“The prince who relies entirely on fortune is lost when it changes. I believe also that he will be successful who directs his actions according to the spirit of the times, and that he whose actions do not accord with the times will not be successful.” Yet, even though the spirit of the times has changed, and even though the West will inevitably have to make major adjustments to adapt to this new era, no major Wester figure has had the courage to state the defining truth of our times: that a cycle of Western domination of the world is coming to a natural end. Their populations, on the other hand, can feel these large changes in their bones, and in the job markets. This, in part, explains supposedly aberrant — to the elite at least — events like Trump and Brexit.

Having experienced Third World poverty as a child, I know that nothing drags down the human spirit more than a sense of helplessness, uncertainty and fear of the future. A small regular income and access to basic goods like TV sets and refrigerators also improves one’s sense of well-being. In short, the eradication of poverty is spiritually uplifting. The world should rejoice at this change.

This enormous improvement in the human condition is a result of a slow process of Western ideas and best practices seeping into other societies. The biggest gift the West gave the Rest was the power of reasoning.

“Reasoning” is a commonly used word. “To think something through, work out in a logical manner.” Western forms of reasoning have seeped into Asian minds gradually, through the adoption of Western science and technology and the application of the scientific method to solving social problems. Science and technology showed the power of empirical proof and constant verification.

The first revolution is political. For millennia, Asian societies were deeply feudal. The people were accountable to their rulers, not rulers to their people. “Oriental despotism” was a fair description of the political environments in all corners of Asia, from Teheran to Tokyo. Each person in Asian societies was supposed to know his or her place. India carried it to the extreme with its caste system. A person’s destiny was determined at birth. There was no escape.

It makes a huge difference if you believe that you can create a better life for yourself and your children. Billions more people believe that they can do this. This enormous psychological revolution also explains why the human condition is getting better.

But the Rest have not sent a “thank you” note to the West. Initially — indeed, for centuries — the West used its military and technological prowess to conquer and dominate the planet. Modern science and technology were harnessed to create powerful weapons. Virtually every society on Earth was subjugated by the West. Every other human civilization had no choice but to bend before Western power. And this domination could have carried on for many more centuries if not for the two suicidal world wars which the Western powers indulged in in the first half of the 20th century.

Moments of triumphalism are inherently dangerous. The giddy spirits of the West were ready to ingest any form of seductive opium. Western rulers fell in love with Fukuyama’s essay and began to believe that their societies had reached the top of the metaphorical Mount Everest of human development and would not be dislodged.

The sound of the Western celebratory drums at the end of the Cold War was not the only event hiding the return of China as a major player in the international order. The Tiananmen Square events convinced the West that the Chinese communist regime was another corrupt regime about to collapse.

Then another event distracted the West: 9/11, in 2001.

The introduction of new workers from China and Eastern Europe led to declining real wages and small shares of labour in national output. This naturally meant that inequality within Western economies rose.

This was one major reason why Trump and Brexit happened 15 years later. The working class population could feel directly what their elites couldn’t. Their lives were being disrupted by fundamental changes taking place in the world, and their leaders had done nothing to explain to them what was happening, or to mitigate the damage.

Western elites, who remain the most globally influential elites, believe that they understand the world better than anyone else. They display little humility when they write in the pages of NYT or the Financial Times, the WSJ or the Economist. Most of these elites remain convinced that they are right. Yet they are now distrusted by their masses, who sense in their daily lives the emergence of a new world that the elites either pretend is not happening or dismiss.

In terms of human development, Malaysia is one of the most successful countries in the developing world.

The end of Western domination could have resulted in a new dark age for the world. Indeed, many in the West still believe that we are on the threshold of such a dark age today.

All three are led by exceptionally honest and competent leaders: Xi Jinping, Modi and Jokowi, respectively. Is this an amazing coincidence? Or is it, perhaps, a reflection of our times?

More and more people are voting with their feet nowadays. They are voting with their feet to travel overseas. And they are also voting with their feet to return home.

International tourism is the ultimate luxury. You have to ensure that you have taken care of all your immediate needs and the foreseeable needs of your family before you can afford to spend a significant amount of money on international travel.

The West needs to engage in deep self-reflection. In so doing, the West will see more clearly how and why it needs to change course if it is going to keep itself safe and prosperous in the 21st century. As George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Honest self-reflection is never easy. As an amateur student of psychology, I learned how prevalent self-deception can be. To break through the natural tendency to deceive ourselves, we have to deal with painful and uncomfortable truths. For example, few in the West will openly acknowledge that one key word explains why the West lost its way at the end of the Cold War: hubris.

After WW2, the West remained focused and competitive. Western Europe worked hard to revive economies devastated by the years of war. America woke up and focused intensively on the new Soviet challenge.

Having won the Cold War, the West could afford to relax and enjoy its good fortune. Western civilization had reached the final peak of human achievement. Other civilizations would have to struggle and work hard; the West need not.

Iraq was a disaster. What made it worse was that it reinforced the conviction among 1.5B Muslims that the loss of Muslim lives did not matter to the West.

The Muslim population will grow more than twice as fast as the overall world population between 2015 and 2060, and in the second half of this century, will likely surpass Christians as the world’s largest religious group.

The West is pursuing a strategy as futile as that of cutting off the tip of the iceberg to save the Titanic. Until the iceberg is dealt with, the problem will never be solved. The West should engage in deep reflection on what it has done to the Islamic world for the past two centuries.

The West’s second major strategic error was to further humiliate the already humiliated Russia. After winning the Cold War without firing a shot, it would have been wise for the West to heed Churchill’s advice: “In victory, magnanimity.” Instead, the West did the exact opposite.

“I opposed expanding NATO toward Russia after the Cold War, when Russia was at its most democratic and least threatening. It remains one of the dumbest things we’ve ever done and, of course, laid the groundwork for Putin’s rise.” The humiliation of Russia led to an inevitable blowback. The Russian people elected a strongman ruler to defend Russian national interests strongly.

The Crimea episode showed that there is only so much humiliation that any nation can take. It was inevitable that the Russian people would say: enough is enough. They wanted a strongman ruler who could also poke the eyes of the West.

The West is no saint either, though it is regularly in danger of believing itself to be so.

Many of these colour revolutions were internally generated. However, when they surfaced, the West rushed to support them because in the minds of Wester policy-makers, especially American ones, the export of democracy was an inherent good. Hence, they believed that they were living up to the highest moral standards of Wester civilization.

Few in the Rest are convinced that the West’s post-Cold War encouragement of democracy abroad represents a moral impulse. Instead, they see this as a last futile attempt to continue the two-century period of Western domination of world history through other means. They also notice the cynical promotion of democracy in adversarial countries like Iraq and Syria and not in friendly countries like Saudi Arabia. Most disastrously, when the intervention turns sour, as in Iraq or in Libya, the West walks away and takes on no moral responsibility for the adverse consequences. One painful truth that cannot be denied is that this thoughtless attempt to “export democracy” has increased, not decreased, human suffering in many countries.

One recent major event illustrates how ignorance of history causes misunderstanding between the West and the Rest. When 9/11 happened, most Americans felt they were innocent victims subject to an unprovoked attack. Most thoughtful international observers saw it as an inevitable blowback against the West’s trampling on the Islamic world for several centuries.

How does it feel now that horror is erupting in your own yard and not in your neighbor’s living room? Do you know that between 1824 and 1994 your country carried out 73 invasions in countries of Latin America? For almost a century, your country has been at war with the entire world. How does it feel, Yank, knowing that on September 11th the long war finally reached your home?

Many in the West believe that the West is an inherently benign force that is constantly trying to improve the world.

When the West was overwhelmingly stronger than the rest of the world, it had an explosive impact across the globe. Western boots trampled everywhere. The Rest had no choice but to bend to Wester power. Now, as Western power recedes, it is perfectly natural for the Rest to ask for new terms of engagement. Many parts of the world, especially Asia and Africa, would welcome a more restrained Western role.

The Department of State desired that the UN prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.

The last thing the US wants is an independent UN throwing its weight around. The US isn’t going to allow the organization to dictate things inconsistent with the objectives of US leadership.

The UN is only a mirror held up to our own uneven, untidy and divided world.

It can be argued that given the impunity with which international law and state sovereignty were being violated all around, the Russian step was merely one — which the West now protest against the most — in a long list, including Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Diplomatic immunity was invented over 2,000 years ago to enable diplomatic envoys to visit enemy capitals without their heads chopped off by angry kings and queens.

Voters will not vote for a politician who says: “Let’s sacrifice now to save our grandchildren.”

All the blame was heaped on Erdogan, one man. But how much of Turkish anger was a result of being insulted by Europe for decades? Turkey applied for EU membership in 1987 and never got in. Austria, Cyprus, Malta, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia…. applied later and did. You don’t insult a country and not face consequences.

One of the manifest absurdities of our time is that the UK and France remain as “permanent members” of the UNSC, passing mandatory resolutions that the rest of the world has to comply with.

If you believe that maintaining power and control and absolute freedom of movement and sovereignty is important to your country’s future, there’s nothing inconsistent in that the US continuing to behaving unilaterally. The US is the biggest, most powerful country in the world now. We’ve the juice and we’re going to use it. But if you believe that we should be trying to create a world with rules and partnerships and habits of behavior that we would like to live in when we’re no longer the military political economic superpower in the world, then you wouldn’t do that. It just depends on what you believe.

63 percent of Americans don’t have enough savings to cover a $500 emergency.

As long as liberal Americans believe that they have the most liberal minds in the world, they will never wake up and understand the closed mental universes they have boxed themselves into. Liberalism has created an attitude of intellectual superiority, especially towards the rest of the world.