Has the West lost it? - Kishore Mahbubani

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

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

In
Kishore Mahbubani's timely polemic, he argues passionately that the
West can no longer presume to impose its ideology on the world, and
crucially, that it must stop seeking to intervene, politically and
militarily, in the affairs of other nations. He examines the West's
greatest follies of recent times: the humiliation of Russia at the end
of the Cold War, which led to the rise of Putin, and the invasion of
Iraq after 9/11, which destabilised the Middle East.
Yet, he argues,
essential to future world peace are the Western constructs of democracy
and reason, which it must continue to promote, by diplomacy rather than
force, via multilateral institutions of global governance such as the
UN. Only by recognising its changing status, and seeking to influence
rather than dominate, he warns, can the West continue to play a key
geopolitical role.

'Kishore Mahbubani might well be the most
intelligent, friendly and doggedly persistent critic of the West. In
this brief book, he delivers some of his trademark analysis and pungent
observations. We should all think of it as the cold shower that is
urgently needed to revive the West' Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World