Source: The Hill

At a dark moment of World War II, in August 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill flew to Moscow to have dinner with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. The ideological gap between them was far greater than the gap between the U.S. and China today. Yet Churchill didn’t hesitate to cooperate with Stalin. Why not? 

An old strategic adage holds that in any great war, one should focus on the main battlefield and not get distracted by secondary issues. The great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “The talent of the strategist is to identify the decisive point and to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignoring lesser objectives.” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who graduated first in his class from West Point, should know this strategic adage well. 

Today, if Churchill were leading America’s war against a pandemic, he would advise focusing on the main battlefront, COVID-19, rather than getting distracted by the ongoing geopolitical contest with China. Indeed, just as he dined with Stalin, Churchill would advise America to cooperate with China. Sadly, few voices in America are recommending such Churchillian wisdom. 

Only President Trump, with his usual flair for unusual moves, could put in a phone call to Chinese President Xi Jinping on March 27. Yet, at the same time, the Trump administration has been sending contradictory signals. Its campaign against Huawei has not abated; the Trump administration is considering additional measures to restrict the supply of chips to the Chinese technology giant. On March 27, President Trump also signed a law obliging Washington to raise global support for Taiwan, a direct slap in the face for Beijing. Churchill, if he were alive today, would disapprove of these contradictory approaches. He would have said, “Focus on the main battlefront.” 

America is about to get a huge spike in COVID-19 cases. Indeed, America now has more cases than any other country in the world. More dangerously, the number of fatalities could run to as high as 200,000 to 1.7 million, as per projections based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scenarios. America desperately needs masks, ventilators, gowns, gloves and other personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care personnel and other workers.

On March 29, a plane from Shanghai landed at JFK Airport in New York, carrying 12 million gloves, 130,000 N95 masks, 1.7 million surgical masks, 50,000 gowns, 130,000 hand-sanitizer units and 36,000 thermometers. Yet, these amounts are a drop in the ocean; America needs much more now. Even France has ordered a billion masks, a vast majority of them from China. 

Instead of relying on domestic commercial channels, the U.S. government should work with the Chinese government. To foster such effective government-to-government cooperation, a few simple steps need to be taken. The first is to stop insulting China; it was unwise, for example, for the Trump administration to try to persuade the G-7 countries to call COVID-19 the “Wuhan virus.” The main lesson we should take away from this massive global outbreak is that all 7.5 billion inhabitants of Planet Earth have become like the passengers on the ill-fated cruise ship off Japan, the Diamond Princess: Our destinies, especially our health destinies, are intertwined. We have to work together to solve this crisis. It’s not smart to argue about who sprung the leak when a boat is sinking; what matters is how we respond to it. A clear signal from the Trump administration that it will stop scapegoating China will calm countries and markets all around the world, including the U.S.

There’s one other simple step that Churchill would advise the U.S. to take: President Trump should announce that he will immediately rescind all the tariff and non-tariff measures he has imposed on China, with the understanding that China will do the same. This may not lead to a major boost in trade or economic growth immediately. It will, however, send a powerful signal to the markets that when COVID-19 begins to retreat, both the economic growth and the international trade will bounce back faster.

President Trump will lose nothing today from making such an announcement. And he could extend it further by withdrawing all threats to raise tariffs on allies such as the European Union, Japan, Canada and Mexico. The markets will take note of these soothing measures. We all feel nostalgic for the world we enjoyed a few months ago. By sending signals that the world is going to return to the status quo ante, we will build up confidence in the future that will come when COVID-19 recedes, as it surely will.

When we return to the status quo ante, we may well return once again to a resumption of the U.S.-China geopolitical contest. Before America does so again, however, it may wish to heed the advice of its own strategic thinkers, like Henry Kissinger and George Kennan. It was unwise of America to plunge headlong into a geopolitical contest against China without first working out a comprehensive long-term strategy, as I argue in the book, “Has China Won?”

If America presses the “pause” button on the U.S.-China geopolitical contest now, as Churchill would advise it to do, this pause should provide American strategic thinkers the time to ponder all the dimensions of this contest before plunging in again. It also would provide Americans an opportunity to discover where the rest of the world stands on this issue. During the Cold War, all of Europe enthusiastically supported America. Today, it is unclear that Europe would do so: Some Italians in Rome played the Chinese National Anthem on public loudspeakers, and Serbia’s president cried and kissed the Chinese flag, after urgently needed medical supplies arrived in both countries from China; in Spain, citizens trended “Gracias China” on Twitter to thank China for sending medical supplies and personnel; the French foreign minister expressed his gratitude to China for providing much-needed medical supplies, including surgical masks, protective suits and gloves.

This doesn’t mean that all will be lost for America in this geopolitical contest. It only means that America will have to emulate the wisdom of great strategic thinkers, like Churchill, Kissinger and Kennan — and think hard before making its next, critical moves. 

Source: The Straits Times

The coronavirus pandemic has underlined the importance of supporting multilateral organisations like the World Health Organisation, rather than progressively weakening them

Humanity is supposed to be the most intelligent species on planet Earth. This species has just received, through Covid-19, one of its biggest shocks since World War II.

Thousands are dying daily, not through war or famine (the usual causes) but through a new disease caused by a novel coronavirus that has effectively left humanity defenceless. No cure or vaccine is immediately available.

The rapid spread of Covid-19 also confirms that all of humanity now live in the same boat, a boat akin to the ill-fated Diamond Princess stuck off Japan.

The big question that humanity now faces is a simple one: Is it intelligent enough to learn the big lessons from Covid-19 and, if necessary, make massive U-turns from current policies? In theory, we can. In practice, I fear that we will fail.

This essay will discuss one concrete example: multilateralism. Multilateralism sounds boring. To explain it simply, let’s return to the boat analogy. If we 7.5 billion people are now stuck together on a virus-infected cruise ship, does it make sense to clean and scrub only our personal cabins while ignoring the corridors and air wells outside, through which the virus travels?

The answer is clearly no. Yet, this is what we have been doing. In the developed world, we have been protecting our own countries while neglecting the global routes through which the virus travels. Since we are now in the same boat, humanity has to take care of the global boat as a whole.

Fortunately, after 1945, the West took the lead in setting up a family of global governance institutions, centred on the United Nations, like the World Health Organisation (WHO), to improve global governance. However, in recent decades, the West has been systematically weakening global multilateral institutions, including the WHO.

The essay will discuss the WHO, to illustrate the folly of undermining multilateral institutions. Its primary objective “is the attainment by all people of the highest possible level of health”. A noble goal.

Yet, the real value of the WHO kicks in when health crises break out. It provides the only effective forum for states to cooperate against global health challenges. Hence, it played a leading role in the eradication of smallpox, the near-eradication of polio and the development of an Ebola vaccine. For the most intelligent species on planet Earth, it’s a no-brainer to strengthen, not weaken, the WHO.

Sadly, the Western countries contrive to deny that they have been weakening multilateral institutions, including the WHO. This denial is very dangerous for the West. If it continues denying that it has weakened institutions like the WHO, it cannot make a U-turn and begin rejuvenating and strengthening them. Hence, the first step that the West needs to take is to engage in deep self-reflection on what it has done to organisations like the WHO.

The West has weakened the WHO in three ways; I have documented them in great detail in The Great Convergence, a book I wrote that was published in 2013.

First, the West starved the WHO of reliable long-term mandatory funding. This used to account for 62 per cent of its budget in 1970-1971. In 2017, it collapsed to 18 per cent. Why is this significant? The WHO can recruit long-term health inspectors and scientists only from mandatory funding, not voluntary contributions that vary from year to year.

The second way was to focus on biomedicine, with its focus on individual behaviour, instead of social medicine. But understanding individual behaviour is not enough to counter epidemics like Covid-19 that spread faster if we don’t take care of social conditions.

The third way was to dilute the role of the WHO and favour institutions like the World Bank, which is controlled by the West. The World Bank’s lending on health went from roughly half of the WHO budget in 1984 to more than 2-1/2 times bigger by 1996.

Giving more money to the World Bank should appear unobjectionable. However, as Professor Kelley Lee, professor of global health governance at Simon Fraser University, has documented in her book on the WHO, “for the WHO, it has meant a bypassing of its role as the lead UN health agency”.

In a health emergency, like Covid-19, the WHO can help us. The World Bank cannot. As Prof Lee says, during the severe acute respiratory syndrome crisis of 2002-2003, the “WHO’s worldwide mobilisation of scientists to identify and genetically sequence the infectious agent was especially impressive”.

So, given the critical importance of the WHO in fighting pandemics, why did the West starve it of mandatory long-term funding?

The ironic truth is that this was not even the result of a careful and comprehensive evaluation of the long-term strategic interests of the West. Instead, the policy was driven by “bean counters” who only wanted to save money.

They were also driven by short-term selfish interest – by making the WHO dependent on voluntary contributions from the West, the Western countries could get the WHO to focus on areas of interest to the West, which makes up only 12 per cent of the world’s population.

Yet, in undermining the ability of the WHO to improve conditions in the remaining 88 per cent, the West was essentially shooting itself in the foot as its own destiny, especially in health, is tied directly to the well-being of the rest, as demonstrated by Covid-19.

We are all in the same boat.

Can the West make a U-turn?

Yes it can. In some ways it has. One of the most eloquent spokesmen in favour of multilateralism is President Emmanuel Macron of France.

He has said: “In the current state of the world, there is nothing more effective than multilateralism. Why? Because all our challenges are global, such as terrorism, migration, global warming and regulation of the digital sector. All these issues can only be addressed globally, and multilaterally. Each time we consent to circumvent multilateralism, we hand victory to the law of the strongest.”

If he gave the same speech today, he would have mentioned Covid-19 first.

Words matter. Deeds matter more. To demonstrate its commitment to strengthening multilateralism, the West can reverse the ratio of mandatory versus voluntary funding of the WHO. Mandatory funding must go back to 70 per cent or more because voluntary funding goes up and down and the WHO cannot rely on that to build long-term scientific capabilities.

When I served as Singapore’s Ambassador to the UN, I saw how ferociously some ambassadors of Western countries fought to contribute less (on the basis of a UN formula where rich countries pay more in absolute terms and poor countries pay less). They would fight to save one or two million dollars. How much has the global economy lost as a result of Covid-19? We have lost trillions of dollars.

Trillions versus millions! Very little money is needed to strengthen the WHO. For example, the European Union countries contributed US$150 million (S$214 million) to the WHO in fiscal year 2018. This amount is just 0.09 per cent of the budget of the European Commission, or one-tenth of 1 per cent.

This makes the tragedy of Covid-19 even sadder. It would literally take “peanuts” to save and strengthen the WHO.

So where does all this leave us on the issue of multilateralism?

In the short run, we can only despair. Turning around entrenched habits in the West cannot be done overnight.

In the long run, we can be confident that a new global consensus will emerge that all of us now live together in a small interdependent boat, like the passengers of the ill-fated Diamond Princess cruise ship did.

On such a global boat, it makes no sense to clean only our cabins when the boat is infected. The only way we can protect our own cabin is by coming together to take care of the boat as a whole.

Over time, we can only hope that the wiser voices of the West will be heeded and a more enlightened policy of supporting multilateral institutions, like the WHO, will prevail. After all, enlightened self-interest, if nothing else, dictates that it must adopt a multilateral stance towards global challenges.

As friends of the West, we should work with and encourage them to speak out more. We should tell them that the fate of the human species depends on our ability to make essential U-turns and work together to strengthen, not weaken, institutions of good governance, like the WHO.

This will be a key litmus test to assess whether humanity is truly the most intelligent species on planet Earth.

Source: Ambassadors Brief

Behind “Has China Won?” (which it hasn’t) lurks a more important question: “Can America lose?” This question seems inconceivable. But future historians will be puzzled: a young republic, barely 250 years old, with one quarter the population of China, is taking on the world’s oldest and most resilient civilization. And it’s doing so without first working out a comprehensive long-term strategy. This is unwise.

George Kennan, the master strategist who formulated America’s long-term strategy against the once-mighty Soviet Union, would disapprove of America’s lack of long-term strategic thinking, if he were alive. He provided wise counsel on how to handle a powerful adversary: persuade the people of the world that America enjoyed a “spiritual vitality”, cultivate long-term friends, avoid insulting the Soviet Union. No such wisdom can be found in America’s policies towards China.

Instead of policies based on cool and hard-headed realistic analyses, American policies are based on myths. My intent with this book is to expose those myths. In what follows, I unpack three of them:

• Myth 1: China, like the Soviet Union, is run by a rigid sclerotic communist party that remains in power only through suppressing its own population
• Myth 2: American society, based on democratic accountability and capitalism, will always be supple and flexible
• Myth 3: America and China have absolutely opposing interests and values. Both countries have no choice but to head for a complete confrontation

Myth 1: China, like the Soviet Union, is run by a rigid sclerotic communist party that remains in power only through suppressing its own population. For instance, Mark Esper, the US Secretary of Defence said in February 2020, “…under President Xi’s rule, the Chinese Communist Party is heading even faster and further in the wrong direction – more internal repression, more predatory economic practices, more heavy-handedness, and most concerning for me, a more aggressive military posture.”

Reality: The greatest explosion of personal freedoms that the Chinese people have experienced in the past 4,000 years has taken place in the last 40 years, especially for the bottom fifty percent of Chinese society. 40 years ago the Chinese people could not choose where to live, what to wear, where to work, what to study. There were zero tourists leaving China. Today, 134 million Chinese (or one-third of America’s population) leave China freely. Then they return home freely. Instead of suffering repression, the Chinese have experienced a great liberation in their personal lives. Jean Fan, a Stanford psychologist, has observed that “in contrast to America’s stagnation China’s culture, self-concept and morale are being transformed at a rapid pace – mostly for the better”. Independent surveys, like the Edelman Trust Barometer 2019 report, show that in China, 90% of the people trust their government. In America, only 39% do.

China is not perfect. It faces many real challenges. The biggest challenge it faces is long-term political succession. Who will succeed Xi? However the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not sclerotic like its Soviet counterpart. It has developed the world’s largest meritocracy. In contrast to American policy-making, which is driven by short-term electoral considerations, China’s policies are driven by careful long-term strategic calculations.

The core calculation is and remains that the Chinese people will tolerate some limits on their political rights (and those of others) so long as the government continues to provide them with what are, in practical terms, better, freer, and more prosperous daily lives. And the CCP is increasingly agile in upholding its end of the bargain.

Even though China’s environment was ravaged by rapid industrialisation a few decades ago (like in the Western Industrial Revolution), China has since then made a massive U-turn and launched an effort to become the world’s first Ecological Civilization. China learns quickly from its mistakes. After its initial mis-steps in Wuhan, the subsequent response of the Chinese government to the COVID-19 outbreak was one of the most effective of any government in the world. The WHO said “In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history… By extension, the reduction that has been achieved in the force of COVID-19 infection in China has also played a significant role in protecting the global community.”

America is therefore making a big strategic mistake in underestimating the strength and resilience of both the Chinese government and Chinese civilization. Professor Wang Gungwu says that the Chinese civilization is the only civilization to be knocked down four times and stand up again each time. Chinese civilization today is experiencing one of its strongest resurgences ever in its history. Many Americans are not aware of this.

Myth 2: American society, based on democratic accountability and capitalism, will always be supple and flexible. Unlike the rigid Soviet bureaucracy, American society is always reinventing itself and adapting creatively and intelligently to each new challenge thrown in its way. Hence, it can only triumph against communist party-run states, like China.

Reality: American society used to be supple and flexible. This generated some of the biggest triumphs ever seen in human history: the world’s largest middle class society, the moon-landings, the dramatic victory over the mighty Soviet Union without firing a shot, the world’s most successful new corporations. Yes, it would be a huge mistake for China to underestimate America as an adversary.

Yet, the latest data also shows tremendous deteriorations in American society. America was famous for its social mobility. Today America is the only major developed country where the average income of the bottom fifty percent has gone down over a thirty year period. Sadly, this stagnation of income has also resulted in a lot of human pain and suffering, as documented by two Princeton University economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton. The white working classes of America used to carry the American dream of getting a better life in their hearts and souls. Today, as Case says, there is a “sea of despair” among them. She and Deaton conclude: “Ultimately, we see our story as about the collapse of the white, high-school-educated working class after its heyday in the early 1970s, and the pathologies that accompany that decline.” The detailed study of Case and Deaton documents how poor economic prospects “compounds over time through family dysfunction, social isolation, addiction, obesity and other pathologies.” American society has never been more troubled.

In theory, American society can make U-turns and recover. In practice, this is a myth. American decision-making has become rigid and captured by special interests. For example, the primary contest with China will not be in the defence sphere. America should cut its defence budget, reduce its participation in foreign wars and focus on internal social and economic development. However, defence budgets are not decided by rational analysis. They are the result of intense lobbying by vested interests.

Myth 3: America and China have absolutely opposing interests and values. Both countries have no choice but to head for a complete confrontation. Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, has said “It is no longer realistic to ignore the fundamental differences between our two systems” and the impact of these differences on “American national security”. He added that “we’re finally realizing the degree to which the Communist Party is truly hostile to the United States and its values”.

Reality: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not hostile to America. The former Soviet Communist Party declared its ideological opposition to America. Khrushchev once said “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” China has no such goal.

Nor does it have any desire to export its political system, culture, and values to the rest of the world. American leaders have always had a universalising mission. They believed that America’s role was to serve as a “shining city on the hill”. The more the rest of the world emulated American values and practices, the more it would be better off.

China has no such universalising mission. It believes that only Chinese can practice Chinese values. The primary goal of the Chinese government is to rejuvenate Chinese civilisation and ensure that there is no repetition of the century of humiliation it suffered from 1842 to 1949. In the eyes of many objective Asian observers, the CCP actually functions as the “Chinese Civilization Party”. Its soul is not rooted in the foreign ideology of Marxism-Leninism but in the rich cultural reservoirs of Chinese civilisation. In this regard there is no fundamental contradiction between America and China. Hence, if both America and China adopt a more live and let live policy, there’s room for both to live in peace with each other. Equally importantly, the six billion people who live outside America and China also want to see this happen.

Americans frequently oversimplify China’s aims – declaring that China is a threat to democracy, in America and the rest of the world. Christopher Wray, the FBI director, has said, “One of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat…  and I think it’s going to take a whole-of-society response by us.” Curiously, the world’s two other largest democracies, India and Indonesia, don’t feel threatened by Chinese ideology. They are deeply concerned by the sharp increase in China’s power. But they don’t foresee any ideological confrontation with China. Neither should America.

Equally importantly in our shrinking, interconnected and interdependent planet, America and China also share common national interests in fighting pressing common global challenges (like Covid-19 or climate change). Both would benefit from greater cooperation. If America and China don’t come together to deal with their global challenges, future generations will see both of them as two tribes of apes that continued fighting over territory while the forest around them was burning.

Source: Global Times

Kofi Annan, the late UN Secretary-General, often said the world was a “global village.” He was right. Our world has shrunk. The recent spread of COVID-19 worldwide, affecting both rich and developing countries, confirms that all 7.5 billion people of the world live in a global village.

Wise philosophers, both Eastern and Western, like Confucius and Plato, have taught us that when we live in a small community, we must develop commonly agreed rules and regulations to manage common spaces and everyday challenges. 

Kofi Annan has also said, “we need rules of the road and norms to guide relations between individuals and communities. This is as true of the global village as it is of the village each of us may have come from.” Therefore, if we have become a global village, we should be strengthening global village councils, like the family of UN organizations, who formulate rules and norms as well as manage our global commons and global challenges. Sadly, in recent decades we have been doing the opposite. We have been weakening the UN organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO). 

Why did we carry out this irrational act? The answer is complicated. It is so complicated that I wrote a book, The Great Convergence (which has been translated and published in Chinese), to explain this irrationality. However, one key reason stands out. 

The wealthiest countries of the world, especially the affluent Western countries, unwisely decided that their interests would be better served by weakening the UN. Many Western countries deny that they are doing this. However, having served as the Singapore Ambassador to the UN twice (from 1984 to 1989 and from 1998 to 2004), I have seen at firsthand how the West has weakened the UN. There is also strong evidence to back up this claim. 

Take the WHO as an example. The West weakened it in three ways. First, the West starved the WHO of reliable mandatory funding. It used to be 62 percent in 1970-71. In 2017, it collapsed to 18 percent. Why is this significant? The WHO can only recruit long-term health inspectors from mandatory funding, not voluntary contributions. The second mistake was to focus on biomedicine, with its focus on individual behavior, instead of social medicine. 

Epidemics like COVID-19 spread faster if we don’t take care of social conditions. The third mistake was to dilute the role of the WHO and favor institutions like the World Bank controlled by the West. The World Bank lending on health went from roughly half of the WHO budget in 1984 to more than two and a half times bigger by 1996.

Today, as both the US and the European Union are being severely afflicted by COVID-19, they should ask themselves whether it was wise to starve the WHO funding for several decades. They should also re-examine their motives for doing so. Indeed, the US and the EU had different reasons. 

The US weakened UN institutions because they constrained the ability of the US to act unilaterally. A former director of the National Intelligence Council told me directly, “Kishore. I can understand why small states like Singapore want stronger multilateral institutions. However, the US finds them constraining.” 

He was honest. The EU, by contrast, was primarily concerned about spending less money. The EU countries resented the fact that combined together, they contributed more than 30 percent of the UN budget, yet they had less than 15 percent of the vote for the spending decisions.

Now that the US and the EU have been severely affected by COVID-19, they should logically conclude that it was unwise for them to weaken the WHO. Indeed, there is no question that the Western countries, who are now the most affected, would benefit from a strong WHO. Sadly, even though Western societies worship reason, they find it difficult to change some of their past irrational policies. Too many vested interests will prevent the West from making a logical U-turn away from the weakening of the WHO. 

This provides a tremendous opportunity for China. Unlike the Western countries, China has declared that its goal is to strengthen the family of UN organizations, including the WHO. 

As President Xi Jinping said in Geneva in 2017, “pandemic diseases such as bird flu, Ebola and Zika have sounded the alarm for international health security. The WHO should play a leadership role in strengthening epidemic monitoring and sharing of information, practices, and technologies.” His words were prophetic.

So, what can China do to strengthen the WHO? The first step is to take the lead in calling for a sharp increase in the share of mandatory funding. This will enable the WHO to make wiser and more strategic long-term plans, including developing long-term capabilities for managing future pandemics. Undoubtedly, more epidemics will come. 

However, the question is not just about money. It is also about creating a global ethos that supports President Xi’s statement that humanity is now a “community of shared future.” The people who understand best that humanity is now a “community with a shared future” are the world’s doctors and health administrators. 

They know better than anyone else that viruses and bacteria don’t respect borders. They carry no passports. They cross borders effortlessly. Hence, we should find ways and means of bringing together all the global health professionals more frequently. 

The WHO can and should hold more meetings of global health professionals. At such meetings, we should pre-emptively anticipate the next few global health crises and put in place plans and measures to protect humanity as a whole. Fortunately, as we have discovered with COVID-19, the solution won’t necessarily be found in expensive medicines. It also lies in simple improvements in personal hygiene.

One of the key lessons I learned from my 10 years in the UN community is that constant face-to-face meetings raised the level of trust and understanding among representatives coming from all corners of the world. Hence, I am confident that if the WHO, with the strong support of China, could convene regular meetings of the global health professionals in all fields, it would significantly increase the level of trust among them. 

With this global sea of trust, humanity would be better able to handle future global health crises: When this happens, the world will thank China for planting the seeds that led to the establishment of communities of trust in our small global village.

Source: South China Morning Post

• The Covid-19 outbreak is occurring at a time when global organisations, including the WHO, are weakened, making it imperative for world powers to step up
• Just as they did for the global financial crisis, the US and China should convene a special G20 summit to form a coordinated response to the pandemic, before it kills more people

Sometimes the most obvious lesson from a global crisis is the hardest one to see.The most obvious lesson from the rapid global spread of the novel coronavirus is that Planet Earth has become – like the ill-fated Diamond Princess, moored off Japan, and the Grand Princess, moored off California – a virus-infected cruise ship.

In theory, the 7.5 billion inhabitants of planet earth live in 193 separate countries. In practice, these separate countries have functionally become cabins on the same ship. Why? After decades of accelerating globalisation, millions of people, goods and services travel across borders. Viruses take the same routes.Despite China’s valiant efforts to contain the virus, it has now reached all corners of the earth, with countries as far apart as Italy and South Korea being seriously affected.

One undeniable hard truth is that humanity now lives in a single, deeply interconnected health ecosystem. The data confirms this.

On February 23, China had about 77,000 cases and 2,500 deaths. The rest of the world had fewer than 2,000 cases, with 17 deaths. Barely two weeks later, China’s number of cases crept up 5 per cent to about 80,000. The figures for the rest of the world jumped to 25,000 – a 1,300 per cent increase.

As of Thursday, out of 193 countries, 114 countries have been hit by Covid-19. As the World Health Organisation (WHO) says, we now face a global pandemic.

Humanity claims to be the most intelligent species on planet earth. The most intelligent response to living in a single health ecosystem would be to strengthen global organisations, like the WHO, to manage it.

With global organisations weakened, the only solution is for the world’s most powerful countries, including the US and China, to step up.

Sadly, we have been doing the opposite. Professor Kelley Lee, of the University of Washington’s Department of Global Health, has documented how the mandatory funding portion of the WHO went down from 62 per cent in 1970-71 to 28 per cent in 2006-07. This decline has crippled the WHO’s ability to recruit long-term staff to manage global pandemics. Sadly, even after the Covid-19 had broken out, the Trump administration announced that it would slash its annual funding of WHO from US$123 million in 2020 to US$58 million in 2021.

With global organisations weakened, the only solution is for the world’s most powerful countries, including the United States and China, to step up to the plate.Fortunately, there has been a recent precedent for both to cooperate to deal with a global crisis. Just over a decade ago, at the height of the Global Financial Crisis, the US and China, together with other G20 countries, agreed at the G20 Summit in April 2009 to launch a coordinated global stimulus package to pull the world back from a financial precipice. It succeeded. Similarly, the US and China should again band together with other G20 countries to respond to the equally perilous Covid-19 outbreak.

US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 29, 2019. File photo: AP

Sometimes the most obvious lesson from a global crisis is the hardest one to see.The most obvious lesson from the rapid global spread of the novel coronavirus is that Planet Earth has become – like the ill-fated Diamond Princess, moored off Japan, and the Grand Princess, moored off California – a virus-infected cruise ship.

In theory, the 7.5 billion inhabitants of planet earth live in 193 separate countries. In practice, these separate countries have functionally become cabins on the same ship. Why? After decades of accelerating globalisation, millions of people, goods and services travel across borders. Viruses take the same routes.Despite China’s valiant efforts to contain the virus, it has now reached all corners of the earth, with countries as far apart as Italy and South Korea being seriously affected.

 

One undeniable hard truth is that humanity now lives in a single, deeply interconnected health ecosystem. The data confirms this.

On February 23, China had about 77,000 cases and 2,500 deaths. The rest of the world had fewer than 2,000 cases, with 17 deaths. Barely two weeks later, China’s number of cases crept up 5 per cent to about 80,000. The figures for the rest of the world jumped to 25,000 – a 1,300 per cent increase.

As of Thursday, out of 193 countries, 114 countries have been hit by Covid-19. As the World Health Organisation (WHO) says, we now face a global pandemic.CORONAVIRUS UPDATEGet updates direct to your inboxSUBSCRIBEBy registering, you agree to our T&C and Privacy Policy

Humanity claims to be the most intelligent species on planet earth. The most intelligent response to living in a single health ecosystem would be to strengthen global organisations, like the WHO, to manage it.

With global organisations weakened, the only solution is for the world’s most powerful countries, including the US and China, to step up.

 

Sadly, we have been doing the opposite. Professor Kelley Lee, of the University of Washington’s Department of Global Health, has documented how the mandatory funding portion of the WHO went down from 62 per cent in 1970-71 to 28 per cent in 2006-07. This decline has crippled the WHO’s ability to recruit long-term staff to manage global pandemics. Sadly, even after the Covid-19 had broken out, the Trump administration announced that it would slash its annual funding of WHO from US$123 million in 2020 to US$58 million in 2021.

With global organisations weakened, the only solution is for the world’s most powerful countries, including the United States and China, to step up to the plate.Fortunately, there has been a recent precedent for both to cooperate to deal with a global crisis. Just over a decade ago, at the height of the Global Financial Crisis, the US and China, together with other G20 countries, agreed at the G20 Summit in April 2009 to launch a coordinated global stimulus package to pull the world back from a financial precipice. It succeeded. Similarly, the US and China should again band together with other G20 countries to respond to the equally perilous Covid-19 outbreak.

WHO declares coronavirus crisis a pandemic

Unfortunately, the pandemic has broken out at the same time as the US-China global geopolitical contest has gained momentum. In my forthcoming book, Has China Won?, I document the deep structural forces driving this rivalry. The recent speeches by the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary Mark Esper also confirm the contest is now in full swing.

The dilemma that both powers face now is whether they can occasionally set aside their differences to work together when they face a common threat like Covid-19. The rest of humanity hopes they will do so.Fortunately, there has been a long history of collaboration in the health sector. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta successfully identified the H5N1 bird flu after China’s Department of Health failed to do so. As a result of the US-China collaboration, the bird flu – which had a fatality rate of 60 per cent compared with about 2 per cent for the novel coronavirus – was associated with 455 deaths.

By contrast, the Covid-19 pandemic has already killed more than 4,900 people. Underscoring the necessity of the US to collaborate across borders to deal with the crisis, the US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said: “We cannot hermetically seal off the United States to a virus. And we need to be realistic about that.” US President Donald Trump’s shock announcement that he would ban all travel from Europe indicates his awareness of how serious the situation has become.

So far, the Trump administration has sent conflicting signals on whether it would collaborate with China. Trump has praised the efforts of President Xi Jinping to control the outbreak. However, the US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said, somewhat gleefully, that the coronavirus could “help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America”.

The data does not support Ross’ claim. The global economy has begun to weaken in the wake of the pandemic, with stock markets falling in response, highlighting once again how interdependent our global system has become. Ross is also probably unaware, as reported in The New York Times, that “many of the active ingredients in life-saving generic drugs – the ones that stock hospital crash carts and maintain our daily well-being – come from China and India”. If this supply stops, many more people could die from the coronavirus.

If humanity decides to take on board the real lesson from Covid-19 – that we all live together in a virus-infected cruise ship – the rational next step for the US and China to take would be to, once again, convene a G20 Summit of world leaders and immediately launch a strong and coordinated global response to the pandemic, before it kills more people. Fortunately, Trump knows that he needs a strong global economy powering a strong American economy to help his re-election prospects.

If Presidents Trump and Xi were to jointly announce that they are calling for a special G20 Summit, it would provide a massive boost to global confidence that the world is finally coming together to deal with Covid-19. Indeed, if Trump wants a quick fix to stop the falling stock markets, such an announcement could do it

The skills of the US and China are also complementary in the health field. The US still has the best medical research institutes. China has developed the best institutions of public administration to manage such health challenges. If the two of them could set aside their geopolitical differences temporarily and launch a massive joint effort to contain the coronavirus, the world would be much better off. The six billion people who live outside the US and China would also be massively relieved.

Our dangerously infected cruise ship, Planet Earth, desperately needs such decisive actions.

Source: Edelman Trust Barometer

The world stands at one of its most important crossroads in human history. As we move inexorably away from the brief era of Western domination of human history, societies from the East and the West will have to find a new balance. And there are two clear paths that the East and West can take: towards convergence or divergence.

In theory, there should be divergence. Many Asian societies and civilizations still have strong memories of Western domination. At its peak, the West trampled on the Islamic world, effortlessly colonized India and humiliated China. As once downtrodden societies recover their civilizational strength and vigor, it would be perfectly natural to return with a desire to wreak vengeance on the West. As Samuel Huntington once famously predicted, the world should be experiencing a clash of civilizations.

Instead, the opposite has happened. Thanks to the generous gifts of Western wisdom, especially the gift of Western reasoning, there is a fundamental convergence taking place in the dreams and ambitions of young people in both East and West. As Larry Summers and I observed in our 2016 essay “The Fusion of Civilizations,” “most people around the world now have the same aspirations as the Western middle classes: they want their children to get good educations, land good jobs, and live happy, productive lives as members of stable, peaceful communities. Instead of feeling depressed, the West should be celebrating its phenomenal success at injecting the key elements of its worldview into other great civilizations.”

A few years later, Yuval Noah Harari reached the same conclusion when he observed in Sapiens that nearly all humans today share the same geopolitical, economic, legal, and scientific systems. As he argues, “today when Iran and the United States rattle swords at one another, they both speak the language of nation states, capitalist economies, international rights and nuclear physics.” There is no better living proof of the possible psychological convergence between Iran and America than the foreign minister of Iran, Mohammad Javad Zarif. His deep knowledge and understanding of Western history and culture would put many great Western minds to shame.

Thanks to the spread of Western wisdom and the global convergence on norms such as the rule of law, the societies with the highest levels of trust in both government and business today are China, Indonesia, India, and the UAE, much higher than in many Western countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

The magical benefits of greater convergence between Eastern and Western minds can be seen in the most competitive human laboratory of the world. When young entrepreneurs flock to Silicon Valley in search of the next start-up and when young freshmen enroll in the greatest Ivy League universities, they are barely aware that they come from the East or the West. Instead, they speak a common language of aspirations and see no problem collaborating across cultures in search of achieving extraordinary excellence. Similarly, when Chinese university presidents strive to create the best universities in the world, they know that they have to emulate the best practices of American and European universities. In short, many forces are pushing the 7.5 billion people of the world towards greater convergence. All this should naturally lead to greater trust between the East and the West.

Yet, there are also equally strong forces pushing humanity towards divergence. One has already broken out: the geopolitical contest between the U.S. and China. This will be a multidimensional contest, in economics and politics, in the military and cultural spheres. Kiron Skinner, the former director of policy planning in the State Department, astutely observed that this would be the first struggle that the U.S. would have with a “non-Caucasian power.” She put her finger on a key factor that would lead to distrust between the U.S. and China.

This distrust explains how the forces of science and technology, which have been propelling humanity towards a common understanding of our natural world and which have built bridges across cultures, can now become a divisive force. If a German or French (or even Japanese or Indian) telecommunications company had been the leader in developing 5G technology, the U.S. would have acquiesced. However, when a Chinese company, Huawei, became the technological leader, the U.S. balked and decided to throttle Huawei. As Tom Friedman presciently observed, “However much justified, this move was the equivalent of China freezing out Apple and Microsoft. It was an earthquake in China’s tech lands… Lots of Chinese tech companies are now thinking: We will never, ever, ever leave ourselves again in a situation where we are totally dependent on America for key components. Time to double down on making our own.”

The struggle over Huawei is only the tip of a massive iceberg. The U.S. will make a major effort to “decouple” itself from Chinese technology, perhaps in the hope that this will stall China’s development. It could. But it would be unwise to bet on it. As Asia’s leading historian Professor Wang Gungwu has wisely observed, China is the only major civilization that has fallen down four times and stood up again each time. Right now, it has only just begun to revitalize its civilizational sinews. The return of China is unstoppable.

Having defeated the mighty Soviet Union without firing a shot, it would be perfectly natural for American strategic planners to believe that America will prevail again. And it well could. However, the world of 2020 is vastly different from the world of 1950 when the Cold War began. All round the world, strong and self-confident societies are emerging. The 6 billion people of the world who live outside the U.S. and China will not be easily dragooned to join one side or another. They will make their own choices.

America and the West could well learn some valuable lessons from how China’s Asian neighbors manage the rise of China. Many of these neighbors share some Western concerns about the rise of China. However, having lived with China for thousands of years, they also know it would be futile to stop China. Instead, each of the neighbors, including major and middle powers like India and Japan, South Korea and Vietnam, will make pragmatic adjustments: pushing back against China when necessary, cooperating when it is mutually beneficial.

As the 21st century progresses steadily towards a multicivilizational world, the West could well learn a lesson or two from supple Asian minds. Instead of seeing the world in black and white terms, where binary choices are made between trust and distrust, the West could learn to live with successful non-Western societies, which were both similar and different from Western societies. They will share some key Western attitudes and retain their unique civilizational identities in other dimensions. This may well be the biggest test for Western societies in the realm of trust: can they “trust” societies that will never be fully Western in their identity?

Source: East Asia Forum

ASEAN should have begun to crack and fall apart from the strain of the rising geopolitical rivalries in Asia between the United States and China, if what critics say about its fragility were true. But ASEAN steadily marched through another difficult and challenging year and quietly delivered many positive results that will improve the wellbeing of its 650 million people.

Most importantly, there were no wars or conflicts. Indeed, not even serious political tensions. ASEAN did not experience any aerial battles like the ones between India and Pakistan in February 2019 or a major military assault like the drone attack on the Saudi Arabian oil installations that took 5 per cent off global oil supplies.

ASEAN consistently and quietly delivers peace to one of the most Balkanised regions in the world. Yet, no one notices.

ASEAN economies continue to grow moderately but steadily. A few years ago, Western media reported with great fanfare that India had surpassed China as the fastest-growing major economy in the world. There will be no such fanfare when the results show that ASEAN grew faster than India in 2019. Nor are many people aware that ASEAN is already the fifth-largest economy in the world with a combined GDP of US$3 trillion.

More remarkably, the understated and quiet leadership of ASEAN managed to pull off one of the biggest coups in recent economic history by announcing the completion of negotiations on the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world’s largest free trade area. RCEP’s 15 member states make up 30 per cent of the world’s population and 29 per cent of the world’s GDP.

Singapore’s Minister for Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing observed that ‘RCEP is more than just an economic agreement. It is a strategic signal to the rest of the world that this part of Asia continues to believe in upholding a global, multilateral trading order’. India’s last-minute decision not to join could have stalled and broken down the RCEP process and could have been as distracting as Brexit. Instead, the wisdom of the ‘ASEAN minus X’ formula shone through.

ASEAN has always believed that perfection is the enemy of the good. If not all participants can join, the rest will proceed first. India will come to realise that its ‘Look East’ and ‘Act East’ policies will mean absolutely nothing if it does not join RCEP.

The completion of RCEP was particularly critical against the backdrop of the escalating trade war and the larger geopolitical contest between the Unites States and China. ASEAN could have been paralysed or broken apart by this rivalry due to a struggle between its more pro-China members and the more pro-American members. Yet, the culture of accommodation and pragmatism prevailed.

The Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong spoke for many in the region when he said at the Shangri-La Dialogue on 31 May that the region should not be divided by geopolitical contests. He insisted that regional cooperation initiatives proposed by other countries ‘should strengthen existing cooperation arrangements centred on ASEAN. They should not undermine them, create rival blocs, deepen fault lines or force countries to take sides. They should help bring countries together, rather than split them apart’.

Significanly, ASEAN launched its own ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific due to fears that the US Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy could divide the region. Indonesian President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo argued for the need to cooperate with China within ASEAN’s Indo-Pacific framework and to build connectivity and infrastructure between ASEAN and China.

In recent years, the South China Sea issue has been divisive. Against this backdrop, it was significant that on 31 July 2019, China revealed that ASEAN and China had completed the first reading of the single draft negotiating text for a Code of Conduct ahead of schedule. This was commended at the ASEAN–China Summit in Bangkok on 3 November.

While Beijing continued its steady and constant engagement with ASEAN, Washington remained domestically distracted. US President Donald Trump did not attend the ASEAN–US Summit in Bangkok on 4 November 2019. Neither did US Vice President Mike Pence nor US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Only the US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien turned up. As a result, only 3 of the 10 ASEAN leaders — Thailand, Vietnam and Laos — attended the meeting. Washington was miffed, but as Hoang Thi Ha observed, the United States missing meetings with ASEAN was a classic case of déjà vu for Asia. Each such absence is a geopolitical gift to China.

It would be a mistake, however, to believe that ASEAN will drift inexorably into a Chinese sphere of influence. Over the years, ASEAN has accumulated quiet geopolitical wisdom. It will keep all windows open and also take advantage of unexpected geopolitical opportunities.

In recent years, South Korea has been in a tough spot. It has experienced difficult relations with China over THAAD, Japan over ‘comfort women’ and the United States over base funding. It made sense for ASEAN to reach out to South Korea — leading to a tremendously successful summit between ASEAN and South Korea on 26 November 2019 in Busan.

The wisdom and resilience that ASEAN revealed again in 2019 took years to develop. The Indonesian culture of musyawarah (consultation) and mufakat (consensus) has become embedded into the DNA of ASEAN and has proven to be a major asset. Perhaps the time has come for other regions to come and study this ASEAN ‘miracle’. Emulating ASEAN may be a productive approach for other regions to adopt.

Kishore Mahbubani is Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, the National University of Singapore, and author with Jeffrey Sng of The ASEAN Miracle (NUS Press, 2017).

This article is part of an EAF special feature series on 2019 in review and the year ahead.

Source: ASEAN’s quiet resilience | East Asia Forum