While many geo-political watchers claim Donald Trump has weakened the United States domestically and on the world stage, some experts argue that both the President —and the U.S.— should not be underestimated.
“(Trump) stands out as a far more consequential president than any of his predecessors,” said Kishore Mahbubani, a renowned Singaporean diplomat and author, who has served as President of the UN Security Council.
“He has moved the agenda very, very clearly, and dominates the political scene in a way that no other recent U.S. president has,” added Mahbubani, while addressing the Fortune Innovation Forum in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday.
Mahbubani, whose widely-read books include Can Asians Think and Has China Won?, added that America’s economy is still 1.5 times larger than China’s, and that it has a powerful weapon: the U.S. dollar.
“In many ways, the Chinese still need to use the U.S. dollar—they can’t escape it. And when the U.S. introduces sanctions involving the USD, it can create significant discomfort for China,” the diplomat said.
But China’s meteoric rise has been undeniable, even to Americans, Mahbubani added. This was underscored in October when Trump referred to his meeting with Xi Jinping as a ‘G2’ one, offering a nod to their eastern counterpart’s ascending power.
“When the U.S. imposed tariffs on over 100 countries, only one country in the world could effectively retaliate against them, and that was China,” Mahbubani said, noting that the latter’s control over rare earths gives it a strategic counterweight to the power of the U.S. dollar.
Yet a key mistake that the Western mind still makes about China, he added, is that it sees the world in black and white terms, as a competition between the white democracies and black autocracy—but reality is never that simple.
“There’s no question that Western societies are on the right side of Western history in pushing for democracy and liberalization, but there’s also no question that China is on the right side of Chinese history,” Mahbubani said.
China, after all, is the world’s oldest continuous civilization, and for them, maintaining stability and harmony is much more important, he argued, adding that the West, however, has been slow to realize this, and has preferred to cling to a worldview where freedom fuels innovation and control kills it.
“This idea that the Chinese mind cannot be innovative is absolutely crazy, but it shows you that the Western mind has trapped itself in a bubble that doesn’t understand the rest of the world,” Mahbubani said.
As the world watches on, America’s thrust to stop China will continue for at least ten or twenty more years, Mahbubani predicts.
“The United States has been number one for 130 years, and no great power gives up its number one position (easily),” he said.
China, too, should stay on its toes, as “there’s something powerful and dynamic in the American economic and social system that explains its high performance”, the diplomat said.
“So whenever I meet my Chinese friends, I always tell them to never, never underestimate the United States of America.”