Kishore Mahbubani: The Dream Palace of the West

In his essay “The West’s Last Chance” (January/February 2026), Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, correctly divines the future trajectory of world order. “The global South,” he writes, “will decide whether geopolitics in the next era leans toward cooperation, fragmentation, or domination.” He’s also right in asserting that “this is the last chance for Western countries to convince the rest of the world that they are capable of dialogue rather than monologue.” Yet to have a dialogue, one must listen. The sad truth is that the West does not seem willing to listen to the global South.

The countries of the global South do not all share the dominant Western perspectives about world order. Stubb emphasizes the challenges posed by China and Russia. But many of the 3.3 billion Asians who are not Chinese, along with many of the approximately 1.5 billion people who live in Africa and the over 660 million who live in Latin America, view China and Russia differently. Western policymakers rarely try to understand why. China and Russia may loom menacingly in Western imaginations, but people in the global South do not think of them in that way—nor should they be expected to. Indeed, the rest of the world has had as much, perhaps more, to fear from the West in recent history as it has from the West’s autocratic competitors. To his credit, Stubb urges the governments of Western countries to take the demands and interests of the global South seriously. But engaging with the global South is not just an exercise in listening. It also requires Western governments to reassess their own positions and approaches to a world they have long taken for granted.

HIGH HORSES

Consider, for instance, the war in Ukraine. Many countries in the global South have condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was and is illegal. Yet when Western governments imposed sanctions on Russia, most other countries didn’t follow suit. Instead, they maintained normal relations with Russia. In December 2025, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the leader of the world’s largest democracy, received Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi with a 21-gun salute, reminding the West that its efforts to ostracize Russia would fail.

The West insists that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. Of course, Ukraine never attacked Russia, but the West’s policies toward Moscow since the collapse of the Soviet Union helped precipitate the crisis. Many leading Western thinkers, including the American diplomat George Kennan and the Australian intellectual Owen Harries, had warned decades ago that the eastward expansion of NATO would eventually provoke a Russian backlash. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva captured a more nuanced view on the war in Ukraine when he said, in May 2022, “Putin shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But it’s not just Putin who is guilty. The United States and the EU are also guilty. What was the reason for the Ukraine invasion? NATO? Then the United States and Europe should have said: ‘Ukraine won’t join NATO.’ That would have solved the problem.” A 2015 video in which the American political scientist John Mearsheimer explains how the West provoked Russian aggression, drawing from his 2014 essay in these pages, has been watched over 30 million times on YouTube—and widely shared in the global South.

Some Western leaders dismiss these views as amoral and as anathema to the principles that Western democracies seek to uphold in the world. Here, the simultaneous fighting in Ukraine and Gaza in 2024 and 2025 undermined Europe’s moral standing. Europeans have rightfully expressed horror over the killings of innocent civilians in Ukraine, but EU leaders remained mostly silent as Israel destroyed Gaza. Not only have many more civilians died in Gaza than in Ukraine, but Israeli military actions, according to estimates published in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, may have led to the deaths of five to ten percent of Gaza’s prewar population—a staggering figure, exponentially higher than the toll of Russia’s war in Ukraine. No one respects an adulterous priest who preaches marital fidelity in church. But this is how European leaders are seen in the global South. And it’s a key reason why the West is losing the rest.

Since many global South countries have also suffered the consequences of the Ukraine war (with many African countries seeing aid they once received from Europe diverted to Ukraine), they naturally welcomed U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to end the war. By contrast, EU leaders have unwisely been trying to thwart Trump’s efforts by encouraging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not to compromise on a peace deal.

In theory, when Trump backed away from confronting Russia and cut off U.S. financial flows to Ukraine earlier this year, the EU could have stepped in to bridge the gap. As Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk put it in March, “500 million Europeans are begging 300 million Americans for protection from 140 million Russians who have been unable to overcome 50 million Ukrainians for three years.” But to replace lost American funding, the EU leaders would have to be brave and cut domestic spending, demanding sacrifices from their own populations. None of the leaders of EU countries have so far dared to significantly cut the welfare benefits of their own populations to support the war in Ukraine. Instead, they have been trying to illegally seize Russian assets in Europe, violating the multilateral principles that Stubb advocates.

In short, instead of isolating Russia, the EU has effectively isolated itself from both the global South and from Trump’s United States. The EU would improve its standing in the global South significantly were it to better support Trump’s efforts to find a compromise with Russia. A long-term détente between the EU and Russia is possible if both sides reconstruct Ukraine as a bridge between them rather than as a knife in Russia’s back.

GOOD LISTENING

If the EU has mismanaged its relations with Russia, a middle power, it has performed equally poorly with regard to China, a budding superpower. A massive shift has taken place in EU-Chinese relations. In 2000, the combined GDP of the EU countries was roughly seven times as big as China’s GDP. Now, both are about the same size. By 2050, the GDP of the EU will be about half the size of China’s. And yet the EU countries speak condescendingly toward China and have blocked deals that would productively strengthen ties, such as the EU-Chinese investment agreement.

The EU leaders will defend such actions by invoking their moral commitments to democracy and human rights in the face of an authoritarian China. In so doing, they believe that they are on the right side of history. But for over 2,000 years, Chinese people have thrived when they had a strong, effective central government that ruled wisely. Under the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese people have enjoyed the best 40 years of human and social development in 4,000 years of Chinese history. As a result, the CCP enjoys a great deal of respect, support, and legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese people—and in many global South countries, as well.

China’s government is certainly not perfect. It makes mistakes. It is still trying to extricate the Chinese economy from challenges such as the enormous debt in the real estate sector and diminished consumer confidence. But it is also one of the most effective governments in the world. Just see how it has driven China’s share of global manufacturing from six percent in 2000 to roughly 30 percent today, a share that could reach 45 percent by 2030. Western leaders and pundits who cast the CCP as a villain and call for the equivalent of regime change in Beijing are unaware that they look perfectly ridiculous in the eyes of the 88 percent of the world’s population that lives outside the West.

Stubb offers wise advice to his fellow Europeans. “Governments of the global West,” he writes, “can maintain their faith in democracy and markets without insisting they are universally applicable; in other places, different models may prevail.” The global South would enthusiastically support this approach, as well as Stubb’s analysis that “a rules-based world order underpinned by a set of well-functioning international institutions that enshrine fundamental values remains the best way to prevent competition leading to collision.”

The sad truth is that the West does not seem willing to listen to the global South.

Stronger multilateral institutions are the answer. Yet, as Stubb emphasizes, these institutions need reform to accommodate rising powers, especially China and India. Here, too, sadly, European countries stand in the way. Stubb is right in saying that the UN Security Council’s list of permanent members needs to be changed. I have proposed a “7-7-7 formula” for Security Council reform that would see the body made up of seven permanent, seven semipermanent, and seven periodically elected members. The permanent members would be major powers representing each region: Brazil, China, the EU (represented by France and Germany), India, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States. The next 28 most influential powers (based on population and GDP) would take turns filling the seven semipermanent seats, and the final seven seats would be filled by the remaining UN member states, also on a rotational basis. This approach would ensure that the Security Council will always be representative in terms of geography, demographics, and economic influence.

There is also a simple way to jump-start the process: the United Kingdom could give up its permanent seat to India. In 2000, the British economy was 3.5 times as large as India’s. By 2050, India’s could be four times as large as the United Kingdom’s. The United Kingdom should make amends for the plunder of British colonial rule—and accept the shifting distribution of global power—by giving India its seat. To be sure, the United Kingdom will be reluctant to give up its veto power, but such a move could help the country come to grips with its changing role in geopolitics. When the United States seems increasingly unreliable as an ally and when the United Kingdom has suffered reputational damage for hewing close to the American line in recent decades, London would gain greatly from strengthening its relationships with other countries. By staging a grand, historic reconciliation with India and simultaneously taking the lead in pushing for much-needed Security Council reform, the United Kingdom can reposition itself as a friend and champion of the global South. It can also use the opportunity to negotiate binding exchanges with India and other countries that would benefit from Security Council reform to help ensure that the United Kingdom retains significant geopolitical leverage even after it surrenders its veto. The United Kingdom could set itself up for success in the decades to come rather than cling futilely to the ultimately unsustainable advantages it accrued for itself in the past.

The West is equally reluctant to reform the International Monetary Fund. In theory, IMF voting shares are supposed to reflect a country’s share of global GDP. Yet today, even though the EU countries combined and China have similar shares of global GDP (the EU has about 15 percent, China about 17 percent), the EU’s voting share is 26 percent, whereas China’s is six percent. The EU has fiercely resisted lowering its voting shares. It is also absurd that the IMF has never been headed by any non-European in its over 80 years of existence. Failing to reform the IMF will drive countries to depend more on parallel institutions and programs set up by China, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative.

Stubb’s ultimate recommendation is a wise one: “A new symmetry of power among the global West, East, and South would produce a rebalanced world order in which countries could deal with the most pressing global challenges through cooperation and dialogue among equals.” But achieving this symmetry of power will require a dialogue among equals. A good dialogue requires good listening. Unfortunately, the 12 percent of the world’s population that lives in the West hasn’t yet learned the art of listening to the remaining 88 percent with whom they share the planet. If Stubb’s essay provokes a new process of good listening in the West, especially in Europe, it will have served a useful purpose.