Kishore Mahbubani: The West has engineered its own downfall

The West often wants to believe it’s the most virtuous civilization on planet Earth. It is lying to itself. So argues Kishore Mahbubani, former President of the UN Security Council. From the killing of Gaddafi, to silence on Gaza, to acting in ways which, in part, provoked Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the West has lost the support and confidence of the majority of the world’s population. The West must give up this self-deception, or find itself shouting commands at a world that is no longer listening. 

Our world is full of divides. Yet, the greatest divide is between the 12% of the world’s population who live in the West and the 88% who live outside. When the West looks at itself in the mirror, it sees itself as the most virtuous civilization on planet Earth, taking care of its own citizens and generously and selflessly making the world a better place. And when the rest of the world looks at the West, they see a trigger-happy, violent civilization which has killed more innocent people in unnecessary wars than any other civilization in recent decades. So where does the truth lie?

Sadly, the data doesn’t lie. Since the end of the Cold War, when the world was expected to receive a peace dividend, the West has involved itself in one misadventure after another. The results have been disastrous. The Brown University Watson School of International and Public Affairs’ Cost of War Project has estimated that at least 940,000 people were killed directly by violence in the post-9/11 wars between 2001 and 2023, and a further 3.6–3.8 million people died indirectly due to secondary causes such as diseases, malnutrition and so on. Many of these wars were initiated by the West.

Curiously, for a civilization that prides itself on intellectual honesty and deep introspection, there has been little reflection on how and why the West has gone so wrong with its constant interventions. Initially, the intervention in Afghanistan was legal and justified under international law, on the basis of UNSC Resolution 1386 (20 December 2001). Yet, after removing the Taliban government, which had harbored the Al-Qaeda terrorists, the West had no strategy for managing its exit from Afghanistan. Instead, it stayed on for 20 years in Afghanistan, only to go from rescuing the Afghan people from the Taliban government to returning the Afghan people to the Taliban government. And in those 20 years, apart from the soldiers who died in battle, over 100,000 Afghan civilians were killed or wounded. No one in the West has been held accountable for this incredible disaster.

Unlike the Afghan invasion, which was legal under international law, the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was illegal. The former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan bravely declared that it was illegal and was persecuted by the Bush Administration for stating the truth. Here, too, a huge number of innocent civilians lost their lives in an illegal war. Yet no one has been held accountable, although Western public opinion has reluctantly conceded that the war was illegal and unnecessary.

The Western reaction to the failed intervention in Libya has been even more callous. “We came. We saw. He died.” So said Hillary Clinton, the then US Secretary of State, proudly when Gaddafi was killed on October 20, 2011. Yet, while Gaddafi was alive, the majority of Libyans enjoyed a decent life, particularly from the 1990s ionwards, which was a period of relative political stability and economic growth. No war or conflict. Each Libyan household also received extensive welfare benefits from the state. GDP grew from US$ 31 billion in 1990 to $75 billion in 2010. Libya’s per capita GDP in 2010, at $11.6 thousand, was the highest in Africa. By 2020, 10 years after Gaddafi was removed, Libya’s GDP declined to $47 billion. Its GDP per capita declined to $6.7 thousand. Millions of ordinary Libyans were transported from a safe and secure existence to hell. The West never said sorry to them.

This callous indifference to the pain and suffering that the West has clearly wrought on so many innocent civilians undermines the Western self-belief that they are an inherently virtuous civilization. And the West is also unaware of how its claims to moral virtue have been further eroded by the manifest double standards it has applied when passing judgements on human rights violations.

For decades, the West had preached that torture was abominable and was outlawed by several human rights conventions. Indeed, the West had regarded the UN Convention against Torture, adopted on December 10, 1984, as a great leap forward. President Reagan stated, when transmitting the Convention to the US Senate for ratification in May 1988, that doing so would “clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.” Yet, when the Bush Administration became the first modern developed country to reintroduce torture in Guantánamo, the erstwhile defenders of human rights in Europe didn’t just fail to condemn the Bush Administration. They aided and abetted this torture with several “rendition” programmes, kidnapping people and sending them to countries where they face a high risk of torture or abuse.

The Western double standards on human rights were further exposed in the contrasting reactions of the West to the loss of innocent civilian lives in Ukraine and Gaza. Many Western leaders correctly expressed moral outrage when innocent Ukrainian civilians or children were killed in Ukraine. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, after the Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv in August 2025, said, “Another night of Russia’s relentless bombings struck civilian infrastructure and killed innocents.” Kaja Kallas, then EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, stated that “Russia once again deliberately targeted and killed Ukrainian civilians”. President Joe Biden, after the July 2024 Russian missile strikes that killed civilians, including children at Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt children’s hospital, described the attacks as a “horrific reminder of Russia’s brutality” and said that Russia had “targeted Ukrainian civilians.” The UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, responding to the same attack on the children’s hospital, described “attacking innocent children” as “the most depraved of actions.” Western leaders broadly described the killings as atrocities and war crimes. Yet, when many more innocent civilians, including children, were killed in the Gaza conflict, the same Western leaders remained largely silent on Gaza.

No single event has damaged the moral credibility of the West as much as Gaza has.

As modern cell phones have become ubiquitous, we have seen with our own eyes how millions of innocent Palestinian civilians have suffered in Gaza. The 88% of the world’s population who live outside the West have also heard the loud silence of the West on Gaza. Pankaj Mishra, the Indian novelist and author of The World After Gaza, said in January 2025, “Gaza has really damaged American institutions, Western institutions, international institutions, to an extent no previous war, no previous conflict has.” The Booker Prize-winning Indian novelist, Arundhati Roy, has said more starkly, “What is under the rubble in Gaza is not just the bodies of Palestinians, but the carcass of Western liberal democracy.”

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For a civilization that prides itself on intellectual honesty and deep introspection, there has been little reflection on how and why the West has gone so wrong with its constant interventions.

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Yet, even if Western external interventions and policies have been disastrous, many leading Western thinkers and politicians console themselves with the thought that domestically they still have the best-performing societies. Josep Borrell, the then European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said on 13 October 2022, “Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build … Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.”

There’s no question that people living in the modern, advanced Western societies still enjoy better standards of living than their counterparts in the Global South. The current citizens of the West are the beneficiaries of the wise and sound public policies made by their ancestors. But what are they leaving behind for their future generations? Will future generations in Europe and North America have equally good lives? Or will they see a steady tdecline?

Surveys show that most Western populations do not believe that their children and grandchildren will enjoy equally good lives. A January 2025 Pew Survey revealed that over 75% of respondents in Europe as well as in the US and Canada believed that their children would be financially worse off than their parents.

Indeed, even today, large segments of the population in the West have experienced a deterioration, not improvement, in their lives. The Brookings Institution reported in May 2026 that “In 2024, 45.5% of US households did not earn enough to make ends meet. In nearly every year since 2014, more than 40% of American households struggled to make ends meet.” The report added, “As it stands, the cost of living will never be affordable if wages do not substantially increase. Evidence shows that even though US productivity nearly doubled between 1979 and 2025, average hourly pay increased by only 34%. In other words, productivity gains have concentrated wealth among capital owners and the highest-earning Americans, hollowing out the middle class rather than driving broad-based wage growth.”

Angus Deaton and Anne Case have documented in Deaths of Despair that the US faces an epidemic of “deaths of despair”—that is, deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol—among midlife non-Hispanic white Americans. They wrote: “Deaths of despair among white men and women aged forty-five to fifty-four rose from thirty per one hundred thousand in 1990 to ninety-two per one hundred thousand in 2017. In every US state, suicide mortality rates for whites aged forty-five to fifty-four increased between 1999–2000 and 2016–17. In all but two states, mortality rates from alcoholic liver disease rose. And in every state, drug overdose mortality rates increased.”

Most Western eyes do not see a connection between their failed external geopolitical ventures and the internal despair of their populations. Actually, the two are linked. Money and resources wasted on unnecessary external interventions could have been better spent on their populations. Speaking about the Iraq war, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz wrote, “For one-sixth of the cost of the war, the US could put its Social Security system on sound footing for more than a half-century, without cutting benefits or raising contributions.”

Even if some thoughtful people in the West may agree with the arguments so far, acknowledging that many Western interventions in the Global South were unnecessary and disastrous, they would not in any way agree that the Ukraine war also reflects Western geopolitical incompetence. There’s no question that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was illegal. Russia deserves to be condemned for the loss of thousands of innocent lives.

Yet, when the West imposed sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine, it didn’t notice that 85% of the world’s population did not follow suit. Why not? Does this reflect a lack of moral integrity in the Global South? Or does it reflect a shrewd geopolitical assessment? When countries like Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa did not impose sanctions on Russia, this did not mean that they supported the Russian invasion. It signalled their rejection of the Western claim that the war in Ukraine was “unprovoked” and only Russia was to blame for the Ukraine invasion.

It’s truly shocking how many Western leaders have used the word “unprovoked” to describe the Ukraine war. President Joe Biden, US President, said, on 24 February 2022, “The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation, without justification, without necessity.” Around the same time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson described Russia’s action as a “brutal and unprovoked attack on a free and sovereign European country.” Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, said, “Today, we woke up to a changed world. Russia has launched a brutal and unprovoked attack on the sovereignty of Ukraine.” The leaders of G7 collectively described Russia’s action as “this unprovoked and completely unjustified attack on the democratic state of Ukraine.”

Little do these leaders realize that when they use the word “unprovoked” to describe the war in Ukraine, they are effectively insulting the intelligence of the countries of the Global South, including thoughtful leaders like Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He 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.”

This great gap in perceptions between the West and the rest on recent geopolitical developments is both surprising and paradoxical. In theory, our world is shrinking. We have more information available today, even from our cell phones, than at any other time in human history. Yet, when we witness the same recent events, the Western perceptions and those in the rest of the world seem to exist in two different universes. What is even more shocking is that most Western leaders and pundits seem completely unaware that they have lost the support and confidence of the majority of the world’s population. This is why the words of S. Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, resonated strongly in the Global South when he said, in June 2022, “Somewhere Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” A year later, in February 2023, the then German Chancellor Olaf Scholz admitted that Jaishankar “has a point.” Referring to the countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia, Scholz further stated, “We have to generally address the interests and concerns of these countries as a basic prerequisite for joint action.”

Despite the growing differences between the United States and Europe, both share a common concern on China and will work in one way or another to isolate and stop China. However, when they do so, they will find that the rest of the world will ignore them and continue engaging with China. Hence, instead of isolating China, the West will be isolating itself from the world.

At the end of the day, the refusal of the West to acknowledge that they have lost the rest represents a massive act of self-deception. The West wants to continue believing that it is still the most virtuous civilization on planet Earth. The longer this self-deception persists, the more the West will be seen as a lonely, narcissistic civilization which is self-absorbed and unaware of how the majority of humanity views them. If this gap between the West and the rest is not addressed effectively and soon, the world will be headed into more troubled waters.