After a week in which US President Donald Trump raised the prospect of economic – and even military – threats against European countries unless they acquiesced to his demand to take over Greenland, and then backed down after talks with Nato produced a “framework” deal, there can be no doubt that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was right.
“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” he said in a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday. “The old order is not coming back.”
Mr Carney echoed a statement the President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, made last year. “The West as we knew it no longer exists,” she said. In April 2025, that may have been a little precipitous. Once an American President refuses to rule out using force to take the sovereign territory of a Nato ally (even if he later rules it out), we can agree with Ms Von der Leyen. This is so norm-shatteringly abrupt and aggressive that the “West”, as it had previously existed, is clearly over.
My question now is: will we miss it?
First of all, I should be clear who “we” refers to. In general, it means the rest of the world. In particular, for me, I am thinking of the two regions I have been most closely associated with for much of my life: South-East Asia and the Middle East.
Second, even Mr Carney conceded during his speech that the narrative the West told about itself was a “pleasant fiction”. “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false – that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically,” he said. “And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
Mr Carney is to be applauded for his honesty. We won’t miss the double standards. Neither will we miss the lectures, mostly on democracy and human rights, which have in any case become increasingly absurd. How is the UK’s Labour government, which won a nearly two thirds majority in Parliament on less than 34 per cent of the vote in 2024, in any position to wag its finger at anyone about the importance of democracy?
It would never happen (and didn’t), but I like to imagine the Association of South-East Asian Nations – or Asean – putting out a statement at the time. “We are dismayed by this outrageously unrepresentative and undemocratic result, which would have led to western accusations of electoral malpractice or vote-rigging if it had happened in any of our member states. It is a human right that all votes count. We therefore urge the UK to conduct a new, fairer poll so that the disenfranchised millions can be heard and the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ does not bring shame to the very concept of democratic elections.”
Are we worried that the America of Mr Trump must now be considered to be “post-western”? My estimation is that the Gulf states actually have better relations with Washington under Mr Trump: just remember the warmth and success of his visits to the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar last May. The US President’s attendance at last November’s Asean summit in Kuala Lumpur also went extremely well, and contrasted favourably with the “Summit for Democracy” organised by the previous US administration, under Joe Biden, and its constant attempts to set Asian countries against China.
Let’s be generous and concede that some who attempted to remake the world in the West’s image were well-meaning. Will we miss people like the UK’s Chris Patten? I believe that the last British governor of Hong Kong was misguided in trying to turn the territory into a liberal democracy just before it had to be handed back to China, but I also think that he is a decent and principled man.
Well, we won’t miss the imposition or export of European ideologies to countries where they do not fit, or interfere with pre-existing systems of governance and legitimacy. I’m not just talking about a human rights culture that is often regarded with suspicion in more religious societies, or an emphasis on the rights of the individual over the community. Don’t forget that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, were European too.
In any case, we have our own sources of inspiration. The 20th and 21st centuries’ greatest human rights figure, Nelson Mandela, was from South Africa, not the West. Mahatma Gandhi is a guide to millions, while Prophet Mohammed is considered to be a complete role model by billions. Many independence and “founding father” figures are revered in the rest of the world.
And the political scientist Amitav Acharya, author of The Once and Future Global World Order: Why Global Civilisation Will Survive the Decline of the West, has pointed out that Asia and North Africa were producing principles of co-operation among nations and human rights long before the “West” had even been thought of. “The oldest known written pact of non-aggression and non-intervention was concluded between Egypt and the Hittites around 1269 BC,” he wrote in an essay last year, “and humanitarian rules of warfare, including the protection of civilians and the treatment of defeated soldiers, can be found in the Code of Manu of India from 2,000 years ago.”
The history of the West in the rest of the world was not just one of brutal imperialism – although there was plenty of that. There were writers who may, by today’s standards, be accused of orientalism, yet still explored places that were new to them with evident admiration and affection. I’m thinking of Wilfred Thesiger, whose book Arabian Sands convinced me at the age of 21 that I must one day return to live in the Gulf, as I had as a child. Or Somerset Maugham and Anthony Burgess’s wonderfully evocative novels and short stories set in South-East Asia.
It should be mentioned that in Mr Trump’s address at Davos, he claimed that he wanted to defend the West and the “very special culture … that America and Europe have in common”. But with his references to “a lot of bad genes” and lamentations about “unchecked mass migration”, it’s clear what kind of “West” he was thinking of. That will not be missed. However, that the more inclusive, grander, sometimes arrogant, but ultimately aspirational concept of the West – with the US as its “City on a hill” – should have collapsed with such startling speed, is not, I believe, a moment for too much public crowing by its critics.
We shouldn’t “mourn” the old order’s passing, Mr Carney said. Perhaps not. It’s worth reflection, though, that such a mighty ideology’s monument could so swiftly resemble the shattered statue in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias, with its pedestal that bore the words: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
