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. 

Kishore Mahbubani will debate the future of the world's superpowers alongside Kwasi Kwarteng and Leo Varadkar this 19-20 September at HowTheLightGetsIn London. Also featuring are the likes of Louis Theroux, Roger Penrose, Sabine Hossenfelder, and many many more. Book your tickets now.

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.

SUGGESTED VIEWING Rebalancing the global order With Kishore Mahbubani

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.