Has the West Lost It?, Kishore Mahbubani
Has the West Lost It?, Kishore Mahbubani
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Has the West Lost It?
A Provocation

Author: Kishore Mahbubani

Narrator: Jonathan Keeble

Unabridged: 2 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 04/05/2018

Synopsis

Penguin Audio presents Has the West Lost It? by Kishore Mahbubani, read by Jonathan Keeble.

The West's centuries-old status as the centre of global wealth and power is coming to an end. As the new powers - China and India from Asia and others from Africa and Latin America - rise to the top of the world's pecking order, how should the West react? Kishore Mahbubani argues passionately and provocatively that the West can no longer impose its power and ideals on the world at large, and - paradoxically - that only by admitting its decline can the West set itself up for strategic success in the long term. Mahbubani examines the myths and self-delusions of Western power with an outsider's critical eye, and the shocking freshness of his geopolitical analysis will give all Westerners and political thinkers pause for thought.

Reviews

Goodreads review by KS on January 05, 2019

A strange book by one of our local public intellect. It mocks the West's myopic vision while at the same time fails to see that Singapore is in an equally precarious position due to the leadership's inability to extricate itself from its Neo-liberal group think mentality. To borrow a Chinese proverb......more

Goodreads review by Helen on September 17, 2024

A refreshing and enlightening view of recent history and the fraught relationship between the West and the Rest, by Mr. Mahbubani, a Singaporean diplomat. This is exactly the sort of book that's needed today as a counterbalance to the crazy right wing nationalism that's sweeping Europe and the US -......more

Goodreads review by Tammam on November 15, 2019

I really wanted to like this book but I couldn't. With a title like Has the West Lost It? (I do think they did, look at Trump!) I thought that a book written by a diplomate from the South would give a view that is different from the Western view that one can benefit from. It doesn't, it is written w......more

Goodreads review by Rajat on June 15, 2020

Some interesting ideas here, but largely a very shallow analysis unworthy of a senior diplomat and commentator. Some of the bits I found worth quoting: The reality that the West has to deal with is that the primary strategic challenge for America is not the same as the primary strategic challenge fo......more

Goodreads review by Antonio on June 10, 2018

An anti-American, anti-Trump pamphlet (equals The West = United States) reminiscent of the not-aligned movement of the seventies. It lacks depth of thoughts and only scratches the surface of the issue. Expected more insights on economic, cultural, political and managerial differences between two (or......more

Quotes

A compelling warning ... It is hard to disagree with this advice from such a well-informed friend of the west Financial Times

Sometimes you need a shock to wake you up. Has the West Lost it? (2018) is such a shock. The sheer concentrated force of this 91-page essay [...] is as unrelenting as it is astonishing . . . It's time we listened to Mahbubani. The Lancet

We should all think of it as the cold shower that is urgently needed to revive the West

It's a powerful, disputatious book . . . It's not comfortable reading, and it wasn't meant to be

Kishore Mahbubani brings unrivaled experience and insight into strategizing where the West goes from here. A book that truly speaks to our tumultuous times

In the longer view, America's - and before that Europe's - dominance may come to be seen as a short aberration and the rise of China and other Asian nations as simply a reversion to the natural order of things. That at least is the key point of a provocatively titled book, Has the West Lost It?, by Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean academic and former diplomat. As many in America and Europe contemplate the dramatic changes to their world in the past few years, it's been getting a lot of attention. The Times

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