahbubani had expressed similar views previously.

Like many other professional political watchers, he is of the view that the "Asian century is here to stay", and that the West has got to get used to this fact.

He also told the Americans that they have a fundamental misunderstanding of China today, saying that the Chinese people are much more free than the West like to think.

In fact, he called his latest book, Has the West Lost it? A Provocation, which was published in April 2018, a "gift" to them, to wake them up to "a new reality".

He echoed the same views with The WorldPost in a 2017 interview as well, saying it is inevitable that the US proceeds to becoming number two in the world.

Therefore, the US should drop its policies of unilateralism and instead, start constructive policies of multilateralism.

Since taking office in January 2017, US President Donald Trump has pulled out of a number of global agreements, such as the Paris climate agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, the United Nations (UN) cultural organisation UNESCO, and the UN Human Rights Council.

Top image via Long Now Foundation/YouTube