Take the piece by Kishore Mahbubani on the Guardian’s site today: "The Sermons of Cowards".

Into the sausage machine are thrown the usual ingredients. Guantanamo, "the gulag of our times"; the USA’s Patriot Act ("In the face of threats from terrorism, the population has, in effect, accepted a reduction of civil liberties" – don’t you just love the "in effect"?); former British Ambassador Craig Murray’s heroic stand against human rights abuses in Uzbekistan; failure of Western policy against the Burmese regime; and so on.

The usual tone of adopted by non-Western progressives: lofty disdain for ‘Western hypocrisy’ and double standards, now with added Asian cockiness. Mr Mahbubani is said to be the author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.

What is depressing about pieces like this which get quite a high prominence in the ‘mainstream media’ is that they are so obviously morally and politically trivial. The Mahbubani narrative is saying that Western inconsistencies or poor performance in some areas quite undermine anything Western governments have to say across the board.

Really? Why? If one is trying hard to do something good, why does partial failure discredit the whole exercise?

He also seems to be saying that only ‘dialogue’ with dictatorial regimes can hope to make a difference:  "History teaches that sanctions and exclusions have never succeeded in transforming societies."

Phew. We all knew that Mrs Thatcher was right to oppose sanctions against South Africa. Oh, but what about the injections of active democratic support which helped end a very isolated Slobodan Milosevic’s rule in Serbia?

Mr Mahbubani makes one good point: "We are moving toward a more intelligent world. Globally, the number of highly educated people, especially in Asia, has never been higher. They can now make well-informed judgments about what the west does with human rights."  

Indeed. Those people may be rather sniffy about Western human rights policies. There is something patronising in the tone often used by our leaders when discussing this subject. David Miliband’s latest speech likewise somehow lacks … Weight?

But are those clever Asians really going to be impressed with the argument that where a government is brutalising its own people, the rest of the world should do nothing much other than engage in affable ‘dialogue’ with the oppressors?

Won’t they too want to grab the gadgets pouring out from the globalised industries created by Western inventiveness and pluralism to network against these rubbishy regimes, and help knock them down?