The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea

by Bill Emmott

New companies and new ways of doing things inevitably threaten old ones. They threaten not just the power, prestige and livelihood of old-style companies but also of those who set the rules that help determine whether and how new companies or entities can enter the field: bureaucrats, both at national and at local level.

interest groups, introducing genuine, economy-wide deregulation, liberalising immigration, introducing full competition in cartelised sectors such as energy, the media, advertising, marketing, wholesale distribution and many others would produce a quiet, but dramatic transformation, even if done only in part. It would represent a real move towards openness.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmi, 1207–73

Those that have achieved revival in modern times have all done so through some new combination of openness and of restored or reactivated equality.

All these revival stories are about throwing off rigidities, whether cultural, social, political or economic, and thereby regaining the ability to adapt and evolve. They are about defeating interest groups that stand in the way of change and renovation, and diminishing the power of those groups.

In the end, the chief lesson from Sweden’s Houdini act concerns the value of achieving cross-party, cross-society consensus and, in relation to this, of persistence in carrying on with persuasion and with reforms for a sustained period of time.

come. A reasonable but simplified narrative of the Swedish transformation is that the country moved within 20 years from being one of the world’s most regulated rich economies, one in which state intervention and spending was one of the world’s highest outside the communist bloc, to being one of the most deregulated, with much lower levels of state intervention, taxes and spending.

Although size can make you more self-sufficient, it does not make you more dynamic, innovative or adaptable. Openness is needed too, aided always by equality.

Our demographic destiny is not a matter of being overrun or superseded by more demographically vigorous peoples. It will be a matter of adapting to and trying to overcome the economic, social and political consequences of ageing, which is itself a consequence of success. Given the past record of Western ideas in overcoming previous challenges, it would be unwise to bet against the West adapting to ageing too – especially since, as this chapter’s analysis will show, ageing is a phenomenon that is shared with much of the world, most notably the West’s biggest current rival, China. The proper bet will concern which of China (and other authoritarian regimes) or the West will adapt more successfully to ageing.

In the context of ageing societies, moreover, another aspect should be borne in mind. It is that the use of intelligent machines may prove constructive as much as destructive. What if it is not to be a matter of humans versus brainy machines but of humans enhanced by brainy machines?

But what, really, is meant by “working age”? If we are healthier than our parents and grandparents’ generation as we enter our 60s and 70s, and are enjoying a longer life expectancy, shouldn’t we rethink our working lives, too?

Adaptation to ageing societies will require a rethinking of what is meant by working age, which also means a rethinking of the whole cycle of our working lives, as well as a rethinking of public-pension entitlements, in terms of both their affordability and the incentives they create.

There is, however, one important silver lining to this cloud. It is that the West is not alone in having to adapt and rethink in this way. Ageing is a global phenomenon.

The result is that adapting to ageing feels similar to the task of adapting to climate change. It is hard to persuade people to make sacrifices or adjustments today in the cause of gains in the distant future for the sake of later generations, so a more incremental, ratcheting approach is required.

If people are to expect working lives lasting 50 years or more, the education they received when young is never going to be enough to prepare them for it. Employers and outsourced training provide most of the continuing education that workers need or want, but in a fluid and insecure labour market they cannot be relied upon to provide all of it. Forms of institutional supplement to that education are necessary but also can helpfully add to people’s confidence.

Human capital – education, experience, training, social skills – is becoming more important in our digital, information age than ever before.

Moreover, recent events in Ukraine and the South China Sea have led the West to fear that its attempt to place that Weberian notion of “legitimate use of physical force” within an accepted framework of international law might have run its course.

And so ideals, illusions and reality collided on September 11th 2001 and in the two wars – Afghanistan and Iraq – that followed. The eventual failure of those wars also flipped on its head the prevailing spirit in the West about military intervention overseas: from being a growing moral duty, in many eyes in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it reverted to being seen as an outgrowth of colonial heavy-handedness, arrogance and even brutality. “Responsibility to protect” turned into “responsibility to steer clear”.

The first is that the West has become economically much weaker, which has made it more politically divided, both between countries and within them. The second is that the military and political responses to 9/11 have made the situation in the Middle East and North Africa worse. The third is that Western, and especially American, intervention overseas has gone through a similar cycle to that which accompanied failure in Vietnam in the 1970s, of retreat and withdrawal from other international entanglements followed by remorse over the weakness that such withdrawal appears to imply.

There is no definitive estimate of their total since the costs go well beyond purely military budgets, but Linda Bilmes of Harvard University and Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University described it in the title of their book in 2008 as the Three Trillion Dollar War, which Stiglitz updated in a 2015 interview as a total cost of $5 trillion–$7 trillion – which can be compared with the US’s annual GDP which is now more than $18 trillion.

The rise in oil prices had several causes, not least the growing demand for energy, as for other commodities, in China. But interruptions, actual or feared, to the supply of oil played a big part too, interruptions that were exacerbated by a war in a country with large oil reserves – Iraq – that is in the neighbourhood of many other oil producers. The popular uprisings from 2011 onwards in the so-called “Arab spring” then added to the concerns about oil supply.

High oil prices act like a tax on the oil-consuming countries, which include Europe, the US and Japan, sapping households’ ability to spend on other things and raising costs for business. In 1998, the price of a barrel of crude oil fell to $10, which is also why one of the world’s biggest oil exporters, Russia, went bankrupt in that same year.

The legacy of the past decade and a half is painful and largely negative. It is clear that the weakened West now faces some pretty tough international-relations and security problems, all of which have been building for a long time. These problems fall into three separate categories, with a fourth as a general, contributory addendum. The one thing that unites them is the weak state of the West in responding, largely because of its economic troubles, along with the political divisions and stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off feelings that those economic troubles have created.

The three categories are, first, the pressures and demands of a rising great power (China) that is seeking to define its own space in world affairs and thereby to reinterpret or recreate international rules in its own interest. Second, the difficulty of dealing with a declining, somewhat paranoid former superpower (Russia) that is throwing its weight around in order to create (or preserve) its sense of national identity, and is seeking to prove that rules of the game do not apply to it. Third, what might best be termed the civilisational challenge posed by Islamic State, its precursors and no doubt its successors, violent groups all using an extreme interpretation of a mass religion to create a movement and an identity defined largely by its opposition to what the rest of the world – including China and Russia – considers as modernity and taking that battle to anywhere and everywhere they can. The contributory addendum is the problem of failed or failing states, especially in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, that provide the room and some of the recruits for this civilisational challenge and make it hard for outside powers to bring enduring stability to those failing states or to help settle their civil wars.

Contrary to Trump’s starting assumptions, of the three barbarian issues that are thumping on the gates of the open societies, the most fundamental and long-term one is not the violent brutality of Islamic State and its sort, even if that is the one that most often forces its way through the gates and into our cities. Nor is it the bully-boy behaviour of Putin’s Russia, a Russia President Trump seems inclined to do deals with, if it helps resolve other sources of instability. These are both difficult pressures but they can be managed, or eventually dealt with, by traditional means. Much more problematic is the rise of China and, more particularly, of the demands for special treatment and respect that that rise is bringing. This is an epochal event and challenge, not a case of firefighting or even traditional deterrence. China will prove President Trump’s most awkward foe.

With the notable exception of the long border with India, China has over the past 20 years settled all the territorial disputes on its land borders. But it has not settled disputes out at sea. These are becoming more important as China’s navy becomes more important and as trade and overseas investments become larger and larger. Moreover, modern weaponry and geopolitics suggest that if China were ever to be threatened militarily in the future, it would probably be from the sea or the air, not the land.

First used officially in 1947 by Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang government, this official map and its nine-dashed line has remained since then a stock part of Chinese foreign policy, although not one that was stressed until recently – which made neighbours hope it had been superseded. Recent events have proved that it has not.

In principle, the nine-dashed line violates the international status quo, which is also true of China’s long-standing claim to the Japanese islands in the East China Sea north of Taiwan, known in Japan as the Senkakus and in China as the Diaoyu. The various post-second-world-war treaties, along with the UN Charter and the later UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, have, on the face of it, established at least the rules governing maritime territorial sovereignty but also in the case of the Senkakus the specifics of which country holds sovereignty. This is what the West, and with it much of the rest of the world, thinks is the status quo, as laid down in international law and convention. But China believes in a status quo that dates back far longer, to before the country’s decline and semi-collapse.

a senior Chinese military official was challenged publicly about the basis for the nine-dashed line. Jaws dropped when he justified this claim not with any reference to international law or modern conventions, or even to the sort of historical documentation of 18th- or 19th-century trading and settlement activity that is the standard fare in territorial disputes, but rather to the history of China’s Han dynasty, more than 2,000 years ago. It was as if a modern Italian were to lay claim to control of the Mediterranean based on the history of the Roman Empire.

A further proof of this belief in Chinese exceptionalism was the country’s initiative in 2015 to launch a new development bank, the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), essentially as a China-led multilateral financial institution in competition with, or alongside if you prefer, the existing UN-sponsored banks such as the IMF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. By launching and guiding the AIIB, China must also hope that other Asian countries will come to see it as a benevolent regional leader rather than as a threat.

China can count only North Korea as a full ally, and it is a painfully unreliable and unpredictable one. Pakistan occasionally plays the role of Chinese ally, though mainly with the purpose of unnerving India and of balancing its power, or of showing the US that it cannot be taken for granted. Access to military bases abroad is one reasonable proxy for trust, friendship or dependence, and China has currently just one, a shared anti-piracy facility in Djibouti in East Africa, which it is busy expanding to become its first true overseas base.

China is also building closer connections with other neighbours and near-neighbours through its investment and trade facilitation projects known as “One Belt One Road” (OBOR), aiming to create a new “silk road” through Central Asia to match the historic trading route, and a similar maritime trading belt. It will take time, but OBOR is bound to add to China’s tally of friends and dependants, especially in Central Asia – which will put it in competition with Russia.

Russia’s firm allies number six countries, namely Syria (where it has air and naval bases) and the five states with which it has a collective security treaty: Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Belarus.

Russia for many years had a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, dating back to the cold war, which it gave up in 2002, but it has recently signed a new agreement to begin using the base again, alongside other foreign navies including that of the US. It has also had a close relationship with India, but that reflected India’s desire during the cold war to remain always independent of the West. In military matters India in those days interpreted “non-aligned” as meaning “be a democracy but also buy military hardware from the USSR”.

By contrast, the list of the US’s alliances and overseas military bases is long. In Asia it starts with Japan and South Korea, with which the US has long had formal security treaties and military bases galore, Singapore, where its naval vessels have basing rights, Thailand, New Zealand, Australia and the Philippines, and it has a surprisingly close (though informal) relationship with Vietnam, given the recent history of war.

One of the US’s closest allies, the UK, also is part of the Five Power Defence Arrangements that since 1971 have made the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore collectively interested – though not quite formally committed – in the defence of Malaysia and Singapore.

Today countries rich or poor, big or small, have many more choices and more freedom of action than they did in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s, say. They do not want to be bossed about by the West, or to be dependent on it for anything. They are perfectly able to play one great power off against another. They want respect and autonomy. They do not want to feel let down by it, as Japan and other Asia-Pacific countries have in the case of the demise of President Obama’s “Trans-Pacific Partnership” effort to set trade and investment rules in the region. They fear, understandably, that such American inconstancy will hand the initiative to China to set its own rules for the region – but they will likely continue to resist Chinese rule-setting rather than actively embrace it. For if polled under some duress to give an honest answer, far and away the vast majority of countries around the world would say that if they had to choose sides, they would choose the Western one against virtually whoever was on the other side, unless to do so would put them in mortal danger. Why? Not because they love the West. Many have plenty of reasons, especially historical ones, to hate it or at least be suspicious of it.

Russia sees Crimea and eastern Ukraine in a similar way that the UK sees Northern Ireland, with the added desire to retain influence over the rest of Ukraine.

Russia is keen to challenge international norms and laws, and to show that it remains a superpower that needs to be listened to. But its aims go beyond just looking good. It has also been trying to undermine the very Western solidarity and alliances that otherwise make Russia look alone and weak.

But responses to Russian efforts to intervene in the domestic politics of European countries, or its corruption of Western political systems, or its propaganda and its cyber-attacks, have been muted. Plenty of people, companies and countries want to do business with Russia and so prefer to take a brighter, rather sanitised view of what Russia has been doing.

For as long as Islamic State looks like a winner, one that might even establish a functioning, sustainable state with control over territory, it will have appeal. Young men will go to fight for it for both money and status. Women, even with their children, will go to support it, care for its sick and wounded, act as brides, help set up its imagined community. But this will end as soon as Islamic State ceases to look viable. By the end of 2016, it was in retreat and looking considerably less successful than it had a year earlier.

Defeats, cheaper oil, the ganging up against it by other Sunni Arab countries and groups, all will eventually cause the demise of this particular group and its leaders. With the end of Islamic State will not come stability in the Middle East, for it is as much a parasite upon instability and conflict as it is a cause of it, nor will it bring the end of jihadi terrorism: others will try to take its place, and both the knowledge and the wherewithal for terrorist violence are too widespread simply for it to disappear.

A more united and confident West would have thrown large amounts of money and effort into helping the countries neighbouring Syria – Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey chiefly – to look after the millions of refugees that are in camps there and to enable those refugees to stay and lead autonomous lives, which means working.

Yes, the barbarians are at the West’s gates. Certainly, China’s pressure to dominate its neighbourhood and be treated as an equal partner to the US is hard to deal with. By any stretch of the imagination, President Putin is an enormous thorn in Western sides. Iran, though not currently a direct opponent of the West, retains always the potential in both its power and its interests to become one. North Korea can always be relied upon to rock boats. Yet while the tactics of dealing with these challenges will always remain imperfect, awkward and hazardous, the strategy to deal with them is clear. It begins with allies, friendships and legitimacy: building them, nurturing them, not letting them disappear in a divisive morass, for they are the greatest assets the West has. Such assets are aided by hard military power but also depend crucially on the defence of clear principles and international institutions: the rules, laws, norms and bodies at whose creation Dean Acheson was present, and which matter so much to the many weaker countries in the world that are keen on Western leadership.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. Lord Acton, lecture to Bridgnorth Institute, 1877

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. John Adams, letter to John Taylor, 1814

Yet the West can still stand tall. Neither the authoritarian, officially communist China nor the illiberal, bully-boy, propagandist semi-democracy of Russia poses a true systemic alternative to the open, liberal societies that is attractive to others, except to other budding dictators, and the caliphate desired by Islamic State is hated by all but its own devotees.

Francis Fukuyama has in that sense so far been proved right in his famous 1989 essay, “The End of History”: the long historical and ideological battle over what is the best and most sustainable political and social model has been won by liberalism and democracy. Nothing new has come along to rival it. What has not happened, however, in the ensuing quarter century is the full demise of the old alternatives, especially the non-ideological one of brute dictatorship. They, in all their forms, caused trouble for liberal societies before 1989 and still cause trouble today.

A richer and more equal world is a more complicated one, but that price is well worth paying. Europe gave up its aspirations for empire during the decades immediately after 1945, and Japan had abandoned such aspirations in the rubble of defeat. What is special, rather, about this decade is the internal weakness of Western countries, which is leading to divisions within and between those countries, and fostering as on previous occasions the rise of purveyors of simpler solutions, based on identity, nationalism and strong leadership – top-down solutions that involve making open societies more closed, supposedly for their own good.

Revival for the West depends on dealing with the internal weaknesses, policy mistakes and self-entrapping habits of democracy that have made life so difficult over the past decade. Such a revival always requires leadership, as it did in the UK of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, or the more consensual revivals of Sweden in the 1990s under Carl Bildt, or Canada in the 1990s and 2000s under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. But the leadership that has succeeded in such cases has been a leadership that opens doors rather than closes them, that removes obstacles so as to release energies and new ideas, that takes privileges away from groups that have been exploiting and protecting them at the expense of the rest of society. And as such, it is a leadership that needs to build a broad base of public support if it is to succeed and be sustained.