“If you keep reading the Anglo-Saxon media you get a completely distorted view”

ts. He has been listed as one of the world’s 100 greatest intellectuals by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines, and by the Financial Times in its list of the 50 most important figures who will shape the debate on the future of capitalism. He has also been called “the muse of the Asian century”. Kishore Mahbubani, a political scientist and highly decorated diplomat from Singapore, gave us a glimpse in an interview of what an Asian perspective on the current crisis between the USA and China and the USA and Russia looks like. People in the West would be well advised, Mahbubani said, to realise that Western dominance is over, and that the Asian century has long since begun and that conflicts can be solved through negotiation and deeper trade relations pragmatism rather than ideologically blinded striving for supremacy are called for. A way to avoid wars in the future.

If there is a new Cold War, the US wrongly assumes it would have the same outcome as the first Cold War, Kishore Mahbubani says: “But the difference between cold war 1.0 and cold war 2.0 [is], and this is slightly provocative, it’s the United States that’s acting like the Soviet Union, and it’s China that’s acting like the United States, you know.” The Americans of today would slide into complacency along the lines of, “Hey, we’ve had a cold war, we won it, of course we’ll win a [new] cold war.” But this would be a blatant misjudgment. Today, China is very well integrated into the world, China signs free trade agreements with the world, just as the US did during the first Cold War, but in complete contrast to the US today. China is making investments with the Road and Belt Initiative, while the US is withdrawing from the world. Mahbubani recommends that the US reconsiders its misperception and not continue to underestimate China. Western domination has only lasted for the last two hundred years, he said, and is nothing more than an aberration in world history. The 1800 years before that, China and India had always been the two largest economies in the world. China has been existing for four thousand years and has already been through a lot: “It will right through this contest too.”

A major geopolitical contest has broken out

Mahbubani was in Washington DC in July as head of an Asian trade delegation and states that US-China relations are at their lowest point since at least 1989, and that the situation is akin to that of two trains that have left the station and are hurtling toward each other at full speed. “A great geopolitical confrontation has broken out. And the sad thing is that it is both inevitable and avoidable at the same time.”
  Trade within China, between China and Southeast Asia, and with the rest of the world has skyrocketed in recent years, he said. “Let me just give you one piece of data. In the year 2000 US trade with Southeast Asia was 135 billion dollars, more than three times China’s trade with Southeast Asia. You fast forward to 2021: US trade with Southeast Asia has gone up significantly from 135 billion to over 300 billion – an increase of two and a half times. China’s trade with Southeast Asia has gone from 40 billion to 800 billion increase of 20 times! And this is just the beginning!”
  What we will see in the 21^st century, the Asian century, is a massive explosion of economic productivity and profits in Asia. And China will be a part of that, he said, while the US will be left out: “… unless it really seriously has a long-term comprehensive economic engagement policy with the region, which by the way we want, we want the United States to be engaged as region, but it doesn’t have a strategy for doing so.” Mahbubani also warns against a Western-narrowed perception of the world and East Asia in particular: “If you are going to understand this region through the lenses of the Anglo-Saxon media, you will completely misunderstand what’s happening in East Asia, because they have a very jaundice black and white view of what is happening here.”
  Mahbubani illustrates this with the example of Hong Kong. Contrary to what is portrayed in the Western media, it must be clearly stated that: “Hong Kong was a British colony that was illegally seized by the British in the humiliating opium war of 1842.” China was just correcting a great historical humiliation by recapturing Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a part of China, he said. “So, that’s the reality, in the same way that Goa [long occupied by the Portuguese, ts.] is part of India. Right so it’s important therefore, if you keep reading the Anglo-Saxon media, you get a completely distorted view.”

Asia is engaged in trading that unites – the West is fighting wars

It cannot be emphasised enough that of the 7.8 billion people on our planet, 1.4 billion live in China and 1.3 billion in India. Together with the 700 million people in ASEAN (see box), that is, says Mahbubani with an ironic wink, “the new CIA”: China, India, ASEAN. Those are the world’s three main growth engines, he said. “And guess what you read, the Anglo-Saxon media, you’ll never understand the “CIA” and what’s happening in this region.” When asked who contributed more to global economic growth in the decade between 2010 and 2020, the European Union or ASEAN, Mahbubani responded as follows: “The answer is ASEAN, and nobody knows anything about ASEAN, so what you have here in this region is a culture of pragmatism that is preventing wars like Ukraine that’s going to drag down the United States and EU. While the EU keeps on fighting wars, Asia is trading”, he said.
  Of course, there are also differences between the Asian countries. He said the China India relationship is complicated and they’re not going to become buddies anytime soon. “But at the same time, I think the Indians have very wise long-term strategic thinkers, and the worst thing that can happen for India is to sort of be completely alienated from China and dependent only on the United States.” Despite the political disagreements between India and China, however, trade between the two countries has continued to grow. He said: “the Ukraine war may have helped to stabilise the China India relationship, because when the West criticised India very heavily for not condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when the West condemned India for continuing to buying Russian oil and continues to criticise India for not continuing to buy Russian equipment, that’s when the Indians said, okay, you don’t like what I’m doing, I’ll go independent. What are you going to do about it?” China and India both neither condemned nor supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he said, and Western criticism brought the two countries closer together.
  Mahbubani has clear words for the role of the Europeans in the Ukraine conflict: “This is a conflict that could have easily been avoided if the Europeans had shown some kind of strategic common sense. They didn’t show strategic common sense by trying to bring Ukraine to NATO.” Europe now pays the price for this. “It’s your stupidity that has caused this conflict, you go fight it, we don’t get involved.”

It would be in the interest of the US to cooperate with the world

As far as the US is concerned, it faces a choice of direction: The United States has basically got to make a choice between primacy or to improve the well-being of its people. Primacy does not come without making a great economic sacrifice. If you want to improve the well-being of your citizens – and that is urgently needed, because the United States is the only modern developed country in which the average income of the bottom 50 percent has not risen in the last 30 years – then you cannot work against China, but must seek cooperation. It should be the business community in the United States that would have to say, “Let’s take care of our people, let’s take care of our own business interests, let’s work with China, … just work with China and don’t try to stop China from becoming number one, because it is a mission impossible.” 
  Wouldn’t Europe and the US be well advised to adjust their imperial view of the world and take the outstretched hand from Asia? Pragmatism or ideological delusion: What will secure our peace, what will lead to more and more wars? “Can Asians think?” was the title of an earlier book by Mahbubani. The question today is probably rather: Can we Westerners think? Listening to Mahbubani, wouldn’t that be a first step on this path?  •

Source: Kishore Mahbubani and Steven Okun. “USA = USSR, China = USA if Cold War 2.0?” of 1 August 2022;  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5klNOA8WRyg