Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy.
Kishore Mahbubani, Has China Won?: The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy. (Public Affairs, 2020).
Kishore Mahbubani (b. 1948) is a Singaporean civil servant, a career diplomat, and academic of East Indian background. From 1971-2004 he served as Singapore's permanent representative to the United Nations. Between 2004-2017 Mahbubani was the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School for Public Policy.
His book, Has China Won?, tells his readership straightaway that the answer is "no," or at least, not yet. He believes that a sleeping America can finally wake up, and as a friend who has benefited from America's manifold contributions to the world, he wants the US to wake up from its slumber to see the rise of China, India, Brazil, and others. (The world today is much more multipolar than it was before WWII with European colonies still intact.)
Mahbubani cites two historical events that shaped American policy in the world: (1) The Cold War with the Soviet Union ended amazingly in the early 1990s without America firing a single shot. Thus Francis Fukuyama's book, The End of History (1992) made the claim that the rest of the world wants Liberal Democracy and Free Trade, just as what the US has developed, but it did not realize that the world has changed with the rise of China, India, and the rest which had benefited from American capitalism. (2) The 9/11/01 attack by Islamic extremists on American soil, and George W. Bush's unilateral declaration of the War on Terror without consultation with allies through the United Nations or even the approval of the US Congress. (The younger Bush failed by differing from his father who succeeded by rallying a coalition of allies through the UN.)
Mahbubani has high praises for what America had given to the rest of the world with people today living in the best time: such as the reduction of world poverty in 1950 from 75% to 10% by 2013, the increase in life-span by modern medicine and biotechnology, not to mention a peaceful world in general in avoidance of any catastrophic nuclear conflagration. Unfortunately, within a month of his presidency, Biden ordered a military airstrike on East Syria (albeit "to save American lives"), despite his campaign promise to reduce tension in the world which most Americans agreed.
The Three "M's" that Mahbubani suggests for the Biden administration are:
1) To be minimalist, to avoid being arrogant and hubris as to America being the greatest economy and military might in the world: in short, to avoid any intervention of foreign lands that the US sees as violation of human rights or rule of law.
2) To act multilaterally in the world in diplomacy and not defense with countries that have different values from our own, such as China and Russia. (Military drills such as those in recent years with Japan, India, Australia, and part of the US ih Fleet (the "Quad") to assure freedom of navigation in the South China Sea should be avoided. (The US had not even ratified the UN Convention on Law of the Sea.)
3 "Machaevellianism," not as cunning immorality, but as virtueas defined by Isaiah Berlin. America with 250 years of history should not preach to China which has 4,000 years. Officials in Washington such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi agree that China should play by the "rules and norms set by international standards."
The first US-China Summit in June 2021 ending with mutual accusation and name-calling was a bad start for the Biden administration. Yang Jiechi of the Chinese delegation challenged US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, that "the US does not represent world opinion or even define the norms of international standards." (See Mahbubani's May 13, 2021, YouTube on "Can Asia Help the Biden Adminstration?" and also Biden's meeting with the G-7 in Europe in June 2021.)
Franklin Woo