THE MISSED OPPORTUNITY OF 1991 – AND THE DECLINE OF THE WEST
By Dr Duncan Richard Shaw
Madrid, 9 July 2022
A hundred years ago, with Europe in ruins after World War One, the most influential book of the decade was Oswald Spengler’s (dystopian, prophetic, depressing) The Decline of the West.
Spengler believed that the “awful fratricidal destruction” of World War One marked the beginning of the decline of the “Eurocentric world”, and that Asia would resume global domination from around 2000 onwards – because of its higher birth rate and greater productive capacity.
On Wednesday there occurred in London an event of massive importance, which hardly got noticed because of the discordant cacophany surrounding serial liar Boris Johnson.
On Wednesday in London, just a stone’s throw away from all the idiocy in Westminster, the heads of the British and US intelligence agencies staged a rare joint conference: to warn the west about the threats emanating from China.
FBI director Christopher Wray called China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security” and had “massively interfered in our politics”, including recent elections.
MI5 head Ken McCallum, for his part, said his service had more than doubled its work against Chinese activity in the last three years and would be doubling it again.
MI5 is now running seven times as many investigations related to activities of the Chinese Communist Party compared to 2018, McCallum added.
The FBI’s Wray finished by warning about “an aggressive anti-democratic alliance” between China and Russia, and said that if China was to forcibly take Taiwan it would “represent one of the most horrific business disruptions the world has ever seen”.
The MI5-FBI conference was yet another Spengleresque warning about the decline of the west. There have been many such warnings in the past year, since the west abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban – a hasty withdrawal which apparently contributed to Vladimir Putin’s brutal attack on Ukraine.
However, are Putin and President Xi really wrong – in the light of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and of Europe’s addiction to Russian oil and gas – to question whether the west has the stomach to back up its promises with long-term commitments and increased defence spending?
What a tragedy, from the point of view of the western progressive: a future of high defence spending, military confrontation and permanent international tension.
Which leads me to the big question: how could this second Cold War have been avoided?
This question takes me back to the massive missed opportunity of 1991, the year when the Soviet Union finished and when the west had the chance to replace the Cold War with an equitable new world order – but sadly
failed to do so.
Ah, 1991 – when a new world was possible…Without sky-high defence budgets, without endless confrontation and tension, and maybe even without nuclear weapons…
I was teaching in Argentina in 1991: telling my students about the end of the Cold War and the consequent opportunities to wind up the dreadful ‘proxy wars’ (Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, Congo, Cambodia, etc).
My Argentine students were excited about a new departure for Planet Earth, with fewer resources wasted on the military – and more on development for the Third World, as it was called then.
In the staffroom, we talked about the necessity of closing down NATO and the Warsaw Pact – and of gradually phasing out nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Well, how naive we were.
Instead of a new international order based on cooperation, equity and a social-democratic/Keynesian mixed economy, we were hit by US triumphalism and the first George Bush’s ‘
New World Order‘: of America as the world’s ‘hyper-power’ with unipolar economic and military hegemony.
The ‘
Washington Consensus‘ insisted on a one-size-fits-all ‘
shock therapy‘ for Eastern Europe and Russia, which impoverished millions of unfortunates (and gave many of them an early death) while enriching a cynical elite through ‘rapid privatization’ – particularly of oil, gas, gold and diamonds.
Russia and China were encouraged – by the World Bank, the IMF, the
Bilderberg Club, Davos, the G7, Washington and Brussels – to introduce ‘capitalistic reforms’ – reforms which only really benefited at the most 10 per cent of their people.
Most Russian and Chinese people have actually
suffered rather than benefited from the western-encouraged move away from socialism to a brutal form of ‘state capitalism’.
This suffering (together with virulent anti-western indoctrination in the state-controlled media) has led to them mostly
accepting the authoritarian, aggressive agendas of Putin and Xi.
In 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev
warned the west about a second Cold War, if NATO was expanded instead of being wound up – and if the west insisted on imposing capitalism in Russia and China.
Sadly, his warning was not heeded, with the unfortunate consequences that we are seeing today – including the decline of the west.
I’ll finish with the words of the great Paul Simon:
“And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
But it’s alright, it’s alright
For we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
Road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help but I wonder what’s gone wrong.”
This does seem to be a turning point just as 1989/1990 was. We are looking at a very difficult autumn economically and politically. It is clear that the last 30 years have been divisive when we could have used the opportunity to build bridges, internationally as well as socially.
I was one of Professor Duncan's students in Argentina in 1991! Very interesting the article showing how from an unique super power World, we are living in a multipower planet with all the complexities we are facing.
Congratulations on your article Dr. Shaw! Your reflexions about all the good things we could have done after World War One are very interesting.
A very good song chosen for your article! Thanks for helping us to open our eyes to the world.
Congratulations! Professor Shaw for a very interesting reflection.
An intriguing discussion is definitely worth comment. Theres no doubt that that you should write more on this subject, it might not be a taboo subject but usually people dont talk about these topics. To the next! Best wishes!!