Westlessness: the long-term outlook in world affairs

For 61 years the annual gathering at the Munich Security Conference has focused primarily on transatlantic relations. There probably could not have been a more seismic location for J. D. Vance to take a sledgehammer to those relations in February 2025. His speech was clearly a watershed moment, but to the rest of the world it was a Western squabble that in many ways confirmed existing suspicions around the robustness of ‘the West’. All trends point to a rapidly changing global role for the West as a key feature of the dawning multipolar age, even as relations within it are starting to fracture. How should we prepare for this? Especially if we are ourselves Westerners and believe that our part of the globe and what it represents still has much that is effective and aspirational to offer to the rest of the world.

There is nothing quite like viewing one’s home in Europe – the foundational region of what we now call ‘the global West’ – at a remove. How we view world affairs is heavily contingent on our perspectives and from where we are looking at it.

No matter how interconnected we are through technology, and how much we think we know about faraway lands, there is nothing quite like having your feet on the ground on the other side of the world to really get a sense of how much the West will matter in the years to come. 

From my vantage point in Singapore since 2020, I have been struck by just how quickly different parts of the world are moving far beyond their previous dependencies and perceptions of Western leadership. And how much desire there is to move ever further away from a history that, in the eyes of many, has simply been Western-centric for too long.

This is a huge topic, and I am mindful of treating it with sensitivity. As a writer, even though my personal family heritage traces back to India and Kenya, and my home for the last four years has been Singapore, I am ‘Western’. I am British and served in the UK’s Foreign Office for several years.

What is Westlessness?

‘Westlessness’ – elaborating on a term first helpfully coined at an earlier, more cordial Munich Security Conference in 2020 – is a composite word that helps us grasp three things. 

First, we need to remind ourselves how historically contingent the global Western influence we are accustomed to has been. We need only look back just a few centuries to see how and when Western dominance began, with the eras of European-led maritime exploration and colonization, followed by the eras of world war and decolonization, through to US-led globalization, which is arguably now reaching its own twilight. Historical eras experience change and geopolitical dominances are ever shifting. It is increasingly evident that we are living through a transition period, heading towards a shift away from a Western-centric era. 

Secondly, however, the West is not somehow going to collapse. This is a transitional phase and not one of imminent destruction or replacement. A book cover with a collapsed Eiffel Tower being reclaimed by the undergrowth might sell more copies, but this delicate and complex topic cannot be approached with sensationalism and doom-mongering. The process of rebalancing influences in world affairs is a gradual one that started some time ago and is now just becoming more tangible.

Third, this ‘great global rebalancing’ cannot be reduced to a binary story of ‘USA versus China’, nor even of an ‘authoritarian axis’ led by China and Russia. These are today’s problems. The rise of China obsesses us, not least because the story of a two-horse race is a captivating and consequential one. But ‘USA versus China’ is not a good enough proxy for understanding what is happing to global affairs more generally in the longer-term – especially for anyone who isn’t actually American or Chinese.

Understandably, in parts of Europe, and in places like Singapore, the rise of China is a matter of concern. The zero-sum aspects of competition between the USA and China in the tech sphere, for instance, or around Trump’s tariff threats and the possibility of war over Taiwan, dominate a great deal of discussion and of crisis planning. Singapore is highly exposed to these negative trends because of its geo-economic proximity to the likely theatre of events. 

Managing the negative fallout of ‘USA versus China’ is the stuff of short- and medium-term risk analysis; it is manifestly not the stuff of genuine epochal change, looking decades ahead.

This is where Westlessness comes in. A genuinely long-term outlook must factor in how the global role and coherence of the West – its constituent parts, as well as its collective geopolitical heft, as expressed through such bodies as NATO and the G7, is changing. 

Decades from now, we will occupy a world that is profoundly rebalanced in accordance with economic, demographic and other indicators of power. The metrics are in some cases staggering and deserve attention for their own sake.

Measuring the Great Global Rebalancing

When we measure how fast, and in what ways, the world is rebalancing, it is worth keeping in mind the words of Austrian philosopher Karl Popper. He helpfully coined the term ‘falsification’, which simply means that if you posit a theory about our social and political worlds, you must be prepared to distinguish those instances in which your theory holds from those in which it does not. Otherwise, it becomes dogma, asserted as a self-evident truth with no understanding of what it remains contingent upon. 

There are a number of undeniable measures of global influence and power. Some of these are set to hold, with the West retaining undeniable ‘influencer’ advantages for decades to come, such as the continuing ubiquity of European-origin languages; the appeal of Western universities; aspects of soft power such as culture and the arts; as well as the hard currency powers of the dollar, euro, sterling, Swiss franc and so on.

Conversely, there are also indicators showing that the West will simply become an ever-smaller portion of humanity. As recently as 1950, 29 per cent all of human beings resided in a Western country (with ‘Western’ defined in cultural and geopolitical terms, therefore including North America, Europe and Australasia). By 2050 this collective figure is set to drop to closer to 12 per cent, based on projected birth rates in different parts of the world. 

When it comes to the emerging and developing economies, and the predicted top-ranked economies in terms of GDP, there will also be great changes, and not only with the ascendance of China and India. Countries like Indonesia are expected to make their way up the rankings in the decades to comes, with fewer individual European countries appearing in these tallies. 

Of course, size is not all that matters, but we ought to be asking ourselves questions about the myriad implications that will arise as the world rebalances in ways that favour parts of the non-Western world. And does so in ways that will be novel, as no one alive today has yet lived in a world of more balanced relations between the Western and non-Western centres of power and influence.

The effects of a rebalancing world on geopolitics are now all around to see. The rise of the BRICS+ grouping (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and, as of 2024, also UAE, Ethiopia, Egypt and Iran) is often misunderstood in the West, because it has not formalized itself in the manner of the EU or NATO and contains a great number of divergent countries. Nevertheless, it is also the most powerful informal gathering of exclusively non-Western states in history. 

Whether the BRICS+ countries can act collectively or not (they likely never will) is of no consequence, because BRICS+ has a different kind of significance. By providing forums for resolving disputes between its members and forging ahead with mutually beneficial trading relations, far from the eye and the reach of Western geopolitical imperatives and influences, it is a novel development and a sign of power outside the Western domain. 

The King Canute of Westlessness

In the USA, these Westlessness arguments offer an interesting undercurrent to Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda. With its faith in a mixture of anti-immigration rhetoric, alongside Elon Musk’s ability to maintain the US’s leading technological edge, it is also driven by status anxiety. The US’s previously unquestioned global leadership roles are increasingly being questioned, and the US’s own majority population, which derived from historic European settler colonialism, is somehow feared by many ‘America First’ populists to be becoming ‘less Western’. 

Over time, no matter how prosperous and independently influential the USA remains, its role as leader of the West in the wider world is changing fast. The impending Westless era is pushing the US into survival mode as it seeks to secure its own prosperity and advantage, rather than leading the West in ways we have been able to take for granted for almost a century. 

In Europe, concern is rife around domestic and transatlantic populisms. These topics fuel many debates about uncertainties for the future, with the rest of our attention focused on the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine. The fallout from the war on Europe’s doorstep will be increasingly for Europeans to manage. 

Despite the immediate threats to security and peace, we must keep an eye on the horizon ahead of us. For all its continuing dynamism and vitality, the West is facing a future in which collectively it will be a smaller part of the world, and in which it is likely to be far less coherent across its transatlantic branches than ever in recent memory. 

The tide is coming in on Western dominance and like Canute we cannot turn it back.

Westlessness in Action

In conclusion, consider one very practical example of how this shift is already constraining the West’s ability to get things done on major global issues, in terms of the efforts that began in 2022 to help Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion. 

In another age, Western-led sanctions would have utterly crippled Russia’s economy and stopped its war machine in its tracks. As recently as 2000, the combined heft of the G7 economies accounted for around 65 per cent of global GDP. In 2025, the G7 will collectively account for less than 50 per cent of global GDP, and that share continues to fall, as economic growth rates in key European countries and in Japan stagnate. 

Putin knows this too. His one judgement that proved sound in his Ukrainian gamble involved leaning on Russia’s Asian trading relationships with China and India. Whereas China could feasibly be described as ‘anti-Western’ in some aspects of its domestic and international posture, India is merely ‘non-Western’. So what is going on?

Russia is closely tied to the debates that are second nature in parts of Asia and some African countries around the increasing exhaustion with the different incarnations of purported Western global leadership, from the ages of European-led colonial empire to that of US-led globalization (which itself was tarnished in recent years by the 2008 financial crash, as well as the ill-begotten US-led 9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya). 

Cynically, Russia buries its own imperial history of conquest in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and leverages the USSR’s 20th century legacy of supporting independence movements and nationalist leaders in places like Vietnam, Iran and South Africa. Russia balances its hybrid identity as European, but anti-Western. In other words, for all its failures in Ukraine, Russia has been ahead in playing the geopolitics of the Westless world. 

​In order to have the credibility to corral global support, and to remain among the world’s ‘key influencers’, the different parts of the West will have to shed every ounce of complacency that they may retain from the dated stories of its historic rise to global prominence. Right now, the West itself even risks coming part at the seams. Welcome to the Westless era.