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And I got to be also very careful here is that the quality of the major world quality of the leaders of some of the major countries in the world is deteriorating. This is a very serious problem we have in the world today.
In the UK, for example, you've gone from Margaret Thatcher to Boris Johnson. I mean, he's a joker. I'm not exaggerating. He's just a complete joker. And then after this joker left, he was succeeded by a joke. Listen as long as the head of lettuce as they say, you know. I mean, so how can a country like UK go from you know Winston Churchill Margaret Thatcher to Boris Johnson List Trust? But it's not about personalities. There's a structural game here.
Fore! Foreign! Foreign! Fore! Foreign! Foreign!
The country in which I've spent the most years of my life obviously is Singapore. The second country in which I've spent the most years of my life is the United States of America. I'm trying to work out, I've either spent 15 or 16 years altogether in the US, 2 and a half years in Washington D.C., 10 and a half years in New York, twice as uh Singapore's ambassador to the UN, one year in Harvard uh as a visiting fellow, and then I've gone back countless times uh to spend time at so many different universities in the United States. So in a sense, um, clearly the United States is a country, the second country in which I've interacted interacted with the most, most uh after uh Singapore, and and I have, I must say, a tremendous number of friends uh in the US. I mean, it's just amazing, every time I go back, that was always such a pleasure catching up. And I'm actually going to go back and uh, you know, you mentioned my book uh after launching it in Singapore, KL, and Hong Kong, I'm going to launch it in uh New York at Asia Society and at Harvard University. And Harvard University has organized a whole day program for me to meet so many different people. So it is for me like is going going back to the United States in some ways almost like also like going back home to meet so many friends.
So as you were writing, you, the, there's so many parts of the book that I highlighted. And I guess, um, you know, one of the earliest things that, one of the first things that we've been talking about during this conference continuously through the two days has been about trade. And as you might be aware, earlier today we had Ralph Ives and Tommy Co with us talking about the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement. And so I suppose, just to connect what we've been talking about over the two days and what, um, the conversation we had earlier today, in the process of writing your book and reflecting upon the interactions that you've had with certain US leaders in thinking about free trade, um, what is your opinion, how successful the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement has been over the last 20 years, since we're celebrating the 20th anniversary today?
Uh, well, I'm glad you had the real expert, uh, Tommy Co, in this room because Tommy, as you know, negotiated the US-Singapore uh FTA. But I'm going to take a sort of a larger philosophical view of the trade issue because one of the highlights in my life was that uh, I accompanied Mr. Lee Kuan Yew uh when he addressed a joint session of Congress. That's the only time when a leader of Singapore has been invited to address the joint session of Congress. And I felt very proud uh to be there in the room because we had some difficulty kneeling down whether or not it would happen or not happen. So since I was ambassador to the UN and since George Shultz, the Secretary of State, was going to come to New York for the UNGA, I got instruction from Singapore government saying, "Please try and find a way of going straight for George Shultz and asking him, you know, can you let us know whether the joint session is on?" And George Shultz said to me, "I guarantee you it'll be done." So I conveyed the message that the joint session speech would happen. Then the reason I mentioned that is that one of the most powerful speech speeches that Lee Kuan Yew ever gave was a speech that he gave to the joint session in Congress. And it was all about trade. And it was at the end of the day, it was a love letter from Mr. Lee Kuan Yew to the United States of America saying, "Thank you very much for telling us about the principles of free trade. Thank you very much for telling us to open up our economies. And thank you very much for stimulating this tremendous growth in East Asia." Right? So that's 1986 or 87. You fast forward almost 40 years. And I think if Mr. Lee Kuan Yew were alive today, he would have great difficulty giving the same speech on trade because I know, I mean, I have many good friends in the US, and there's a tremendous backlash against free trade in the United States. And the paradoxical moment, the what the great paradox about the moment that we are living in today is that the countries that are succeeding in the world are succeeding, succeeding because their leaders learned some brilliant lessons on the importance of free trade from American universities. So they take all their learning from American universities. They apply it, and they're doing well. They're thriving. And in the previous session, you already saw I didn't time talking about the excitement in Malaysia. And so what, what's driving that? American ideas again about opening up trade and so on and so forth. So the paradox is that while the most of Asia is embracing these ideas of free trade, the United States sadly is walking away from it. And and and and that the reality is that, for example, if you take the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that was very much something that was designed to ensure that the United States had a long-term vested interest in staying in this region. There were sound geopolitical trade reasons for the, you know, TPP. But then, boom, United States decided to leave. And I think that's that's very sad. And if there's anything we can do, and I know it's going to be very difficult, I'm extremely aware of the political complexity within the United States today, it'll be extremely difficult to get any presidential candidate to say, "Hey, if you vote for me, I'll join TPP." That's a vote loser, right? We know that. So the question therefore for us in Asia is, against this political backdrop where there's incredible backlash against trade in the US, how do we ensure that the United States remains engaged in this region?
>> Well, we are down in the countdown to the presidential elections in November. And one thing is certain, we're going to have a new administration. However, one of the candidates, we kind of know. The other one is kind of new, but it's not all. Nobody's really new, are they? What advice or what would you say to whichever the new administration comes to be? And we're not in the game of doing predictions, although we did try to get Deputy Chief of Mission Casey Maize to predict the election earlier. He didn't play, so I think he's very smart. Uh, so I'm not going to ask you to predict who's going to win, but I would like to understand what advice you would give to who, whichever administration is elected, on what the potential path to trade, to to reinvigorating trade in the region might be?
>> If they were even a little bit open to it.
>> Uh, well, you're right. It's impossible to make uh predictions. I remember 2016 very well. I remember the the US embassy organized a gala event in some big hotel. I don't know whether it was this hotel or some other hotel, some other place. Uh, probably near Sentosa, I think, if I'm not mistaken. And as I walk into this room, as big as this, normally in the elections results are coming out, everybody's very happy. There was doom and gloom in the room. So I kept going around saying, "What's going on? Why are you why is everyone looking so gloomy?" They said, "Well, it looks as though Trump is going to win." And it was a big shock, you know, huge shock. And I know that my friends, obviously, you can, I'm sort of indicating where my most of my friends are, were very, very disappointed. And certainly Kirk Waga was the ambassador then, was also very disappointed. So we, I think we have to, in this part of the world, acknowledge the reality that Donald Trump may win. I mean, that's, you have to prepare for that. It'd be irresponsible not to prepare for it. Okay. Then the question is, what do we do? How do we handle it? And at the end of the day, I do believe that you have to appeal to long-term national self-interest. I, at the end, I may sound very cynical, but geopolitics is a very cold, cruel game. It's not about being nice. It's about appealing to hard-core long-term interests. And at the end of the day, the United States has got to assess whether its presence in East Asia is a major asset for America's long-term interest. And remember that what's unique about Southeast Asia, and seriously, you go there, not many other parts of the world can replicate this, the huge reservoirs of goodwill towards the United States in Southeast Asia. It's partly the Cold War history. ASEAN is a pro-American creation, denounced by Russia and China, Soviet Union and China when it was created. And there's a long history of happy engagement between the United States and Southeast Asia. But the sad part is this, most Americans are not even aware that Southeast Asia exists. And most Americans are certainly not aware that there are huge pools of reservoir, you know, u reservoir goodwill towards the United States in this region. So you have a precious asset here that can go to waste. And similarly, even within East Asia, and and certainly in Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, there's a lot of goodwill towards the United States. But at the end of the day, if you want to preserve that, it requires long-term commitment. It cannot go up and down on the basis of election cycles. And so I hope that you can create a constituency within the United States, a bipartisan constituency that says, "Hey, American presence in this region is important, and we must be part of it." And of course, at the end of the day, frankly also, I'm sure we're going to discuss it at some point in time, how you manage China is equally important, right? As you can see from the countries in this region, they want to be friends with the United States, and they want to be friends with China. Okay? And they have to be, because if the United States is going to be around for 100 years, China will be around 1,000 years. So Southeast Asians dealt with China a thousand years ago. They have to deal with China a thousand years from now. So they have to preserve those links also. So managing that very delicate change requires a a certain degree of political sophistication within Washington D.C. which frankly, as of now, doesn't exist yet. So that's what we need to build in Washington D.C.
>> Yeah. I'm going to bridge over to the China thing in a second, but I do want to ask our members in the audience for AmCham members. We represent a great diversity of American companies and American business interests. And this is where our job would be to carry the message of what's happening in Southeast Asia, the complexity of the region, the opportunities here, back to the United States. And every time you get a chance to do that with your corporate headquarters, with people that you meet who are coming through, I highly encourage you to do so. And if you're not comfortable doing it, I'll do it for you. So, so that's something that I do hope you take very seriously because we do need to help people understand what is Southeast Asia. I think they know what Singapore is now, and we all know Crazy Rich Asians, but generally Singapore's profile has risen, but Southeast Asia, they still think of it as a block of countries without realizing how incredibly different Indonesia is from Vietnam, etc. So, please let's all work together to communicate that back home to the United States. Um, on the China one, I'm gonna quote a little bit of your book because I did make a bunch of highlights, but one one which I thought was super interesting was when you said, "For great powers such as the United States, their influence doesn't depend on the quality and ability of their ambassadors. Power speaks more eloquently than personality in generating influence." And I actually thought, given that you mentioned China, when I read that, I thought, "Okay, great powers such as the United States." And I thought, well, same for China, right? Can you talk a little bit more about the fact that power speaks more and has more influence than individuals or individual personalities, because it doesn't really feel like that right now when you have leaders of these huge countries who are such strong personalities that it almost rides out any kind of policy conversation.
Well, I can tell you that, you know, I was an ambassador for many years, and but I was never actually what I call a bilateral ambassador, although I was head of mission in Cambodia in '73-'74 uh when the war was taking place. And that's when I learned a lot about geopolitics because every day the city would be shelled. And then I realized, hey, war is a serious business. Uh, but I can tell you, once you become an ambassador and you arrive at a capital, the one of the first questions you ask yourself is, who's the most important ambassador in this capital? Because there's a hierarchy among ambassadors, clearly. And quite often, the ambassador of a neighboring country would be very important because they, they would have to understand their their neighbor very well, clearly. But also, you also realized that the whoever were the great power of the day was also that ambassador would be very, very important. And I actually, you give a concrete example, throughout the Cold War, if you went to Bangkok, right, very clearly, the most powerful ambassador in Bangkok by far was the American ambassador, right? Because, you know, Thailand was a treaty ally, Thailand was a very important staging post for operations in Indochina, China, and there had always been a certain degree of closeness between the Thai uh establishment and and the American establishment. So the American ambassador's number one. And frankly, in those days, the Chinese ambassador was not very consequential. I mean, important, but not that consequential. But today, I think if you go to Thailand and you ask yourself, which ambassador is more important? It would depend also on which country does, for example, does Thailand do more trade with, United States or China? And the answer is China. And which country is engaged in new projects in China? All right. Again, in in Thailand, and I suspect the answer again is is China. So progressively, you find that the the standing of the Chinese ambassador is slowly going up, and the relative standing of the US ambassador is going down. And also in terms of visits, for example, Chinese leaders have more visits in Thailand than American leaders do. In fact, I can tell you this, one American diplomat based in Southeast Asia, one day called me up, "Shaw, help me." This was in a year when there was another crisis in the Middle East, and the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was debating whether or not to come for an ASEAN meeting. And this American diplomat said, "Help me, help me persuade Condi, she must come for the ASEAN meeting, you know." So that's that's the kind of consistency of attention that China gives to Southeast Asia, then becomes a plus, whereas the inconsistency of the United States becomes a minus. And then that affects the ranking uh of ambassadors too. So it's it is it is a reality, but it keeps changing all the time. It's dynamic. So, for example, let's say if the United States decides to mount a major ASEAN initiative, which to some extent Joe Biden tried to do by inviting the ASEAN ambassadors to the US and so on and so forth. Let's say if the United States proposes a new uh working arrangement with, um, uh, ASEAN, then things can change. But the, at the end of the day, it's partly a reflection of your power and your commitment to the region, and not personality. And that, that's a, that's a reality of international relations.
Well, speaking of how the United States ambassadors are perceived outside of, in in various countries around the world, and even just the different ambassadors and the shifting of importance, um, there's something else you wrote in the book that I thought was, when I read, I thought, "Ouch." And we do have some folks from the US Foreign Service in the room, so you all brace yourself if you haven't read this already. But in the book, uh, Professor Mahbubani wrote, "American foreign service is demoralized and much less effective. Something has clearly gone wrong." And I've only taken two sentences out of about 8 to 10 sentences in that vein. And just out of curiosity, because we talked about the importance of having ambassadors be engaged in the country that they're in, and we do have also other ambassadors in the room, including my good friend, Ambassador McGrath from Ireland, um, you know, this idea that the foreign service in the United States, and possibly you can help us compare and contrast a little bit with other countries' foreign service, are we, as Americans, do do we really have a foreign service that is demoralized and clearly gone wrong?
>> Well, I mean, I, as you know, I, I've dealt with American diplomats from the time I joined the foreign ministry in 1971, so that's about 53 years. And I, I can tell you, in my, when I was in, when I was in Cambodia, I became very good friends with my American counterparts there, and they were brilliant uh diplomats. Some of them got awards from the State Department like Tim Carney did, and Tom Anders, and, and, um, then when I went to Kuala Lumpur, my next posting, I had an extremely close relationship with Ambassador Miller, and then with, uh, Frank Bennett, and, uh, um, another diplomat whose name will come to me in a second. But I can tell you that, for example, uh, some of you may know, I'm married to a girl born in New Jersey called Anne Markey. The person who introduced me to Anne Markey was Frank Bennett, an American diplomat. So, you know, I had very close ties with them. But at that time, you know, the American diplomats were engaged, happy, confident about their future in their service. Quite a few of them would advance and become ambassadors. Now, this is, this is data that is available by Google. Just ask yourself a simple Google question: How many ambassadorial appointments in the US Foreign Service had political appointees, and how many had career foreign service officers? If I'm not mistaken, don't hold me to this, the longtime long-term ratio used to be about 70% for career foreign service officers, and that's very important because when you join the Foreign Service, your aspiration is to become an ambassador, right? You want to reach the top. And so if you have a large pool of ambassadors to choose from, your your statistical odds of becoming an ambassador are much higher because only 30% are political appointees. Don't hold me to this, but I think now the ratio shows is reversed. Now it's 70% political and 30% uh. Please Google and check this, okay? This is, let me know, but it's it's moving in that direction. So as a result of it, if you join the State Department, this sadly, this is true, you, if you are lucky, you can become ambassador to Mali, to Congo, to Guinea-Bissau. But London, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, you know, you name all the major capitals, is all political appointees. And of course, that it is good that you have political appointees. I'm not saying it's bad. In fact, Singapore appreciates having political appointees because political appointees give us access to the White House. So we like having political appointees. I'm not saying go towards zero political appointees. That would be wrong. But at the same time, you must create enough opportunities for your career foreign service officers to also succeed and do well. And I think some of the ones who became, what, there's a special term you have uh in the State Department, I think it's a career ambassador post. Those posts are very important as aspirational posts for diplomats rising up the ladder. And I met, you know, most successful diplomats like Tom Pickering, for example, who's a legend, right? He was, he's a good friend of mine, and, and he's a career foreign service officer, but he could rise to the very top, right? Now, that's what you need to create also within the Foreign Service, and which is what we have done, for example, in the Singapore Foreign Service. We used to have lots of political appointees too, but now, uh, they're almost all career-based ambassadors.
>> Right, thank you so much for that candid assessment. Uh, there's always room for improvement, right? So I wouldn't feel too bad about it, but it's something to think about, especially as we represent ourselves on the foreign stage. I'm about to open this up to the floor. And I think, um, I just want to close off with something I read that I think is worthwhile for us to remember because there are many leaders in the audience who are currently working in public affairs, folks who are, we have some students in the audience too who are thinking about a career in public service. And you mentioned that as you were thinking about it for the LKY School of Public Policy and working with a consulting firm, actually, I should just say the name because they're a member too, McKinsey. The four areas you thought were important were economics, politics, leadership, and management, which is kind of an interesting mix for a school of public policy to educate its leaders on. Before we transition to opening up to questions, um, would you like to comment on how you envision the leaders of tomorrow in public service?
>> Uh, well, I mean, the, the one of the saddest things about our world today, and I got to be also very careful here, is that the quality of the major world quality of the leaders of some of the major countries in the world is deteriorating. This is a very serious problem we have in the world today. And of course, I mean, this, this I can say openly because I've said so publicly many times. You know, the UK has traditionally produced some of the greatest leaders in the world. Winston Churchill, clearly, was one of them. I mean, Margaret Thatcher was another. I can tell you, when Mr. Lee Kuan Yew was stepping down in 1990, I accompanied him on his farewell tour of Europe. So we met Margaret Thatcher in London. Incredibly impressive woman. And we were having dinner at Number 10 Downing Street. She stood up and without any notes, you know, nothing in front of her, gave a wonderfully beautiful, eloquent speech about what a great man Lee Kuan Yew is and what he has done. Then Lee Kuan Yew stood up equally spontaneously and responded. So these were two great leaders interacting with each other, you know. Similarly, when he went to Paris, François Mitterrand came to the door of Élysée Palace to receive him, which is a breach of protocol because he's head of state. Dwan is only head of government. Head of state coming to receive head of government at the entrance. Very unusual. And then when he went to Germany, we met Helmut Kohl, another impressive, thoughtful leader. But, you know, now in the UK, for example, they've gone from Margaret Thatcher to Boris Johnson. I mean, he's a joker. I'm not exaggerating. He's just a complete joker. He's actually history will regard him very unkindly because he destroyed his country by engineering Brexit. Brexit is by any reasonable calculation a disaster for the UK. And Boris Johnson lied his way in the campaign for Brexit. And then after this joker left, he was succeeded by a joke. Liz Truss, she didn't last as long as a head of lettuce, as they say, you know. I mean, so how can a country like UK go from, you know, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss? But it's not about personalities. There's a structural game here. Politics is becoming more difficult, and you really got to have, it's very difficult to find people who are on the other hand, very ethical, you know, very committed to doing the right thing, and yet are cunning enough to succeed in the field of politics, because politics is not easy. If you're not shrewd, if you're not cunning, if you're not ruthless, forget it. You, and, and it's very rare to find people who are both good human beings and also shrewd human beings. And now with politics becoming more difficult, it's harder and harder to get good people into politics. And that leaves the way the field open to all kinds of populists and others who come in. And, and sadly, that's going to be one of the structural problems uh for our world, and it's a common problem that many countries are facing around the world.
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