The title of this column is borrowed from The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, a collection of essays published by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. I felt compelled to write under this title in light of the profound transformations currently unfolding in global affairs—particularly the shifting balance of power from the Global North to the Global South, from the United States to China.

This may have been open to debate a year ago, but time has since demonstrated that such a shift is indeed underway.

The following discussion took place on a television show, during which I challenged the widely held notion that international relations are governed purely and exclusively by the ‘interests’ of individual nations, and that no other factors shape or influence these relationships. In this context, I reminded the esteemed panel of Henry Kissinger’s distinction between the foreign policies of East and West, as cited by Edward Said in Orientalism.

Kissinger argues: “Cultures which escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking have retained the essentially pre-Newtonian [primitive] view that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer.” Said observes that Kissinger maintained a fundamental distinction between Occidental and Oriental approaches to foreign policy: the former, he contended, is rooted in pragmatism (a consequence of its direct encounter with the Newtonian revolution), whereas the latter is characterised by prophecy—owing to its lack of that experiential transformation which the West underwent.

With this in view, one might be tempted to conclude that foreign policy, when rooted in a scientific worldview, is entirely rational—unaffected by emotion and guided solely by mathematical calculations of material gain arising from........

© The Friday Times