Joel Jenkins

Op-Ed from @SecRubio: Why We’re Dismantling the ICC wsj.com/opinion/why-we…

“China effectively operates more market power than any nation on earth, including Saudi Arabia and the United States,” said Gregory Brew, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a research firm. nytimes.com/2026/07/13/bus…

Kishore Mahbubani (@mahbubani_k): The West has, in global terms, become a lonely, narcissistic civilization, self-absorbed in itself, very happy with itself, and therefore, with this narcissism, has blinded itself to the mistakes that it has made in dealing with the rest of the world. And I want to begin the story, in some ways, with the end of the Cold War in 1990, because I’m sure you all remember how the West celebrated, how happy the West was that it defeated the Soviet Union without firing a shot, and the West thought, “Hey, we have arrived.” And you even believed—this is amazing—almost everyone in the West believed that you had reached the end of history. Hooray! We don’t have to struggle anymore. We’ve made it. We made it to the top. We’ve achieved these liberal democratic societies, which are the best societies in the world. We succeeded. We have made it. The rest of you, the rest of the world, you’re going to struggle. We don’t have to struggle. And one statistic that I’m surprised that so few in the West are aware of is that the West only makes up 12% of the world’s population. Twelve percent. Eighty-eight percent lives outside the West. And the West crazily assumed at that moment of history, when it reached the end of history, that the rest of the world would come and become replicas of the West. Copy you. Follow you. And become like you. I’m sure you’ll all agree that that’s a somewhat arrogant assumption on the part of the West. But that arrogance dominated the worldview of all the Western intellectuals at that time. I know it so well because, by an accident of history, I spent a year in Harvard in ’91–’92. And I drowned in that arrogance. I could feel how the West had arrived and succeeded, and the rest of you poor chaps, get used to it, adjust to it, move on. So, the reason why that arrogance at that point was a major strategic mistake was because that arrogance put the West to sleep at precisely the moment when the other civilizations decided to wake up. So, you close your eyes when the rest of the world was waking up. And remember, China had started its Four Modernizations program in 1979 and, by 1989–1990, was gaining a lot of momentum. And then India also woke up around the early 1990s as a result of crisis, by the way. In both cases, China went through a major crisis and said, “Okay, enough is enough. Time for us to get sensible and do the right thing.” India went through a major crisis and said, “Enough is enough. Let’s do the right thing.” And, of course, what you’ve seen since then, in the case of the Chinese, the Chinese civilization has been around for 4,000 years, and the last 40 years of economic and social development in China have been the best 40 years in 4,000 years of Chinese history. And the West said, “It cannot be. They’re not like us. They cannot be succeeding. Right?” Because you assume to succeed, you must be liberal democratic. So, that clearly, that’s why I think the end-of-history moment was a disastrous moment for the West because they put the West to sleep at precisely the moment when the rest was waking up.