Conversations With History - Kishore Mahbubani

welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our distinguished guest today is Kishore Babu Bonnie who is Dean and professor of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore his new book is the Asian hemisphere - sure welcome back to Berkeley thank you glad to be back here one of the themes in your book is the transformation of Asia give us a sense of that I mean how have things changed in in just over the period of your distinguished career and and-and-and into the president well I mean this we are clearly entering a new era of world history and I describe it in two ways one is of course I described as the end of the era of Western domination of world history but not the end of the West which will remain the single strongest civilization for some time to come and secondly you seeing finally a return of Asia but the return of Asia is important to remember is a return to the norm because while the West has been very powerful in the last 200 years if you look back over the last two thousand years from the year 1 to the year 1820 the two largest economies in the world were consistently China and India so only in the last 200 years the West has taken off now finally the Asian societies have figured out what they need to do to succeed and as I say in my book they were implementing the Seven Pillars of Western wisdom and you will see clearly by 2050 as the goldman sachs study shows the four largest economies in the world will be number one China number two United States of America number three India number four Japan and not a single European economy will be among the top four and that's a huge shift of world history talk a little about the what you call the the pillars that made the these chain is possible and and some of this if not a lot of it was learning from the West so so so the West has played an important mentor role facilitating this I change oh yes I think the what mentorship is is a good word to use and in fact one of the more optimistic messages I given the book is that the Asians as they emerge do not want to dominate the West as the West dominated Asia they actually want to replicate the West and implement his best practices and you know the is remarkable how by implementing some fairly simple straightforward Western policies how the societies transform themselves take China for example right before they implemented free-market economics when I went to China in 1980 and I went to the barber to have a haircut he gave me a wonderful haircut but he took one hour so I said why do you take one hour to do a haircut he says well it doesn't matter whether I do five haircuts ten haircuts I get paid the same so what's the hurry so but once you implement the free market economics and you created incentives for people to work the same people who had been unproductive you know 400 years plus suddenly became very productive and very dynamic and for China the world's most populous country to have the fastest growing economy in the world for 30 years it's as unusual as watching the fattest boy in class win the hundred meter race and that's because of free-market economics you you throughout the book you have some really interesting statistics and in one case you quote from the president of China I guess a press conference that he had in which he went over the figures and and I think they're worth repeating that in in the period 78 to 204 China has gone from a hundred and forty seven point three billion to one point six trillion in its GDP in foreign trade during that same period it's gone from twenty point six billion to one point one five trillion and that is a growth rate of 16% the GDP which I just gave you has grown nine point four percent and the foreign exchange reserves increased from 167 million to six oh nine point nine billion and 204 and still growing so just a an extraordinary achievement and and the bottom line here is that Asia is by following free market economics is creating a middle class Oh enormous Lee and I'm actually I'm very glad that you read out those statistics and by the way the latest figures are even the impressive that their GNP is over two trillion dollars their foreign reserves 1.2 1.3 trillion dollars I mean it's amazing yes the huge middle class is being created in both China and India and this naturally shifts the center of gravity of the world to to Asia because I mean it is already China with over 300 million people in the middle class has a bigger middle class than United States of America most Americans are not even aware of that and when you create a middle class the most important thing that happens is that you create a class of what Bob Zoellick once asked China to do to become a responsible stakeholder but middle class citizens are almost by definition responsible stakeholders and so as a consequence the one of the piece of good news that results from the success of Asia is that we are moving to a more safer to a safer world rather than a more dangerous world and this is an important point to emphasize do a Western audience because you know whenever never Western leaders speak they always begin their speeches by saying you're moving into more dangerous war you know well that is full of threats that's not true actually with the rise of the huge numbers of people entering the middle classes in China and India and other societies we are actually seeing a more peaceful and stable world that is emerging and this is something this is why the West should welcome the rise of Asia and not try to resist the rise of Asia on the middle and middle class there's another figure I want to quote here in 2050 six million belong to the middle class in China by 2030 there will be 361 million more more 361 million more than the entire population of the US so it but let's just go through some of the things that the changes that that were sort of in a way ways of doing things that were bestowed by the West you talk about Science and Technology a big change there in the way China Asia thinks about science and technology and I was doing some recessions for the book I came across Time magazine cover story on Asia and science and they quoted a late Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley as saying that even as closest 2010 ninety percent of all the PhDs in science and technology will be held by Asians now even if it's not ninety percent even is 85 percent or 80 percent it's quite a remarkable shift in of world history and the reason why the West was able to go out and conquer and dominate the world is because it mastered Science and Technology in a spectacular fashion today Asians are discovering that they can do the same also and indeed you know I caught a column from Tom Friedman he attends a graduation ceremony of a leading university here in America and when they read out the list of PhD graduates they're all Asian names one beaten on Kabul Kumar's and he said finally one David Morel save the day and there was one I guess you might call a white American male in this is this is a remarkable shift you know and what this means is that the transformation of Asia is real you know this is not a ephemeral thing this is actually a fundamental fundamental shift of world history and the mastery of science and technology in some ways confirms it to other figures I want to cite from your book Asia share of global high-tech exports rose from 7% in 1980 to 25% in 201 while the US share went from 31 to 18% and then from 1983 to 203 students from for Asia country Asian countries China Taiwan India and South Korea own more than 50% of the science and engineering the group doctoral degrees awarded in the United States so Tom Friedman wasn't seeing a mirage you have a wonderful way of expressing this change you talk about the march to modernity and how this affected the poor on the one hand but then the other thing you have you have a beautiful turn of phrase here introducing gifted people to the global society namely the the untapped mental resources that are in Asia and were never tapped because of the poverty yeah well I must say I'm amazed how well you read it okay yeah well and you and you have highlighted two very critical points in the book one the phrase marched modernity and I hope that that phrase march to modernity becomes used more and more often in the contemporary discourse because it is this march to modernity that is making the world a safer place he began as you know with Japan the first Asian country to succeed from Japan it went to the four Tigers from the four Tigers he went to Southeast Asia and then when as I say in the book when the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping looks all around the borders of China and said hey why is every Khan in China doing better than China and why not China so she switches the system so the master modernity enters China and then when China takes off India says come on we are as good as China we can do it too so now India is also taking off and this brings me to the really important piece of good news okay this master modernity is now about to enter the Islamic world now can you imagine an Islamic world where you have the elites and the middle class saying our vision is to be like China and India we want to have successful growing modernizing economies that's where you want to go and if the Islamic population begins to create very large middle class it means a much safer world for all of us because they to become responsible stakeholders you know and the second point you mentioned is I think an equally important one when when people ask me you know if I had to give a very simple explanation of why Asia is taking off now I say the simplest way to understand it is this Asia had hundreds of millions of brains always but they were never used you know they were you know in in Asia because of traditional Asian culture birth was destiny if you were born in the untouchable caste in India you could never leave the untouchable caste so can you imagine millions of brains being wasted but in India today you can have someone who grew up in an untouchable family suffered a terrible childhood being excluded being he's kept aside from his classmates in class and then that same person could go on do well in school get a PhD at Columbia University and become the chief economist of the Reserve Bank of India his name is Narendra Yadav and the Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh says that this is an enormous silent revolution taking place in India and all the brains learner and rudolph's that were wasted for centuries are now emerging and creating a tremendous explosion of gifted people all over Asia it's interesting because at when and toward the end of the Cold War and as Asia began to rise the the note the the idea was okay Asia there were so many different people's so many ethnic divisions so many different countries that we would we were entering an era in which war would be constant or intermittent that at a minimum in Asia that didn't happen why not yeah and I and I'm glad you mentioned that because I I notice you know in what happens in academia is that as a result of textbooks you get recycled wisdom being sent to the students you know and unfortunately most students in America and Europe keep reading the old stuff that was written about Asia which says and I quote this in my first book conditions think that Europe's pass is Asia's future which means that the Europe they used to fight each other for centuries well therefore this is what Asian powers will do as they rise and emerge they will fight each other at the European powers do and this assumes of course that the Asians cannot think cannot figure out for themselves hey what works in the wind in the world indeed but as I explained in the book one of the Seven Pillars of Western wisdom that the Asians are learning is what is called the culture of peace and here the biggest tribute I give to the European Union is that the European Union has reached the highest level of human civilization and by the highest level I mean that in Europe you know the self zero wars between any two EU Member States you also have zero prospect of war and that's an incredible human achievement and the Asians have studied that and looked at Europe and said hey why can't we do it too why not learn from Europe so in Asia we already achieve zero was indeed for the first time in a long time the guns are silent there are no more interstate anywhere in East Asia and so you can now proceed to the next level of trying to achieve zero prospect of war and from all I see in Asia this is the trend this is the clearly the the the dominant trend in Asia and and is it because of the rise of the middle class as part of this march to modernity that that there isn't a constituency for war and on what circumstances might there be i I think well I give a very simple explanation you know I say that what you see in Asia today is that Asia has been overcome by a tidal wave of common sense and you know you have more and more young Asians you know who can see what life is like you know you know you mentioned YouTube you mentioned Google all that's prevalent in Asia in fact the degree of broadband penetration is higher in many Asian countries than in America Europe this is only very few Americans know and so they're connected to the modern world and if you're connected to the modern world you really realize the futility of war and in some ways you know the Iraq war which as you know is very tragic its biggest contribution may have been to further the legitimate law in the modern world because the whole world could see that the richest and the most powerful country in the world couldn't dominate could invade and occupy a country of 20 million people very poor country it shows how difficult was today and so it's clear that of course the Asian countries will continue to a defense budgets will continue to and military expenditures and that as you know it's prudent but they're going to try and avoid war you you look at China as kind of a model in the way it's formulated a foreign policy that has further developments in in Asia and furthered the stability of the region talk a little about that and why do you think China was able to to seize that course well you know I've tried to create a new index a new index of what I call geopolitical competence and in which I put the EU at two you know it's the former Soviet as a tattoo you said one one to ten mm-hmm the four must have been in a two because it disappeared the EU at a four because around all these borders it has unsafe borders the United States I give a six but I give China and eight or nine and the reason why I give China and eight or nine is because you know when whenever a new great power emerges throughout history you see as a great power emerges rising levels of tension and rising the danger of conflict but China is emerging in a massive way without creating any tremors now that requires enormous geopolitical dexterity and one of the most brilliant moves that the Chinese government made because they knew that at some point in time the United States might tried to contain China I mean you don't have to be a genius to anticipate that so what are the Chinese do they launch a preemptive strike and what is their preemptive strike they export their peace and prosperity to all their neighbors and this explains why the fastest-growing trade flows in the world are not in Europe not across the Atlantic not in North America not across the Pacific but between China and his neighbors and this represents a major geopolitical decision whether it's within China and Japan China and India and I can tell you that one of the most brilliant moves that the Chinese Dee did was to propose a free trade agreement with South East Asia you know South East Asia you might call the soft underbelly of China right 500 million people who in the past had been used by the United States to contain China in the Cold War so what does China do fear impose a free trade agreement and not only did they propose a free trade agreement they concluded it in record time and even before they concluded it they gave the ASEAN countries of Southeast Asia the Association of Southeast Asian Nations an early harvest by giving them unilateral concessions into the Chinese market now if only Europe could copy what China did an export is prosperity to Africa it will make it a much safer world for Europe in the long run but obviously what China can do today you don't still cannot do it shows how far ahead China is in geopolitical competence and there's a there's a learning cycle here that that you're describing which is quite fascinating lamely the West had much to teach Asia learned and in some respects the the West has ceased to learn whereas Asia has built on what it learned and is is actually in in some cases navigating a new course yeah well unfortunately see the the tragedy about the West is that the early generations in the West succeeded because they had open minds and they were willing to learn an experiment and be pragmatic what you have today in the West is a population that is on top of the mountain but has never struggled to climb the mountain themselves and they assume that their natural place is to be up on the mountain so they become arrogant smug condescending visibly the rest of the world and when they watch the rest of the world climbing the mountain right they look down and they say why can't you become democratic overnight what's wrong with you excuse me even the United States right when you look at it you you propose the principle of equality of man in 1776 it took you years to get rid of slavery after that it took you another 150 years to give the world to the women it took you 200 years to effectively give the vote to the black people it took you so long to get to the top of the mountain and yet when you expect other societies to change overnight and this is where the dialogue between the East and the West is going to change because clearly now there is a remarkable degree of resentment in the east towards lectures by Westerners telling them this is how you should transform your societies and the attitude of many in Asia is go fix your own societies first we are doing a reasonable job 20 just what to do look at what you are doing that is wrong in your societies there's a story in your book that that I found fascinating which is the difference in in the way the American League prepared for the occupation of Japan in comparison with the lack of preparation for the invasion and an occupation of erect a little about that and what how do you explain the difference well I think the the the big difference between the American occupation in 2005 of Japan umino 1945 945 in Japan and 2003 in Iraq the big difference is that the occupying powers in Japan knew that there to understand Japanese culture I mean one of the most critical decisions that was made in 1945 was not to put the Emperor on trial but to say hey if we want to preserve stability in Japan and we have to preserve social and political stability in Japan you have to preserve some critical institutions so you have to understand Japanese history and culture now the people who went to Iraq were the most incredibly arrogant people and they thought they didn't have to study Iraqi culture at all and they made disastrous decisions you know they you know this D pacification so you remove the entire middle class the entire ruling elite and threw them out and of course the society falls apart the glue that holds a society completely fell apart I make an even more telling comparison between the way the Japanese occupied Singapore in 1942 and even though they were brutal they made sure that even the British colonial officers who are running Singapore were allowed to stay in in their place I give the incredible example of the Botanic Gardens in Singapore which is a world treasure frankly and when the Japanese sent a botanists from botanist from Tokyo to Singapore they told the British botanist Peace Day you have to preserve these beautiful gardens by contrast the Americans allowed the looting of this incredibly ancient tragic treasures in the museum of their dead I've had incredible incompetence you know and you and and I'm surprised what amazes me about all this discourse is they're so few minds in America keep asking this fundamental question why have we become so incompetent what has gone wrong and I think a lot of it has to do with ideological arrogance that has grown in the Western mind and this ideological arrogance has to be removed otherwise you'll become a major obstacle to the West understanding the nature of the real world that is emerging you talk about that and let's let's discuss that now namely a set of principles we're not now talking about the pillars that help in the march toward modernity but we're really talking about the end of the Cold War and the the misunderstanding of why we won the Cold War and how we want it leading to the notion that we can now face the world on the Mount and give it the the a new set of principles that are defined by the way we see ourselves and that they will should be implemented all over the world talk a little about yeah well I mean as you know this is not a secret there was a great mood of Western triumphalism at the end of the Cold War I saw it in Europe when I went to a meeting of foreign ministers so European Union and ASEAN that then Belgian foreign minister really class said ho yeah hey the only two more two superpowers left in the world America and Europe and we will set the rules for the world and in America as you know there was this incredible celebration of Francis Fukuyama's argument that all societies in the world now must immediately become liberal democratic I mean this is a distortion of Francis Fukuyama's argument but that's what they wanted to believe and in the process the West failed to understand why it really succeeded in the battle against the Soviet Union it succeeded not because of his political system it succeeded because of his economic system and the real test of which was more important came at the end of the Cold War when Russia and China took different roads Gorbachev unfortunately bought the argument the Western argument and he said hey it's all about politics so he changed the political system before changing the economic system and that led to economic chaos in Russia there was a huge economic implosion living standards went down life expectancy went down infant mortality rates went up there are social indicators you know when when negative and the Russian suffered in the 1990s and one if you want to understand why Russians are so bitter to us the West today they feel that a time in the 1990s when they were really suffering the West kept sharing them say hey Russia you're doing a great job you have democracy you have democracy and they were suffering and that's why they resent this lectures from the Western democracy by contrast China to the opposite road and Deng Xiaoping said hey it's not about politics it's about economics we must fix our economic system so by focusing on transforming the economic system China went through a spectacular growth so clearly China understood what was real the what was a real factor they explained the West's success in the Cold War is all about transforming your economic system first before you transform your political system you you describe how freedom is understood in China because one of the the mantras of the Bush administration and America in this new phase is must have free and fair elections there has to be freedom the march of mankind to freedom but but there are different definitions of freedom and if we don't understand that that that's problematic yeah well I think the if you look at it from the point of view the Chinese people right if you are living on less than a dollar a day and you're struggling to feed your family it makes no difference if you have any kind of political freedom or the right to vote if you can't feed your family so from the Chinese people's point of view when you look back over the last hundred and fifty years they've gone through foreign invasions the British coming to China saying please we want to buy or tea except our opium in return and when the Chinese said no thank you the British bombarded the Chinese occupied parts of China and insisted that the Chinese accept opium so they've gone through hell over the last hundred fifty years now finally for the first time in almost two centuries the Chinese are experiencing this incredible improvements in their standard of living and in China the number of people living on less than a dollar a day have fallen from six from six hundred million to two hundred million so 400 million people larger than the population of America right have seen a significant improvement in their lives and what happens you get greater freedom you can finally go out and not face the stress of survival you have choices to me you can choose where to work you can choose to buy television sets you can choose to travel and that's a remarkable in improving your lifestyle they experiencing real personal freedom and the real test of whether or not a society is free or unfree is when it's people allowed to go overseas do they come back or do they stay overseas right obviously if China was a closed dark oppressive society as soon as the Chinese could leave they would leave and not come back but guess what each year over 20 million Chinese tourists travel overseas and almost all of them come back to China why do they do it obviously they have enough freedom to do what they want to do clearly China hasn't achieved the political freedoms that America has been to America two hundred years to achieve it and maybe if you give China maybe not two hundred years hundred years they may achieve or the Americans did in two hundred years but the other more controversial point that I would like to make here is that the Americans assume that they will always remain defenders of freedom no matter what but if you look at what America did after 9/11 you look at the erosion of civil liberties in America you look at the way the Americans are prepared to accept the Patriot Act it's clearly that it's clear that when the Americans feel threatened they to walk away from many of the freedoms that they celebrate and the most astounding thing the most shocking thing that America did after 9/11 by the way was to was to practice torture and this has come as a huge shock to the rest of the world they said how can this land the beacon of freedom the beacon of human rights and so on and so forth take this major step backwards and begin to practice torture it's almost as bad as America going back to re-implement slavery again because it was a move away from slavery it was the move to D legitimize torture these were great leaps forward in the battle for human rights and America the leading defender of human rights suddenly began to practice torture and you can imagine how shocked the rest of the world is and the rest of the world is saying to America you had no longer have any moral authority to give lectures to anybody on any human rights questions because you have failed your own test you you do a very interesting analysis of the way things have turned in the sense of Western hypocrisy the Western changes in their attitude were the very global institutions that they created and I want to explore that now because it the sense of that is part of what you call the D westernization process namely as Asia rises and it sees things like the American record on torture there is a deal edged itamae ssin of the of the placement on the top of the mountain to use your metaphor now early in your book you quote Samuel Huntington and Samuel Huntington says the West in effect is using international institutions military power and economic resources to run the world in a way that will maintain Western predominance protect Western interests and promote Western political values is that is that the new change yes I think the you know as a result of the shift of power to issue the West has got to make some major decisions now it's in the senses got to choose between its narrow short-term interests in protecting its positions of predominance in many global institutions and its longer interests in a stable world order and the way you create a stable world order is by giving the rising powers a stake make them responsible stakeholders in the key global institutions but it is very difficult for anybody who holds a privileged position to give up his or her power let me give you some examples okay the two most powerful international economic organizations in the world are IMF and the World Bank and even to today there's a rule that says that to be the head of the IMF you have to be a European to be the head of the World Bank you must be American and 3.5 billion Asians don't qualify and this is amazing Asia today has the fastest growing economies Asia has the largest pool of reserves foreign reserves in the world the Asians have demonstrated that they can do equally well in economic enterprises and for Asians are not not qualified to run these two decisions and by the way this this practice was reaffirm as recently as 2007 last year when you had a change of the leadership of both World Bank and the IMF and they still went back to the old practice now this is an example where you got to discard these anachronistic rules to adjust to the rise of Asia another example the UN Security Council right it was a very wise move on the part of the founding fathers to create the principle of permanent membership to ensure that the great powers of the day had a stake in the UN and didn't walk away from it as they did with the League of Nations right it's a good principle to have to give the great powers of the day a stake in the United Nations but what you have today in the UN Security Council is not the great powers of today not the great powers of tomorrow but the great powers are yesterday indeed the only qualification for permanent membership seems to be that you must have won world war two in 1945 and this this rule has got to go I mean take for example the Europeans celebrating the fact that they're going to have a common European foreign policy in January 2009 they can finally provide Henry Kissinger a telephone number that you can call to find out what the foreign policy of Europe is great then in this case have a single European seat in the UN Security Council and no longer have separate seats for UK and France but neither UK nor France will give up their privileged positions you you are saying that the real danger here is the failure of the West to adjust to the new political realities that are emerging because of the rise of Asia and I want to understand why is that is it that people have ideas in their head and they refuse to change I'm talking about the West now is it that the Western intellectuals are not defining this new world and those new ideas are not entering the policy debate or is it that Western politicians are worried about the next election I think it's a combination of all those factors and in this sense this is why I felt a tremendous pressure to write the book at this stage because we are now entering one of the most plastic moments of world history you know we're gonna see shifts of power of a scale that has never before been seen in human history you know incredible shifts of power now with so much shifts of power you have to begin to adjust and accommodate and this is where the Wes which has got news to two centuries of domination the world history has got to make adjustments and so in the West which always sees itself as being the solution to a problem cannot conceive of the possibility that the West may now be part of the problem and not just part of the solution and this idea by the way is very difficult to implant in Western minds because even the leading the most sophisticated intellectuals in the West cannot accept this let me give you a simple concrete example soon after my book came out The Economist's gave it a review and I was very pleased that the Economist gave it a whole page review but what did they say the book is they say the book is an anti-western polemic now that's a complete misunderstanding of what the book is all about indeed I keep emphasizing that the new Asians don't want to dominate the West they want to replicate the West they want to become equal partners of the West but now it is the West that refuses to accept this equal partnership it is the West that refuses to give up his privileged positions whether it's in the I'm Air Force world bank or UN Security Council and so on and so forth and so the West is today the biggest threat to the world now for me to even say a simple sentence like the West is the biggest threat to the world today is inconceivable to do Western Minds it's absolutely inconceivable and and and this is this is why when I explained in in my introduction to this book that this book is a painful book I don't deny that in fact my wife has you know advised me not to publish it she said you're gonna get many of my friends your many of your friends unhappy in the West I say that's true but the discomfort you feel on reading my book is the necessary discomfort you have to go through to begin to understand the nature of the New World this emerging if you look at the presidential debates in the United States and you look at the issues that you raised almost none of them are being discussed I mean so so it's somewhat frightening a that we seem to be incapable of learning from a book like yours on the one hand that is the elites but in the second is one doesn't see a way out except for the the collapse that you're trying to warn against yeah the well I mean the American presidential debates are distressing because they focus on very short-term issues and they make no effort to look at the world outside but I think the world has also got used to the fact that most American presidential candidates say one thing during the election campaign and do something completely opposite let me take Bill Clinton for example during the election campaign he said unlike President George HW Bush I will not coddle the dictators of Beijing right that was in 1992 I saw him in November 1993 do an incredible job of reaching out to a Chinese leader Jiang Zemin at the Blake island meeting in Seattle and I was present there and I watched to them and he obviously coddled the dictator from Beijing and did a very good job of it after he got elected in the same way I think that for example if Barack Obama is elected just the sheer fact that a man like Barack Obama is elected would be a tremendous boost because he would get rid of half of the entire Americanism around the world for the rest of the world to see a member of a minority like Barack Obama win the highest office in the land was sent a wonderful powerful message to the rest of the world and they will see what a great and wonderful country America is again so you know it's not just about what they say it's also about the symbolism of who they elect in this elections you you're making the distinction in the book between Western values which the East has followed through on versus the changing Western interests and the extent to which that because of elections because of threat to economic interests say farmers in Europe that that what we're seeing here is the West moving from a a koa a balancing a an intersection and interface of global interests and national interests we were able to create the post-world War two order but now there is a divergence of these instrument rest's that is what one would see as a global interest versus a national interest and you actually really fault the Europeans on this talk a little about you well I mean the the actually if you want to solve the problems of the world they can be solved very easily just implement Western values now let me give one a simple one the West always speaks of democracy as being the peak of human civilization what does democracy mean it means that each citizen has an equal stake in the society we all have you treat everybody equally now what's happening in the world today is that in the 6.6 billion people in the world right in the past he was only the West there was dynamic energetic affective but that today is only 12% of the world's population the remaining 88% of the world's population is no longer passive it is now energetic effective and dynamic and as they become more energized the first question they ask themselves is why is it that 12 percent of the world's population live in the West control our destinies this goes against the fundamental principles of democracy and indeed if you want to see the it is ironic that the West is trying to perpetuate dictatorship in in global institutions because it believes in the principles of you know transparency accountability representativeness and so on and so forth but the last dictators in the world are the permanent members of the UN Security Council because you cannot vote them out they have a veto against being voted out now so this is where the West is not being true to its own values in trying to cope with a new world order and you know one of the most surprising suggestions I make for example in the book is that if you want to ensure a more peaceful and stable world you want to make sure that the voices of the 88 percent of the world's population who live outside the West is heard by the world and there is fortunately something which Paul Kennedy calls a parliament of men the UN General Assembly which can provide the opportunity for us to listen to what the voices in the wall are saying go listen to them so for example if you believe that something is a great global challenge don't take it to the UN Security Council which is so unrepresentative today take it to the General Assembly and have a debate down there and if you get the support of the vast majority of the world's population then you know you're doing something right but if they don't support you then you know hey consider the possibility ring something fundamentally wrong so the West has now got to be true to its own principles and listen to the voices of the majority of the world and I think what my book tries to do is to is to point out what the rest of the world is beginning to think and as I say somewhere please treat me as an early tremor because behind me comes a big earthquake if you don't listen to this tremor you go through a number of issues proliferation global warming the international economy and in all of these cases this this mass of people who were sort of excluded and their leaders have insights about particular problems and the West is sort of shooting itself in the foot by not hearing because in the present you could have modest change which actually might enhance our power although there would be relative decline and and we're oblivious to that talk about one of these issues I'm even take for example the problem proliferation yeah what the most is you know the the two most painful chapters I have in the book for a Western reader are the chapters and D westernization and the chapter and Western incompetence and this is something that's quite new you know it's quite amazing that on a very wide range of is user if you look at the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and that's pure incompetence you look at the Doha Round of trade talks and the way this is going that's also pure incompetence you look at how the West is reacting to the challenge of global warming also a case of pure incompetence but the one that I fear the most and I'm glad you you you mentioned it is that the fear of proliferation of nuclear weapons of mass destruction indeed one of the greatest achievements we have had in the last 40 50 years is that we have been you have been maybe a managed to more or less hold the line on nuclear proliferation and the way the reason why we were able to hold the line on nuclear proliferation is because there was a grand bargain within the five official nuclear weapons States United States Russia China UK in France and the other states that while the other states didn't prevent themselves from going nuclear the five nuclear weapon states would also reduce the nuclear arsenals and certainly not walk towards the nuclear threshold and here one fact that many Americans are not aware of is that one of the greatest violators of the NPT today is the United States it has kept increasing modernizing its nuclear arsenals and if you have someone as influential as Donald Rumsfeld saying what's wrong with nuclear bunker busters then you're crossing the nuclear threshold you're not supposed to cross under the NPT so clearly something has gone wrong in the way America approaches these issues and this is why I'm glad that this group of wise men you know Kissinger shows Perry I think one more yeah I come out with a statement saying peace let's find a way of putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle it's America that has uncocked this nuclear genie and it's up to America to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle because it is in America's long-term national interests to prevent this kind of nuclear proliferation and what Americans have got to understand is that the NPT is not a solitary treaty on its own it's part of a complex fabric of multilateral organizations the NPT is not self and forcing you in the NP when when the NPT needs to be enforced you have to turn to the United Nations to enforce the NPT but if the America keeps attacking the United Nations and if you keep sending an ambassador john bolton who believes his job is not to strengthen the united nations but to weaken the united nations how if you keep on weakening the united nations how can you then use it to maintain the NPT that's a amazing funder mental contradiction in America's policies on multilateral issues and most Americans are not aware of it and how if you wonder and at the same time you want to preserve the sanctity of treaties like NPT you must become America as a state a role model in in also respecting other treaties why do you walk away from CTBT Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty why do you walk away from and you have nuclear weapons other states don't have nuclear weapons the CTBT prevents them from carrying out nuclear tests you should respect that treaty it's in your long-term interest to do so so in in in these areas America is clearly shooting yourself in the foot and what a critic might say of what you're saying that well let's compare the United States with China in the case of China for example it's its generosity its toward ASEAN during the the financial crisis where it kept the the the the the yuan fix was supported by its domestic concerns namely the the continued need for the the economic machine to work to employ more and more people and so on on the other hand the United States which is showing less generosity even a meanness in its international affairs one could argue that the leaders are responding to domestic interest groups that are in its essence being disenfranchised as the what rest of the world is marching toward modernity not so much disenfranchised but are suffering the economic consequences how do we reconcile these two pictures I mean because obviously the leadership in China and the leadership in America have different set of problems but the solution lies and somehow figuring how to deal with that yeah I think you put your finger on a very important point here you know I mean one reason why the rest of the world was happy to see the Western powers remain as custodians of the International order custodians of the major international organizations because the West had the strongest and most self-confident populations in the whole world and you know the reason why the United States could for example argue forcefully and Europe could argue forcefully for trade liberalization was because they believed that as a result of trade liberalization as a result of countries opening up the economies America and Europe would naturally do well so let's open up and compete what's happened in the last ten years and this is a major shift in world history by the way the populations in Europe and the populations in America certainly if you listen to Lou Dobbs and CNN are beginning to fear that if you push for trade liberalisation is no longer Europe is gonna win no longer America is gonna win it may be the American Chinese and the Indians and so on and so forth and that's a real danger for the world because if suddenly the custodians of the international trade order begin to lose faith that they can win in this game then they begin to retreat and the danger is that these these international trade institutions and processes could be endangered and this is a very pitiful the fundamental reason why the Doha round is being threatened and here this is why you need a much more sophisticated intelligence here in America to actually explain to the American population that this is what free market economics is all about indeed it was European economist Joseph Schumpeter who said hey if you want free market economics you have to have creative destruction so for example in the case of Singapore we used to have a textile industry but once China and India began to develop textile industry we said we with our high wages we cannot compete with China and India so he moved out so you have to keep on shifting and adjusting and move into the areas of economic competition that you can do well and clearly America and Europe can do very well you still have the best educated populations the largest capital resources you have the best universities in the world you have a tremendous competitive edge over the rest of the world you can America and Europe can compete and can win but none of the leaders in Europe America have the courage to tell the populations we can compete and win if we adjust our economies if we give up policies that are self-destructive and one of the most self-destructive policies that Europe has the Common Agricultural Policy you know there's a statistic which shows that with all the monies that the Europeans spend to subsidize their cows they can fly each cow around the world five times and business-class and still pay for duty-free shopping so I mean that's an amazing gross abuse of funds on the part of the Europeans and that same money basically could be used to create a much more stable world by exporting its prosperity to all its neighbors Kishore on on that note and of warning and actually of hope I want to thank you very much for being with us today I want to recommend your book to our audience it will be good for them to read to see how we have to change if we elect a new president thank you for being here today thank you very much I really appreciate that and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

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Keywords: uc, ucberkeley, university, california, berkeley, history, politics, Mahbubani, yt:quality=high

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Length: 60min 2sec (3602 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 02 2008