They came from different sides of the world and were meeting for the first time. For everyone’s sake, we hoped they’d be on speaking terms by the time they arrived at our event. Because if their countries ever truly fell out, this incongruous pair could end up taking us closer to World War III.
It was June 2022 and U.S.-China relations had plunged to a new low. Our guests were meeting in Singapore, the Switzerland of the modern era: a neutral place to meet at a time of tension. I had moved to Singapore two years previously to join the small team that ran the Shangri-La Dialogue, a big annual security summit. After a lull in face-to-face diplomacy caused by the pandemic, we were finally up and running.
This article is adapted from Westlessness: The Great Global Rebalancing by Samir Puri (Hodder & Stoughton, 448 pp., €28.99, July 2024).
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin made his entrance. The besuited and baritone-voiced Austin towered over his counterparts. He spoke in measured tones, but during his speech, he berated the Chinese defense minister for the “unsafe, aggressive, unprofessional behavior” of China’s warplanes and ships around Taiwan. His key message was crystal clear.
“More members of the U.S. military are stationed here than in any other part of the world: more than 300,000 of our men and women,” he said, referring to the regions spanning the Indian and Pacific oceans, China’s backyard. Austin reiterated Washington’s promise to defend its allies, including Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand, while drawing closer to India, a fellow democracy.
China’s defense minister later took the stage. Wei Fenghe was dressed in military uniform and sharply saluted the audience, a gesture that conveyed the regimented nature of China’s system. On behalf of his leaders in Beijing, he delivered a litany of complaints.
Wei accused Austin of “smearing” China’s good name while pointing out the United States was trying to “hijack countries in our region and target one specific country,” namely his own. “Global affairs should be handled through consultation by all stakeholders, instead of being dictated by just one country,” he said of the United States. Wei warned Austin: “If anyone dares to split Taiwan from China, the Chinese will not hesitate to fight to crush any attempt of Taiwan’s independence.”
At least they were talking to one another—even if it was not particularly diplomatic.
Later on, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky beamed in live from his bunker in Kyiv. He appeared as a veritable Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, his presence a warning to Asians of the perils awaiting them if their resident authoritarian behemoth acted as Russia had done in his country, invading and killing without remorse. As the audience applauded Zelensky, we endorsed the idea that preserving Western, and most of all U.S., global leadership was the best path to averting yet more chaos. The Chinese officials in the room seemed less enthused, and Wei wasn’t clapping.
As China has leant Russia a helping economic hand, allowing Russia to cope with G-7-led sanctions, the West has reacted with alarm. Notions of there being a league of authoritarians who seek to topple Western global hegemony have gained credence. This is an understandable but ultimately misleading way to interpret the emerging world order.
I wondered if a stage-managed tale of “evil authoritarians” and “virtuous democracies” camouflaged more than it elucidated. For a start, the summit’s host, Singapore, was as wealthy and high-functioning a state as one could imagine for its size, but it had eschewed Western-style democracy ever since independence from British and then Malay rule. It has balanced simultaneous friendships with Western countries and China while never vocally picking a side between them, hence its reputation for neutrality in Asia.
I was also struck listening to Prabowo Subianto, then Indonesia’s defense minister and now its president-elect, describe Indonesia—Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the 16th-largest in the world—as a “survivor of colonialism” from Dutch rule while praising China’s historical role in Asia. Prabowo told the gathering, “Your enemy is not necessarily my enemy,” words he borrowed from Nelson Mandela to remind us Indonesia was not recruitable into an anti-China alliance.
A cynic might say there is nothing new to see here. People always complained about the Western countries—including plenty of Westerners—while enjoying some of their fruits and rejecting others, so what was new? Was I simply learning ever-present truths by living far from home?
But fresh themes were also coming into play. In 2024, the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), an acronym coined in the early 2000s for these emerging economies, expanded to BRICS+ as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates accepted their invitations to join the club. Western countries were not invited to the annual BRICS summits, where Chinese officials spoke portentously about a new era dawning.
Western skeptics rolled their eyes at this, arguing the BRICS nations’ marriages of convenience hardly competed with the West’s deeper bonds. I would not dismiss these developments as a failing fad. Significant chunks of the world have already started acting as if the West is ceasing to be the dominant force it once was.
We are fast passing the peak era of global Western power and influence. The “collapse of the West” is too sensationalist. But there is a transition underway from an era of unbridled Western global influence to one of contested Western influence.
This need not spell the West’s doom. Nevertheless, there will be changes. Even the greatest skeptics of China’s continuing economic ascent, or of Russia’s long-term prospects as an imperial state, or of the viability of the BRICS+ project, have to concede one thing. For the Western countries to perpetuate their global leadership roles in the coming decades, they must adapt to changing realities. In demographics, share of global wealth, cultural prestige, and other critically important indicators of civilizational power, a grand transition is underway. Although we cannot yet predict precisely where it is headed, some observations are already becoming clearer.
The tactics that once worked for the Western countries in perpetuating their influence, such as relying on the combined economic help of the G-7 countries to decisively influence world affairs, or assuming that the Western countries and their allies represent the peak of modernity for others to aspire toward, are simply not going to suffice under changed circumstances.
The world is facing real epochal change as more centers of meaningful power and influence multiply outside of the West’s reach. This includes rivals such as Russia and China, but also ostensible Western partners like India, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, which cannot be assumed as remaining in thrall to Western power. For the West, it will not be enough merely to endure these changes; it needs to actively maneuver to preserve its global influence.
Some Westerners would like to gain inspiration from the world wars and the Cold War, where the Western democracies toiled against opposing forces before emerging triumphant, validated and expanded. These are poor analogies for the evolving era of Westlessness, which draws its historical focus from troubled past relations between Western and non-Western peoples.
Post-colonial resentments can take on new meanings in a less-Western era. They have arisen not only from memories of subjugation in the last century, but by holding subsidiary status in world affairs after independence. To take a specific example, France has struggled to preserve its influence in West Africa in recent years, as locals have enthusiastically pushed out the former colonizer in countries such as Mali and Niger.
More generally, several Western governments have endured global criticism for supporting Israel during its war in Gaza, following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas. This criticism sometimes used the language of “resisting settler colonialism” to criticize Israel and those backing it in the United States and other Western states.
Those wishing to silence such criticism should be warned. The diversity of voices shaping world affairs is only going to heighten in the future. When South Africa brought a case against Israel’s conduct of this war to the International Court of Justice in the Hague, attracting support from numerous other states, we were glimpsing into the future of world affairs.
In Asia, sometimes geopolitics trumps post-colonial grudges. Chinese maritime harassment of Philippine vessels around the Second Thomas Shoal has encouraged the Philippines to bolster its security ties to the United States. The need to protect itself against China has eclipsed any lingering post-colonial resentment in the Philippines toward Washington—at least for now.
There are events, and then there are trends in world affairs. Too many observers fixate on the former; taking time to appreciate the latter is becoming increasingly vital.
