Transcription
So, here you're talking about things that aren't even really the pursuit of self-interest by uh American elites because they're not even based on strategic thinking.
Yes, I think the American elites uh have a lot to be held accountable for because they have failed their own populations. They haven't been able to create a social and political system that distributes the uh public goods uh to their own population and improve the lifestyles and and lives of their own uh populations.
And but that's a failure of American elites and that's why and precisely because the the masses the 50% at the bottom have not seen any improvement in their living standards. They have become a very angry population and they wanted to vote for somebody who would give Washington DC a big kick in the butt.
That exchange you just heard gets to the heart of one of the most central questions of our time as the world's number one power. What exactly has gone wrong with the United States? The speaker is Kor Mahbubani, a former top diplomat from Singapore who spent decades navigating the UN Security Council and the world stage. His perspective is crucial because he is an expert in geopolitics, deeply rational, calm, and has a profound understanding of both the US and China. It is from this foundation that he offers a candid, almost brutal diagnostic report for this superpower that is losing its way.
In the content that follows, you will hear him systematically dissect why the chip war launched by the US ultimately backfired. Why America's massive defense spending has instead become a geopolitical gift to China, and how the United States has repeatedly made disastrous decisions against its own interests on a series of major geopolitical issues like the wars in Iraq and Libya. This is not just an in-depth analysis of America's strategic blunders, but also a profound reflection on what it truly takes for a great power to remain strong. Let's continue.
And there's no question that Donald that uh Donald Trump is clearly giving Washington DC a big kick in the butt and saying, you know, you you you guys uh uh have not taken care of the people of of the United States. Now, of course, unfortunately, his belief uh that the the there's only one solution to all these problems to to increase tariffs on every country in the world, I fear is not the answer. And and and economics 101 will tell you that when you impose tariffs, the tar the cost of the tariffs will not be paid by the exporting country. It will be paid by the consumer. And and so American consumers are going to find in the in these coming months that life is going to be very difficult for them as a result of these tariffs. Of course, assuming that uh the suspension uh is removed, but of course if they remain in place, then then the tariffs won't do as much damage.
You pointed out uh that global economics is not a zero sum game. And another theme that comes across in your writing is that essentially if we are going to have a prosperous a peaceful 21st century that deals with the major uh crises that we face such as climate change. um we are going to have to have a world that cooperates, a world of mutual respect and a a world where we are sort of capable of where countries are capable of understanding one another. And in the rhetoric that you hear in the United States about I mean Donald Trump openly says China is our enemy. That's his his quote you know uh the rest of the world is uh ripping us off. It is really quite the opposite of the of the story that you're tell. I mean, you tell a story of us as all inhabiting uh one one planet and a a need to sort of work things out. Uh in the United States, the Trumpian narrative is we inhabit a world of enemies. Those enemies need to be tamed or destroyed. Uh we need to build up our ability to crush them militarily if uh if if necessary. Uh so it would seem that uh much of the story told in the United States is really uh going in the opposite direction of the of the one that you you feel uh generates the understanding necessary to uh live well in the 21st century.
Well, you're you're absolutely right about that. But you know, I I I can fully understand why Donald Trump wants to try and improve the livelihoods of the bottom 50% of Americans. I think that's a noble goal that he has. uh I can understand um why he wants to make American industries more competitive uh and re-industrialize America. That's also an understandable goal. But I think he will find that the best way to achieve those goals is actually to work with the rest of the world. And I, you know, one thing I've learned after studying geopolitics for 55 years is that you got to be cold and calculating if you're going to succeed in geopolitics. And if you're emotional, then you're at a major disadvantage. So for example, how did China become so wealthy so quickly? What it did was that it worked closely with the United States even though technically uh even during parts of the cold war the US was an adversary. uh China work with the United States to grow its economy and I think that's one thing that is is taboo in the United States that actually the best way for for United States to regenerate its economic growth and make it grow faster is not to try and bring down China but to work with China. You know, just as you know, in the when at the time when you were worried about Japanese cars taking over uh United States, you what do you do? You had voluntary export restraints. You encourage the Japanese to set up factories, Toyota factories, Nissan factories, Honda factories in United States. The same thing can be done with China. It can only be done if you are rational and calculating in your moves and not emotional and say, "Oh, no, we can never work with China." Why can't you work with China? If if working with China is going to bring benefits to the American people, why not work with them? Because at the end of the day, uh it's very clear that all efforts to stop the rise of China by the United States are going to fail. And you know, you cannot stop a a 4,000-year-old civilization that has his own civilizational cycles uh and as it is rising just just by depriving them of this technology and that technology is not going to stop the rise of China.
And you point out that for most of human history, you know, the the Chinese and Indian economies were among the largest in the world. They have the largest uh global population. And so to to try and reverse the trend uh to towards a more equal balance of of power in the world, you argue, is is futile.
Yeah. I mean, it's that's a fact that everyone should know that from the year 1 to the year 1820, for 1800 out of the last 2,000 years, the two largest economies of the world have always been those of China and India. And it's only in the last 200 years that Europe has taken off. and North America has taken off and the last but the last 200 years of western domination of world history have been a major historical aberration and all aberrations come to a natural end so it's perfectly natural to see the return of China and India but what's important to emphasize is that the reason why why China and India are coming back is that they are uh uh studying absorbing and implementing western pillars of wisdom you know, and that's why they're succeeding. And and paradoxically, at a time when, for example, China, a communist party run country, is this is discovering the virtue of free trade agreements and free trade agreements have enabled China to become one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The United States is walking away from free trade agreements. But this is where economics 101 theory is right. the United States should be signing more free trade agreements and not walking away from them.
Now you mentioned there China being a communist party-run country but one of the points that you make um in your book has uh China won is that one of the major misunderstandings of China comes from seeing it as a an ideologically communist entity in the kind of classic Marxist Leninist sense.
Well, I think you know anybody who thinks that China is a communist country should go visit China. I mean that literally every American who believes that should go visit it. I have actually visited Moscow in 1976 and trust me that place was so controlled, so oppressed and you know the when you when you went into the biggest department store in Moscow, right, and you wanted to buy a toothbrush, I'm not exaggerating. You get a huge cabinet and you had one toothbrush separated from the other toothbrush by one foot. Even the toothbrushes were scarce commodities. No. And probably in this in a small 7-11 in the United States has more toothbrushes than a large department store in Moscow. Every everything was scarce. Now you go to China today and you will see the most advanced economy in the world in terms of how it produces both private goods and public goods. You know, if you go and see the infrastructure of the of China, you you begin to realize that after going from Kennedy airport to Beijing airport, you're going from a third world airport in the United States to a first world airport in China. And by the way, in incidentally also a first world airport, New Delhi and Mumbai. So there there are areas in which Asia has surged ahead clearly of the United States and the United States should consider the possibility that it could possibly try to emulate what the East Asian economies have done.
You point out uh perhaps uh more controversially that even on the question of personal freedoms um there are important ways in which China is certainly distinct from the Soviet Union. In fact, you I I believe in one of your books you cite uh going to the Soviet Union and you know the the lavatory on the on the train you're not allowed to use it because there's no law saying you can use the lavatory on the train. So like you know whatever um isn't permitted explicitly is is forbidden and and you point out that even though China is not you don't argue that China is in fact a a democracy or that it doesn't have abuses of power um or you know clearly a different system than the United States but with that we don't um but but you point out that you know Chinese tourists travel all around the world in a way that Soviet tourists certainly uh didn't. So e even there we sort of we sort of misunderstand um and and by not understanding that we don't understand why a lot of people in China might actually think that they had good governance.
As I say in the old Soviet Union which I visited several times by the way not a single ordinary Soviet citizen was allowed to go on tourist holidays overseas because they were afraid that any Soviet citizen who went out would defect and not return home to the Soviet Union. Now the what's amazing is that in the year 2019 before uh covid came along there were 139 million Chinese people left China freely to go overseas. And if if if the if the communist China was a gulag that was oppressing his people the 139 million people in China should never have come back. They should have said, "Hey, we we will enjoy freedom overseas." But guess what? They all came back massively. And as you know, now even uh students graduating from American uh Ivy League are coming back. Professors teaching in Ivy League universities in America are coming back to China. And it's true that the Chinese political system is certainly not as free uh as the American political system. But at the same time, the Chinese also believe that in in a in a good society, what the needs of the society are as important as individual liberties. So many Chinese are happy to accept restraints on social behavior because they believe that that's how you create a good society and that's a different uh cultural assumption. Whereas in the United States you believe the most important good is individual freedom and any kind of social control is bad for the society.
Now but the Chinese are not saying that Americans should become like China. But what what what Americans and West has got to understand is that in this in this new Asian 21st century when the Asian societies come back they're not going to become carbon copy replicas of liberal democratic societies they're going to find their own balance their own uh formulas uh for success and and it's good for the west to understand that in many ways it may not necessarily be bad for the world if different societies and different civilizations make different choices to create good societies for their own people which their own people are happy with.
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My feeling certainly is that uh if we in the United States wish to uh make the case that uh liberal democracy with a high very high value on uh individual personal liberty um is the model for the good society which I personally think uh it it is um the the way we could do that is by proving that it works in our own country and then other countries might want to uh adopt it but we don't at at the moment do a very good job of uh making the case that a society with our kind of political system uh is going to end up uh terribly functional.
Yeah. And in fact you know u in my book has China won I cite the works of Angus Deaton you know who wrote a book called death of despair and if you look at the data is very this data is extremely sad about how the working classes in United States are struggling and how the incomes have stagnating how many of them are losing their medical benefits and I think it's very important in a good society that you got to take care of people at the bottom 10%. You know, I studied philosophy uh both in Singapore and in Canada university and one philosophy one philosopher I studied was America's then greatest living philosopher John Rawls and in his book a theory of justice he emphasizes that the only way you can justify inequality greater inequality if as a result of the greater inequality the bottom 10% are also better off and not just the top 10%. So that's what's missing in the United States that the top 10% have seen their share of national income and wealth increase exponentially but the bottom 10% 20% have been stagnating and that's some but that's something that can be fixed with good social policies.
I want to go back to something uh that you said earlier because um you uh you mentioned the need uh people might have uh a little surprised to hear you talk of the virtues of being cold and calculating and when you uh read your your books one of the things that you um uh one of your prescriptions is uh to become more Machiavellian and I think this is very interesting because people might be surprised to hear Machiavelli praised um staying on the subject of political philosophy but one of the interesting things that comes out of uh your your books, your analysis is that actually when the United States thinks it's doing cold, there's certainly no lack of callousness or coldness in in a lot of American uh foreign policy uh or willingness um to destroy the the lives of of others. But there's there is a certain absence of of strategic thinking and and one of the things that you point out is that um you know we we mistake what real strategic thinking is. So for example uh you cite Sun Tzu saying well you know if you if you don't know your enemy as well as yourself you're going to lose half your battles. It seems like in the United States we don't know either our enemy or ourselves. uh it might be considered non-strategic or or sappy or uh excessively empathetic to try and understand China, but you say no. Um understanding China, understanding how Putin thinks, these are these are not things you do out of an excess of emotion and sympathy. They do be these are things you do because you are a strategic careful thinker.
Absolutely. And and it's it's a bit sad that the United States when it launches geopolitical contest against China uh decided to do so without first working out a comprehensive long-term strategic plan. And you know in my in an early chapter in my book has China won I say there are 10 questions that anyone should ask if they're formulating a strategy. And I'm actually trying to help the United States formulate a comprehensive long-term strategy because if you don't have a comprehensive long-term strategy and you just carry out emotional actions, you end up hurting yourself. So, for example, the Biden administration thought they could stop the development of semiconductors uh in China by imposing all kinds of sanctions. And you can see the result a few years later uh China's share of the semiconductor market used to be 10%. Now it's 50%. to all the efforts to stop China didn't work because no one thought strategically and and give you just to make a very important point of detail when the United States cut off uh supplies of advanced semiconductors uh to China it was cutting off its nose to spite its face because by depriving yourself of 30% of your revenue you lost all your R&D budget and when you lost all your R&D budget, you lost your capacity to compete. So, you know, you got to think strategically when you carry on action. Is it going to do more damage to my opponent or is it going to do more damage to me? And I'm actually trying to help the United States work out policies that will be beneficial for the United States.
Yes. Another example of this kind of this kind of paradox where the thing that uh the United States does to counter China is actually helping uh China not the United States is um you you say rational and wasteful defense spending which you say it is in the n this what might surprise some people you say it's in China's national interest for American uh wasteful defense spending to continue the more money that America spends on weapon systems that will never be used against China uh because as you say a a war between the two countries would result in the destruction of both countries. Um you say that the better off China will be and American military expenditures are geopolitical gifts to China. That is certainly something that those authorizing those expenditures don't believe.
Yeah. And they see the tragedy here is that your the way America spends money on defense expenditures in theory you should first work out a strategy and say what kind of weapons do we need and then you work backwards and say okay in this new strategic environment maybe instead of piloted jets we need pilotless jets because drones today are as good as piloted jets. You spend so much money in an aircraft trying to protect the body of the pilot. But once you have a pilotless jet is everything is much cheaper and you don't and you don't have to worry about the human body in there. And similarly today with advanced missiles uh aircraft carriers have become sitting ducks. You no longer need aircraft carriers anymore to project power. But the reason why you cannot change course is because in America, and this is part of being a plutocracy, the the arms industry can lobby the US Congress to pass bills to buy weapons that are outmoded and that are no longer needed. So America is producing a lot of weapons that will not be useful when a real war comes because the aircraft carriers will be sitting ducks in the face of all these hypersonic and supersonic missiles that are being developed. But you can't you have vested interest deciding what should be purchased. But if you go if you do a zero-based thing, you can actually defend the United States much more effectively with half the budget or one quarter of the budget with much more effective weapons. But of course, the large part of the military-industrial complex will complain and then they will they will go to Congress and you won't be able to arrive at a rational decision. So in that sense, it it is it is not China that is distorting your defense expenditures. It's the American political system that is preventing the United States from having rational defense policies.
We've been talking here about how the United States policy towards China is ultimately uh irrational and self-defeating and uh pseudo Machiavellian without actually thinking sensibly about what is in the interests of this country. But it's not the only example that you give of uh self-defeating western policy. Just um opening up your uh your book here has the west lawsuit. Uh you'd say you have a section strategic errors, Islam, Russia and meddling in world affairs. And you make a series of arguments there that uh for example uh the United States treatment of Russia after the cold war actually led to the rise of Putin which was preventable. um and that the United States through its disastrous um wars in the Middle East has created in many sense or exacerbated the problems that they that supposedly we are trying to solve.
Yeah. I mean certainly the Iraq war was completely unnecessary. Completely unnecessary. I mean, you you you spend $3 trillion of blood and treasure and at the end of the day delivered a broken state in which is not safe for Americans to live in. Right? And similarly, by the way, the removal of Gaddafi was a huge mistake, especially for the Europeans because Gaddafi was acting like a a cork in the bottle uh preventing a surge of migrants from uh Africa towards Europe. But as soon as Gaddafi was removed, you know, the the floodgates opened up. So, it's not in your interest. So it's it's important to do a rational calculation of where your interests lie and and and and it's not in America's interest necessarily to fight forever wars and to have 800 military bases around the world because the 800 United States is a very safe country. you are protected by two wonderful huge oceans and you're protected by Canada and Mexico and you don't have uh hostile republics uh at your border. So you can actually cut down your defense expenditures dramatically and instead of making it a sole American mission to keep international waterways safe, work within other navies in the world and work cooperatively because all of us share common interests in keeping international sea lanes safe.
you know, you served as uh president of the I mean, I believe you were in the uh UN Security Council in the in the leadup to the uh Iraq war. What what That's right. 2001, 2002. Yeah. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Yeah, I mean it it was in I mean you could see the tension building up uh in the Security Council because the United States was trying to pass a resolution saying that to justify an invasion of Iraq and it was very clear that Russia, China and Germany and France thought it was a wrong decision and and frankly if the United States had listened to its good friends Germany and France who said this, you shouldn't fight this war. You will lose a lot of money and you will be worse off. The United States could have saved $3 trillion and by the way used it to develop the infrastructure of the United States and make it as gleaming as that of uh China. So why spend $3 trillion fighting an unnecessary war? And I'm surprised that no one has been held accountable for this unnecessary war. And I should I should I should also mention that I'm making these points because I actually believe that United States can become once again a very strong country. And the goal of all my prescriptions is not to weaken the United States but to strengthen the United States and to make it a more effective actor in a complex world environment.
Yes. I I there even one part in u in your uh your book on the west where you say you know some of my friends in other countries might wonder why I'm giving advice to uh America on how how to become stronger but I genuinely you know want all of the countries in the world to be to you know to reach their their potential and uh and and and you come as a friend and you say this over and over in the book you go I'm not criticizing I'm not here to just to just list the flaws and follies of the United States and pointing out uh ways in which this country is is is hurting itself.
Yeah. So my goal is to help the United States become stronger and more effective.
In this incredibly informative and deep analysis, Professor Makbubani has systematically dissected the current predicament facing the United States. Let's quickly review a few of the core diagnoses he offered.
Internal malady, plutocracy. He points out bluntly that the root of the problem lies in the American political system being hijacked by a plutocracy and the military-industrial complex leading to public policy that no longer serves the majority and defense spending that is both wasteful and irrational.
External blunders, a lack of strategic thinking. He argues that in its competition with China and in launching wars like those in Iraq and Libya, the United States has shown a pattern of emotional short-sighted decision-making ultimately leading to a series of disastrous self-defeating outcomes.
The core prescription, a return to rationality and cooperation. He repeatedly emphasizes that geopolitics is cold and calculating. He argues the US needs to abandon emotional zero-sum thinking, return to rationality and work with the world, including China, to truly solve its own problems and become strong again.
Professor Mahubani's diagnostic report also leaves us with several thought-provoking questions. First, to what extent do a nation's internal structural problems like wealth inequality and political polarization affect the rationality and effectiveness of its foreign policy? Second, when analyzing great power competition, should we focus more on their professed values or on the cold, hard national interests that lie beneath? And third, and most critically for the United States, does the real threat come from an external challenger or from its own dysfunctional internal system?
We are eager to hear your thoughts in the comments below. If you believe this diagnostic report has provided a valuable perspective for understanding our world today, please like, share, and subscribe to our channel. Thank you for watching.