Has China won? Part 2 of our conversation with Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani

Sinica Podcast

Kaiser Kuo

Culture, China News, Hangzhou, Chinese, International Relations, Chongqing, Beijing, Sichuan, Currentaffairs, China, Politics, Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, China Economy, News, China Politics, Business, Film, Shenzhen

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2020

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this second half of our interview with Kishore Mahbubani, a former UN ambassador of Singapore, he talks to Kaiser about the perils of American exceptionalism, the poverty of strategic thinking in Washington, and the view of U.S.-China competition from the rest of the world. His latest book, Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, is a bracing read, unsparing in its criticisms of Chinese and American strategic blunders, and its tough-love approach is sure to rankle.

8:52: Comparing Chinese realities to American ideals

15:31: How the outcome of the U.S.-China geopolitical contest will be decided

24:49: Strategic thinking regarding the South China Sea

37:57: America’s relationships with its allies

Recommendations:

Kishore: Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, by Stephen E. Ambrose and Douglas G. Brinkley.

Kaiser: A new podcast series by Patrick Radden Keefe, called Wind of Change.

This podcast was edited and produced by Kaiser Kuo and Jason MacRonald.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with SubChina.
0:14.9	SubChina is simply the best way there is to keep on top of all the important news coming out of China with our indispensable daily newsletter,
0:21.3	websites, and growing range of podcasts and videos. It's a feast of business, political, and cultural
0:27.1	news about a nation that is reshaping the world. Today, it's part two of our interview with
0:33.6	Kishore Mabubani, who served as UN ambassador for Singapore for many years.
0:38.0	Professor Mabubani is a noted scholar and author of many books, including the one we're discussing
0:42.5	in these episodes, a book titled, Has China Won, the Chinese Challenge to American Primacy?
0:49.8	Last week, we talked a bit about how the COVID-19 pandemic might have changed what he had written,
0:55.0	about the U.S.'s lack of a coherent, long-term strategy for dealing with a newly powerful China,
1:00.6	about the difference between China and the Soviet Union during the era of the Cold War,
1:05.4	about the fate of the U.S. dollar and many, many other topics.
1:08.9	Today, we plow ahead first by talking about the difficulty of achieving both freedom and equality,
1:14.8	and then move into an in-depth discussion of American exceptionalism
1:18.6	and the blinkers that our guest believes exceptionalism places on the ability of the American
1:24.9	strategic thinking establishment to, well, think strategically.
1:30.1	Enjoy.
1:33.1	You were talking about freedom and equality as sort of the twin pillars on which
1:38.0	American political culture is supposed to rest.
1:40.9	American ideals are supposed to aim for these two things.
1:43.9	Something that was really
1:44.8	influential in my own studies of history was a slim volume by Will and Ariel Durant called
1:51.8	The Lessons of History, which they wrote at the end of that mammoth series, the story of
	...

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