On Monday, I wrote an article pointing out that the era of Western hegemony may be over, due to population growth and economic development in other parts of the world. A country’s power is roughly equivalent to its share of global GDP, and the Western share has been falling since 1990.
I concluded that “Western countries may just have to live with it”.
Right on cue, Janan Ganesh has penned a similar article for the FT. His piece is framed around recent criticism of World Cup-host Qatar and all the Westerners who’ve been paid to take part. Ganesh writes:
To judge by the criticism of Qatar, lots of people are psychologically unprepared for the rest of this century. Whether or not China surpasses the US, the centre of world power is likely to creep away from the established democracies. (Look at projections of the biggest economies in 2050.) There will have to be a modus vivendi.
He has a point. The world’s five biggest economies (in PPP terms) are: China, the US, India, Japan and Germany. That’s three Western and two non-Western. In 2050, the five biggest economies will be: China, India, the US, Indonesia and Brazil. That’s one Western and four non-Western.
We can barely afford to boycott Russian energy today. Trying to impose ‘our values’ on the rest of the world will only get more challenging as the West’s power ebbs.
The brouhaha surrounding Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup illustrates this perfectly. Players and commentators, notably the ex-England captain Gary Neville, have been roundly criticised for not boycotting the tournament to protest Qatar’s human rights record.
There’s just one problem: we need Qatar’s gas. So unless Neville’s critics plan to boycott their central heating this winter, they haven’t got the moral high ground.
Before this year, Qatar was the second largest gas supplier to the UK and the sixth largest gas supplier to the EU. By next year, it will probably be the EU’s third or fourth largest gas supplier. Since Russia began reducing supplies through the Nord Stream pipeline back in June, European leaders have been practically begging Qatar for more gas.
The EU’s fifth largest gas supplier, Algeria, isn’t exactly a shining beacon for human rights either. According to Freedom House, both Qatar and Algeria are “not free” countries – along with Russia, China and Iran.
Western countries face a choice: we can continue doing business with the rest of the world, including all those resource-rich countries in the Middle East, or we can insist that everyone respects ‘our values’. But we can’t do both.
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Na, we can just realign our values with theirs. Rigging elections, stalking and arresting people for protesting the regime and blaspheming against it’s ideology, gaslighting and brainwashing them over bogus demons and evils, plundering their wealth and building a universal digital surveillance gulag that drip feeds it back to them at just enough to keep them alive but nothing more. Yeah that’s a great idea, I wonder if anyone’s though of it?
We always did business with the rest of the world and we never insisted they respect our values. If we’d done that we would never have been able to sell them so many arms
(yes irony recognised)…
IMO opinion, financial involvement apart, the main reason the government has been denying the Lab leak only-just-still-theory, knowing the data is against zoonotic spillover, is because they want the news to come out slowly, so there is no danger of a big dramatic story demanding a response. They know they have no levers to pull with regard to China and their total weakness and capitulation would have been laid bare (or rather, made even more obvious). If the news trickles out, they don’t have to respond to a big news event or implement a substantial response to ensure it never happens again.
Interesting hypothesis.
The story threatened to break earlier in the pandemic with clear calls for demands for compensation. There was a hint of real buy in and anger, with MP’s calling for properly dealing with China. There was a sense it could gather momentum. People had been locked down and they were angry and it had had a huge effect on their lives. I was thinking “what are they gonna do?” – they quite literally can’t afford for this to turn into a dramatic opinion swing against China because they have done nothing to insulate our economy from the effects of that and their idiotic engagement without conditions policy will be laid bare.
More likely there has been too much involvement by the USA and maybe the wider west through financing and sharing in such experiments, maybe the USA is worried about law suits being brougfht for damages.
The UK and US are up to their necks in the research labs, financing and coverup of this also.
Yes of course. The reason I think this may have been a secondary factor though is that, unlike where the vaccines are concerned the scientists involved could have been thrown under the proverbial bus and govt culpability shifted. China is definitely to blame for covering up the outbreak and lab records and samples. It actually becomes pretty handy to have a real villain. People rally behind the narrative and you can shift some of the blame for your policy impacts. IMO that they didn’t take that option could well have been out of concern for China, and I don’t mean a direct concern for China’s wellbeing but rather because they absolutely know for the sake of the economy, they need to avoid a Cold War.
Yep..China didn’t force us to,’lockdown’…Boris and the mother Fuck**s in government did..never forget where the blame lies…
Too true !
It won’t go down well with the left but the British Empire actually clamped down on many of the barbaric practices they encountered in the savage lands.
The West has committed suicide. There was no reason for us not to have maintained our strong economic and manufacturing positions. The elitists who control the West’s institutions are deliberately creating food and energy scarcity while simultaneously abolishing our liberty. It sickens me, frankly.
1930s eugenics (and its consequences) by other means. In my opinion.
That link to the ONS is interesting. The “Closer look at gas” seems to mix up percentages re unit volume and the cash “volume” re both import and export of gas. Not obvious if the changes are real demand or financial inflation.
A sentence starting with In 2050 is always sufficient to discard a complete article. I seriously doubt the author would have predicted the events of November 1989 correctly immediately after the celebrations for the 40th anniversary of the GDR in October 1989 were over. Him being able to predict correctly what will have happened in 28 years is impossible. He may be true by accident. But until 2050, we won’t know this, and hence, discussing it is useless.
In the UK at least this statement is false. There is enough gas under our feet to last us a century.
Neither do we ‘impose our values on others’, woke megacorps that bang on about Pride all summer only do so in their western regional subsidiaries. In the middle east and asia not so much as a peep.
Quatar is mostly an uninhabited desert. Hence, drilling for gas (or oil) is possible there. In the UK, this can’t be done without platoons of masked housewives sitting on borough councils immediately swarming all over the place and crying something like “I don’t understand what you’re doing here! This is scary, scary, scary!! Stop it immediately!!!”.
Democracy can only work if politicians aren’t professionals. If they are, they necessarily have to pander to whatever is currently popular with their electorate, no matter how stupid it might be (and what becomes popular with the electorate is largely controlled by the people who control TV).
The way China is going, I’m not going to put a bet on them being top dog in 2050.
India seems to have a good balance between young population, education and tech. It’s main problem is a lack of natural resources of its own. Brazil has a young population but perennially disappoints, Malaysia has similar problems to India.
I foresee the next major conflicts happening in Asia over access to natural resources like Coal, Oil, Gas and Uranium. Europe is basically consumed with becoming Africa, Africa will remain poor and starved of finance, exploited only for its natural resources. South America will be exactly the same as it is now, mired with corruption, and poverty for 90%.
Despite all its problems, the US is likely to still be the big dog. With no real regional threats, plenty of resources and financial clout even a diminished, democrat run sh*thole that it is becoming will still outlive anything else on the planet.
If you add up the unforced policy errors of the UK, let alone the west as a whole, over the past two or thgree decades it is clear our decline is a chosen path. The political class prefers for us a life of poverty and weakness when it could have been otherwise.
Similar errors were made in earlier decades too but they were not as immediately damaging as recently, in my view.
I doubt there is time to recover and there is certainly no appetite for it among the self designated elites. If we had better people it would be worth the effort.
What a shame so many good people in the UK and the west will suffer so badly as well as my descendants anmd maybe me.
It’s the generations behind mine that I fear for. The poor buggers.
…the thing is Hux, none of us decide what we get, and we all tend to get on with it! I’m so bloody annoyed at the young people I know, including my own family, that they are just going to have to deal with the crap they are bringing onto themselves….
My own dad ended up fighting in WW2, I don’t think it was what he expected, but ‘shit happens’…and the next gen’ will have to get on with it. I’m actually more bothered about us, now…and what we can do to make our lives liveable…but I know where you are coming from…
I understand your point ebg and unfortunately too many of my family have gone along with the crap but I still have feelings of guilt, as if I let them down. But, I made my anti position clear from day one, even before I had sussed how serious our predicament.
Ethnic minorities! White Europeans are the minority race of the world & they are the ones destroying it !
……of the five biggest ‘projected economies’ three of them are already founding members of BRICS, along with Russia….while Indonesia is close to joining..
the world is tipping towards the global,south…
We can either be part of it or follow the USA into the abyss….
Watching NATO countries, especially in Europe, discuss and disagree about price capping Russian energy, (the energy they are desperate for!!)….while Russia neither needs to sell to them, and who have also already said they won’t sell to anyone imposing a price cap…(LOL!) ….has got to be one of the most ridiculous, cringeworthy and embarrassing things ever…it’s like watching Nero fiddle while Rome burns…
I have no idea how we have got to the state of being ruled by such utter morons…but here we are….
Since the anti-British Establishment has imported millions from these places over the past 25 years “our” values no longer exist.
Well, there are still a few native British enclaves which haven’t been enriched by the importation of millions with very different values (I live in one of them) but they won’t last for very much longer when the influx has been ramped up to 504,000 in one year, plus 50,000 criminal migrants.
Perhaps that was the anti-British Establishment’s Baldrick-style cunning plan: import “very different values” so that in 20 years’ time they can claim these “very different values” are actually “our values.”
Problem solved.
The future is unwritten, and all geo-political prophecies are simply propagandist attempts to push an agenda.
In any case instead of attempting to mould the world in this sort of power block and competitive fashion (‘this lot are going to rise up and reign supreme over that lot’) wouldn’t it be better to deal with simple morality and practicality – what is the best way for human beings across the world to live and organise themselves?
Core human rights and values include material needs (food, shelter etc), non-discrimination, non-violence and, crucially in the context of this post – freedom (of thought and speech, movement, education, economic activity etc).
Ultimately the whole intrinsically divisive, oppressive and war-mongering nation-state system stands as a barrier against the fulfilment of these goals.
Sectarian and coercion-bssed governments must be replaced by non-violent and cooperative administrations (of the type that successfully operate at every other level of human organisation such as local government, business, education, clubs etc).
In fact the whole of march of progressive history is in this direction, with the multi-party liberal democratic model representing the current vanguard;
And the primitive, brutally oppressive state structures and ideologies maintained in eg the Russian Federation and CCP controlled China being indirectly heavily promoted in this article pointing in the exact opposite regressive direction.
The only reason that the democratic West is currently falling down so spectacularly in areas of both economic prosperity and freedom is the widespread adoption of self destructive and pernicious ideologies such as environmentalism (especially via its ‘Net Zero’ weapon of mass destruction), which are both pushing its internal structures and practices in the CCP-type tyrannical direction and concomitantly allowing fully tyrannical regimes to increase their relative global power.
So the way forward is the precise opposite of the one being endorsed here by Mr Carl.
Far from simply accepting the rise and ultimate universal takeover of the vicious and anti-human tyrannical model we should be working as hard as possible to reclaim the democratic freedoms and rights fought so hard for by our ancestors (eg by completely rejecting the quasi-marxist / fascistic Green agenda).
In so doing we will liberate both ourselves and ultimately our even more brutally oppressed brothers and sisters in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea etc.
Just remember, the seemingly all-powerful Soviet Union collapsed in a matter of months.
Again, the future is not pre-determined and is ours to create.
A Western Imperialist propaganda piece thinly disguised in faux moral platitudes…
What you are basically saying is ‘they’ have to change and adhere to ‘our’ norms and rules because they are the best….A World hegemony of the West…forced on them for their own good!
I think ‘they’ have had enough of that crap…..
China is an amazing and ancient civilisation…and as far from primitive as you can get.
One of the modern humanitarian wonders of the world is the hundreds of millions of Chinese lifted out of poverty…..’core human rights and values’ in action….something the West hasn’t come close to achieving…
China is a modern, forward looking, highly technically modern country….the idea that they need to change to suit us is hubris and hypocrisy on a massive scale. Are they perfect, hardly…but denying their achievements is wholly wrong.
This ignorance, in relation to other civilisations, is used as a typical Western Propaganda tool…reduce the history, people and their whole civilisation down to ‘primitive and brutal’….…Ignore 2000 years of Russian history, music, literature, architecture…just boil it all down to ‘Mad Vlad’…!
True cooperation means understanding and accepting that we are not all the same.
America is by some measure the most bellicose war-mongering nation the modern world has ever seen….and as such has visited more brutality, poverty and misery on other countries than anyone else….all in the name of democracy and free-speech!!
The road, to whatever you call freedom and democracy, is a journey people, society and civilisations have to make on their own…currently looking at the degraded and deprived norms of the supposed civilised West it’s hard to think anyone would choose it as a preferred model….
The claim:
A Western Imperialist propaganda piece thinly disguised in faux moral platitudes…
What you are basically saying is ‘they’ have to change and adhere to ‘our’ norms and rules because they are the best….A World hegemony of the West…forced on them for their own good!I think ‘they’ have had enough of that crap…..
The reality:
“In any case instead of attempting to mould the world in this sort of power block and competitive fashion (‘this lot are going to rise up and reign supreme over that lot’) wouldn’t it be better to deal with simple morality and practicality – what is the best way for human beings across the world to live and organise themselves?”
The claim:
China is an amazing and ancient civilisation…and as far from primitive as you can get.One of the modern humanitarian wonders of the world is the hundreds of millions of Chinese lifted out of poverty…..’core human rights and values’ in action….something the West hasn’t come close to achieving…
China is a modern, forward looking, highly technically modern country….the idea that they need to change to suit us is hubris and hypocrisy on a massive scale. Are they perfect, hardly…but denying their achievements is wholly wrong.
The reality:
“And the primitive, brutally oppressive state structures and ideologies [my bold] maintained in eg the Russian Federation and CCP controlled China being indirectly heavily promoted in this article point in the exact opposite regressive direction.”
The claim:
This ignorance, in relation to other civilisations, is used as a typical Western Propaganda tool…reduce the history, people and their whole civilisation down to ‘primitive and brutal’….…Ignore 2000 years of Russian history, music, literature, architecture…just boil it all down to ‘Mad Vlad’…!
The reality:
As above, the term ‘primitive and brutal’ was of course unambiguously linked to the tyrannical Putin-led government of Russia rather than anything to do with its ‘history, civilisation and people’.
Indeed one of my main motivations in these areas is sympathy for the suffering of that country’s viciously oppressed population –
A view that I am sure is shared by arguably Russia (and the world’s) greatest novelist, the anti-violence and anti-state oppression Leo Tolstoy – who is currently whirling at 600 rpm in his Yasnya Polyana grave 100 miles south of Moscow.
True cooperation means understanding and accepting that we are not all the same.
True cooperation (and compassion, tolerance, respect, non-violence etc) means recognising that human beings across the world are in fact identical at all important levels eg in terms of their capacity to both suffer and prosper.
Spiritually there is only one humanity, though surface individual differences are to be celebrated in a ‘variety is the spice of life’ sort of way; xenophobic totalitarianism attempts to deny and suppress both of these fundamental aspects of existence.
America is by some measure the most bellicose war-mongering nation the modern world has ever seen….and as such has visited more brutality, poverty and misery on other countries than anyone else.
And yet in spite of these hugely negative allegations you are also claiming that Russia and China both wish to and should co-exist in perpetuate with such a fundamentally malign force in a ‘multi-polar world of mutual respect and cooperation’.
How odd….
The road, to whatever you call freedom and democracy, is a journey people, society and civilisations have to make on their own…currently looking at the degraded and deprived norms of the supposed civilised West it’s hard to think anyone would choose it as a preferred model….
The only model which counts is the individual spiritual-moral one of compassion, self-restraint and self-sacrifice.
We need to find ways to become self-sufficient so that we are not dependant on these corrupt nations. Ah but wait… our government is corrupt too…