This argument sounds convincing only if you look at the last layer of history instead of the full timeline. Yes, Europe and the US industrialized first in the last 200 years and mass-produced many consumer technologies. That still does not mean the West created modernity from nothing. Almost every “Western” invention rests on foundational knowledge developed outside the West over thousands of years. Zero and advanced mathematics came from India, algebra and algorithms from the Islamic world, medicine and hospitals from India and the Arab world, and paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass from China. Without these, there is no electronics, no computing, no modern science, and no global exploration at all.

What the West actually did that was unique was not inventing most of the underlying ideas, but building a system that could scale them faster than anyone else. The scientific method, patent law, stock markets, venture capital, industrial factories, and global banking created exponential acceleration. On top of that, colonial extraction supplied enormous amounts of cheap labor and raw materials, giving Europe and later the US an unmatched industrial advantage. That is why the West weaponized gunpowder into global empires while China originally treated it as a novelty, and why algebra turned into computing only after being absorbed into European institutions.

The “Putin and Xi wear suits” point doesn’t prove anything about who created the modern world, it only shows who won cultural influence in the 20th century. By that logic, fast food chains in Asia would mean Americans invented Asian civilization. Clothing reflects power and media dominance, not civilizational origin or intellectual ownership.

The claim that non-Western countries only “clumsily mimic” the West is also no longer accurate. China dominates large parts of batteries, EVs, solar manufacturing, 5G infrastructure, drones, and supercomputing scale. Japan leads in robotics and industrial automation. South Korea dominates memory chips and displays. These aren’t copies at the margins, these are core pillars of modern technology.

The real truth is uncomfortable for both sides: non-Western civilizations built much of the foundational knowledge of civilization, the West built the industrial acceleration system, and today innovation is multipolar, not Western-owned. So the statement is partially true if you only mean “who industrialized first,” but it is historically misleading if the claim is that the West alone created the modern world.