Geopolitics to the Fore

[Music] we welcome you to our session on geopolitics we're very pleased to have with us to distinguished guests robert kaplan from the eurasia group and kishore mahobani professor national university of singapore robert kaplan in detail is managing director and expert global macro politics at eurasia kishore mohabani is distinguished fellow asia research institute at the national university here in singapore we will first start with opening remarks robert kaplan will go first and speak for about 10 minutes followed by kishore mahavani well it's a great privilege and pleasure to be here with all of you today if it's even though it's only virtual anyway i'm just going to dive right into it and talk about the united states and china first of all in the in the june 2005 cover of the atlantic i wrote a cover story about how we would be having in the future a cold war with china people were enraged by the piece but you know but so i've been thinking about this for 15 years already um it's a cold war for very simple reasons the united states and china compete in a wide of re and a wide array of issues across the gamut very seriously but neither side sees it even remotely in its self-interest to have a shooting war therefore it is a cold war in the lower case sense of the term of course much much different than the cold war the united states had with the soviets here are the issues that are basically unsolvable one is the united states and china have absolutely diametrically opposed ambitions and goals in the south and east china sea in the south um for china the south china sea is absolutely critical to control in order to allow china easy access to its growing indian ocean maritime empire through the straits of malacca and other straits it's it's like the british east india company in reverse what china is building it's going from the south china sea clear across the indian ocean up the red sea to the central mediterranean and all along that route the chinese are building ports are helping to finance ports from the united states point of view the united states especially the pentagon sees this the united states is a pacific power as if it were if it as if it were actually located in east asia the legacy of world war ii of vietnam korea um of the phil of the occupation of the philippines and so much so much more neither side is willing to budge an inch and it's the same with the east china sea um but as i said neither side sees it in its self-interest to have a shooting incident if it would happen it we um issues of status would come in in a global media age and both sides might find it very hard to back down we've seen a number of major wars in the middle east they have not affected financial markets at all any kind of a conflict in the south or east china sea would seriously affect financial markets then we go to cyber cyber is a destabilizing element for the u.s china relationship the china we the united states and china have for some years been in a hot cyber war already the chinese have successfully hacked into the u.s navy ship maintenance records the pentagon's personnel system u.s cyber command is poised to launch retaliatory strikes um cyber is bad news for the u.s china relationship trade you know all about i don't need to go into that if president if the vice president biden were to be elected president he would downplay the trade issue but he would upgrade the human rights disagreements that china has with the turkic uighur muslims the tibetans and the people of hong kong um then there's ideology for a third of a century um the united states was comfortable with china's system it was enlightened benign collegial technocratic authoritarianism that was fine as far as the us business roundtable was concerned but any system as we all know has evolved it's evolved into more of a one-man personality cult or repressed um repressive kind of regime and the result of that is that china has no more friends in washington no friends in the media no friends in congress um no fri and not many friends among the democrats because remember the left-wing democrats dislike china for the same reason that the right-wing republicans do because uh because the feeling is from the from the extremes of the us that the chinese the chinese regime has been in effect stealing american jobs um we have an election coming up in the united states in november in november china will be an issue in that election um and each side trump and biden will compete with each other to show who can be tougher on china so the very democratic process in the united states is like cyber will further destabilize the u.s china relationship um president donald trump has been a gift to china um because he tore up the trans-pacific partnership tpp so that the united states has no overarching vision for asia and eurasia tpp would have encompassed trade of democracy building military alliance structure all that is gone uh trump has been a trans actor in asia not an alliance leader and that leaves the field wide open for china's belton road initiative with all of its problems and all of its difficulties it has no competitor at the moment the chinese at least have a vision the americans at this point do not um then there's uh trump has played loose and fast with the u.s japanese treaty alliance he's given the japanese much to worry about in terms of whether the u.s nuclear umbrella is there forever for japan and the u.s japanese treaty alliance is what anchors the security of asia and what allows asia to just ignore strategic issues and just make money for the world economy because it's a natural elegant balancer to the um to the rise of china the u.s japan relationship and it's been weakened by president trump then there's the japanese south korean trade dispute which never should have happened because they're both strong allies strong treaty allies with the united states and in any other administration they would have in a heartbeat sent an assistant secretary of state for east asia to engage in shuttle diplomacy between seoul and tokyo in order to solve that thing in a second it was not done under the trump administration um however i've got news for you if um if if vice president biden is elected president in november the atmospherics will improve greatly but the basic problems that i've outlined in the u.s china relationship will remain and you'll be surprised to see how tough a democratic administration will be because i know all the people that they will appoint that biden will appoint in the asia portfolios in the pentagon in the um in the state department at the national security council etc and all of these people they're all moderate democrats who over the past decade have become increasingly hard line against china so what i'm saying is that there's no daylight really um and then um however at the end at the end of the day what will determine the ultimate outcome of the u.s china lower case cold war it will be internal developments in the in the united states and in china itself whichever system internally is able to be more robust is able to get over its problems and reinvent itself that is the system that will ultimately prevail and we could go into detail about all the internal problems of china and all the internal problems of the united states um uh the united states internal problems are less opaque better reported on than the internal problems in china but the problems internally in china are there nevertheless so i think that what people have to get used to what they have to get their you know heads around is that you know is that the great power of rivalry we're entering a period of fractured globalization fractured along the lines of u.s china with russia as an asterisk so to speak in this and this second wave of globalization this globalization 2.0 is not going to be as friendly to optimistic scenarios as the first wave globalization 1.0 was when it bred a whole elite global elite class of optimists it's gonna you know it's gonna be fractured um supply chains are gonna separate not completely that's been overstated a bit vietnam is not gonna lock stock and barrel replace china to um to make uh u.s goods but but it will separate out and that will give us businesses less of a naked self-interest to be sympathetic to china so it's it's a worrisome scenario but i can end with this positive note each side will do everything it can to avoid a hot war to avoid an incident um um you know they will try to said and in a biden administration to close up i'll say that you would have rules of the roads established in other words we'll agree we'll agree on what we can disagree on we'll have regular summit meetings it'll be much more orchestrated and yet the difficulty the rivalry will go on and on thank you very much it's a great pleasure to join you for this asian insights conference at dbs let me say this conference could not be more timely because we are all clearly in the middle of a major geopolitical contest that has broken out within the united states and china and i agree with robert kaplan when he said that this is a new cold war with a lower kc but i want to emphasize that the perspective i'll give you will be somewhat different from kaplans because in any geopolitical context it's a mistake to think that one side is right and one side is wrong they're always different perspectives so what i propose to do today is answer three questions first why did this conflict break out second who will win and three how will other countries choose let me begin by asking why did this contest break out and here i want to emphasize is not driven by personalities forget trump forget biden it's driven driven by deep structural forces and let me mention three firstly for over 2000 years whenever the world's number one emerging power which today is china is about to overtake the world's number one power which today is the united states of america the world's number one power always tries to push down the world's number one emerging power so what's happening within united states and china is now following a 2000 year logic which actually graham allison has spoken about in his book uh destined for war and then but the second structural force is something that virtually no americans and no westerners speak about which is that there is a subconscious emotional dimension that is also driving this u.s china geopolitical contest and this subconscious dimension which is actually politically incorrect as mentioned in in western political circles is that there's always been in the west a fear of the yellow peril it's been there since the mongols almost invaded europe and it's still there in fact at the end of the 19th century the united states passed the racial exclusion act to keep out chinese so it's it's a real factor and i and i mentioned that because it explains the emotional dimension that is also at play in the u.s china geopolitical contest and the third structural factor is the fact that the united states on both sides of the republicans and democrats and i agree here with robert kaplan the republicans and democrats are united on this contest against china that both sides believed that when the united states engaged china when the united states opened up china's economy after opening up china's economy china's political system would open up china would become liberal democracy like america and china and america would live happily ever after that was the expectation of course you can say it was an unrealistic expectation because how is it that a young republic like the united states which is less than 250 years old assumed that when it interacted with a 4 000 year civilization with four times the population the united states would change china rather than the uh china changed the united states but it's important to understand the mindset of the americans in their belief of this so we can see this is driven by deep structural forces so my next question is who will win and let me begin by emphasizing that for most americans these questions doesn't even arise americans assume of course america is going to win and it's fair to say that america has had 100 years of tribe it's won every contest it took part in world war one world war ii the economic contest with japan the cold war against soviet union the united states got used to winning after a hundred years the idea the question can america lose is actually impossible to ask in in america and that's why i wrote my book called has china one to at least pose the question is it conceivable that china can win and surely common sense will tell you that surely that is a possibility but let me explain why the americans cannot even conceive of that possibility because they believe in a contest within a democracy and a dictatorship which is what they call the chinese system the democracies will always win and i want to emphasize that the united states is still by far a much stronger country than china and if the chinese underestimated the united states it will be a huge and indeed a fatal mistake to make never never underestimate the united states and winston churchill once famously said you can always count on the united states to do the right thing after it has explored all other options so even though the united states has made mistakes and i'll speak about them you must never underestimate the capacity of the united states to win this contest but at the same time the biggest strategic mistake that the united states has made in dealing with china is that it has not worked out a comprehensive long-term strategy before taking on china and the man who gave me this insight was probably is probably america's greatest living strategy thinker henry kissinger had a one-on-one lunch in new york in march 2018 that was the message he gave me and he allowed it he allowed me to put it inside my book too and i can tell you that that's a serious mistake because if the united states doesn't even look at his own strategic weaknesses then it's going to face a real problem and i agree with robert kaplan when he said at the end of the day it's not about guns and bombs or who's got the stronger military it's about which society is more dynamic and more vibrant in this contest the americans assume that their society is more dynamic more vibrant but the evidence suggests otherwise america is the only major developed country where the average income of the bottom fifty percent five zero percent has gone down over a thirty year period creating what two princeton university economist case and deaton have said is a sea of despair among the white working classes and the sea of despair this unhappiness is what explains the election of donald trump in 2016. by contrast if you look at china and the the well-being of the chinese people the chinese people have just enjoyed the greatest improvement in the standard of living in the past 40 years and indeed the past 40 years have been the best 40 years in 4 000 years of chinese history so here you have a civilization bouncing back with great force and the united states a troubled society and yet the possibility that the united states may lose just doesn't even emerge in american thinking and that's why my book is also a gift to the american to say think twice look at the big picture and think carefully before you march straight ahead into this geopolitical contest so let me conclude briefly by talking about how will other countries choose and unlike the first cold war which the united states had with the soviet union where many many allies enthusiastically joined the united states europe certainly joined the united states japan joined the united states major third world developing countries you know egypt pakistan indonesia all join the united states but this time around you notice that while clearly more countries appear to be more sympathetic to the american position most of them just don't want to take sides and here i completely agree with robert kaplan when he says that trump has been a gift to china he has i mean when he launches trade war against china logically he should have recruited a few allies like the europeans like others to join united states in a trade war against china instead he also launched a trade forum against his own allies and by alienating so many key allies of the united states president trump has of course inadvertently increased the amount of geopolitical space for china which is why it makes it a very interesting question [Music] would china prefer to see trump win again or which would china prefer to see by dunwin and that's an interesting question i think we can discuss in the q and a section but one thing is clear whether it's trump whether it's biden this geopolitical contest will continue and my view is that the vast majority of countries in the world if they had a choice if they had a voice they would all speak out and tell the united states and china stop please don't carry on with this contest we have far more pressing challenges and certainly we are still in the middle of fighting kovit 19 the battle is not over let's get together let's fight covert 19 let's kill kovat19 before we carry on with our joe geopolitical contests and i hope that the rest of the world will come together and give this united message to united states and china in the hope that this will finally succeed in getting them to think twice before shaking up the world with this geopolitical contest thank you great opening remarks and we already have some excellent questions from our viewers and i have a few questions of my own let me start with robert kaplan robert welcome to the show uh the uh you just heard uh kishore mahavani say that his friends in the u.s need to think about the big picture instead of getting fixated on a series of minor irritations he is also asserting that the u.s has allowed or ceded to china significant geopolitical space in recent years because of the strategic error your views please yes well i i actually agree with kishore in terms of the u.s seating to china geopolitical space because remember china's belt and road initiative with all of its problems and all of its limitations and and whatever you know the imperfections of it at least it's a grand strategy it's a direction it's something that catches people's imagination it's something that can be tinkered with and fixed as they go along now the united states did have a counterpart called the tpp the trans-pacific partnership which would have been an alliance of a military economic free trading democratic trending alliance of like-minded u.s allies and others eventually but as soon as president trump entered the oval office in early 2017 he tore it up um so the us has nothing to compete it doesn't have grand strategy it has no vision to offer um at the moment and its alliance is is not i wouldn't say crumbling that's too extreme because there's such a a fear of china in asia in some places but just take the japan south south korea trade uh trade fight that would not have happened in previous democratic in previous presidential administrations which would have sent an assistant secretary of state immediately to the region to conduct shuttle diplomacy that had that's just an example of how the alliance the western alliance in asia is face is facing real trouble so we have seated geopolitical space i agree with that but some of the things president trump is focusing on are not small things like trade disadvantages china's creeping gradual annexation of the south china sea remember the south china sea is an adjacent sea to china it's half a world away from the united states but the united states like it or not has always considered itself a pacific power and that's because of history world war ii in the pacific vietnam korea commodore perry opening up japan etc etc um let's switch the discussion toward china and i'll bring in professor mahubani here professor in your latest book provocatively titled has china one you argue that both the u.s and the chinese have made major strategic errors in recent years on the u.s side and you just talked about it it's the argument that there has not been a cohesive long-term plan to engage with china what have been china's strategic error well i think china's biggest strategic era was to alienate its number one friendly constituency in the united states which was the american business community and in fact i devoted a whole chapter in my book to explaining how and why it happened because frankly for a long time in the past for example the mid-1990s when president bill clinton wanted to pass some measures against china the american business community immediately said stop stop stop please don't go there you know china's got a big market and and they were always the one force that would prevent any major downturn in u.s china relations but what's significant is that when president trump finally launched his trade war against china in 2017 2018 no one spoke up no one and i noticed earlier you had evan greenberg in your show here his father for example hank greenberg was one of the biggest spokesman for saying we needed a good u.s china relationship today actually as i think robert said in his opening remarks china has no friends in the united states nobody is speaking out at all and saying hey let's pause and think about what's going on so i think the chinese need to reflect quite deeply on what went wrong and obviously china made mistakes there was allegations of stealing of intellectual property armed twisting to share technology and frankly after the 2008-2009 financial crisis the chinese officials did become a bit arrogant especially after u.s treasury officials went to beijing and said please please please buy u.s treasury bills and the chinese thought they'd arrive so i think the chinese need to also consider as i said in any job contest both sides have made mistakes and i think that's where the chinese made the biggest mistake uh robert kaplan back to you in 2016 the international court of the hague had made a ruling on a rather landmark ruling on territorial claims on south china sea it was a rather sensitive one and the obama administration sort of neglected it but last week the trump administration officially aligned itself with the ruling and and basically you know very openly challenging china's territorial claim on south china sea now we've seen a series of escalations in the last couple of years and especially in recent weeks how significant is this one it's very significant but it's been an organic development because republican administrations even if they're conventional republican administrations can be expected to be more hard-line in these kinds of things than traditional democratic administrations remember the obama administration had people at the pentagon ash carter and others who wanted a much stronger reaction to china and the south china sea it was the president really who was saying no no let's not go that far so what trump is doing in this instance is not really out of the ordinary it's not wild and crazy it's just you know a true traditional republican more hardline response to china's creeping you know of 1 000 micro step annexation of what the chinese consider their caribbean like i wrote a chapter in a book six years ago i called the south china sea china's caribbean that china's views the south china sea exactly as the united states from the late 19th century through the early decades of the 20th century saw the caribbean as their adjacency that they were going to organically take control of uh you know having settled their continental landmass so but here's the problem the problem is that as both sides dig in their heels on this the chances of an incident go up they're still low but you know it's not a probability but the possibility goes up from say 5 to 15 or so that there could be an incident and if there were an incident in a global media environment you know both sides would be you know obsessed with status and not seeming to be the weaker party in this and therefore they could escalate rather quickly um remember we've had wars in iraq syria libya hasn't affected global markets at all they easily priced it in but if we had even like a four day military conflict in the south or east china sea between the u.s and china you would have you would have a massive effect on financial markets i think great you've not only answered my question but you've also answered my follow-up questions i'll just go back to professor malwani professor i'm going to share with you a quotation from ian bremmer of eurasia group he wrote this earlier this week that china's international escalations increasingly look like weakness alongside risk acceptance behavior from a leadership that is under more pressure than they have been over the course of their tenure what's your view about that well let me just make a quick comment on south china sea and i completely agree with robert when he said if there was any kind of incident in the south china sea today it would have a far more devastating effect on markets and the global implications would be enormous and let me share with you my biggest fear over the next four months we know that president trump is trailing in the polls we know that he's going to have a challenge winning the presidential elections and sadly when you're a president and you're in trouble getting re-elected it's good to have a distraction sometimes it's good to have a small foreign war really the country around you people rarely run ready around the flag and that's how president trump might try to get elected so that's i think a terribly dangerous uh situation that we should pay very careful attention to and i hope robert that there'll be some voices uh in the united states to a sort of in a sense advocating caution when it comes to dealing with the south china sea because robert is absolutely right neither side can afford to be seen to be uh climbing down but on your question about whether or not as my friend ian bremer said that this is a sign of weakness in in china i can tell you it is possible okay we never know what really is going on inside the chinese government but let me suggest a different point of view which is that the present chinese government may be one of the best governments that china has had in a very long time and certainly since uh deng xiaoping and you know the you know i i participated in singapore actually in the launch of something called the ailment trust barometer and in the results of this edelman trust barometer global survey is that the country where you have the highest level of trust in government today is china with 90 percent level of trust and and xi jinping today i mean most people don't seem to know this is actually a very popular leader in in china because the chinese people actually like to have a strong leader and especially one who's taking care of the country and i can tell you that after president trump launched his trade war followed by a technology war even the members of the establishment who had some reservations about xi jinping removing the term limits for example but they actually coalesce around him and said no no this is where china needs a strong leader and frankly i'm actually glad that china has a strong leader now because if the united states makes some moves that are dangerous and inflammatory you actually need a very very strong leader not to react equally strongly you need a strong leader to hold back and say no we will not respond to this provocation so in that sense i think we must give some credit where it's due and we must give xi jinping some credit for saying okay i will still be measured and restrained in my responses responses in these areas robert kaplan in uh his book kishore mahavani warns that weaponizing the dollar could be a very dangerous move by the us against the chinese and it could actually come back and harm the u.s how far do you think the u.s would go in this path um well i hope it wouldn't go very far because one of the many reasons the us dollar is the reserve currency in the world is because the u.s because it's the people always trust the united states and its political situation more than they have trusted europe or asia or china and a provocative move to weaponize currency would downgrade the trust in the united states and that could have effect over the middle and long term on the value of the dollar and it's the reserve currency remember the units to reserve currency is people feel safer investing in the us europe is more unwieldy it's a bit more unpredictable china's authoritarian it's not quite there yet and so there's nobody no other major power with the capacity so that the currency remains the world's reserve currency but this is not forever perhaps and it's caveated by that the united states has to act responsibly in this um going back to something kishore said before kishore said before was that um there unfortunately there are no voices calling for more moderation against china in the united states because guess what this is an election campaign and the democrats have decided that they want to get to the right of president trump and be even as aggressive or more aggressive towards china than he is so we're in a dangerous period up until the election after there's a winner in the election even if it's president trump you know he would ramp down the pressure on china perhaps because he wouldn't need to have it ramped up to get reelected because he's already done that and i think what the democrats would do is they would lower the temperature they would get back to a more stable predictable but hard relationship because the democrats would be tougher on human rights than than the republicans are robert i want to stay with you for a moment uh there's a question from a viewer that you know you had earlier said in your opening remarks that you have a pretty good sense of the administration officials who will be part of a biden team who will be in charge of china and the state department and these personalities what's your sense of the way they will advise well i can't tell you exactly because in washington they're always surprises and you know and people almost never get the jobs they want they always settle for something less so to speak but the major figures are the china experts in the asia experts in the moderate wing of the democratic party are well known um they're you know some are very well known like kurt campbell former assistant secretary of state for east asia some are lesser well-known like eli ratner who worked for joe biden as a deputy national security adviser when baden was was vice president and he is he is an asia specialist um there are quite a few others the defense secretary would likely be michelle florinoy um i have to say you know to a disclosure these are all my former colleagues um so uh so i i i know them all and their basic attitude is they want to like draw parameters around the u.s china dispute and make you know and set rules and regulations so it doesn't get out of hand but within those parameters they will be very very tough there will there probably is no going back to the pre-trump u.s relationship with china because as i said several times china has no friends left in washington uh really it's alienated the media the elite media because of the repression of the uyghur turks what they've done in hong kong and they're ramping up uh you know us they're ramping up pressure on taiwan so a democratic administration would be a little bit back to normal but not fully back to normal as in like the obama george w bush era china has no friends left in washington professor malbani how many friends does china have left in asia we have seen in recent months you know provocations against india there's perennial issues vis-a-vis korea and japan where where is china going with all this well i mean certainly china doesn't have the kind of deep old friends and allies like the ones that united states has had in europe in japan and and south korea and the question is is that how china is going to conduct its relations with the rest of the world and i think china is not going to try and copy what the united states did it's not going to try and create a global alliance system because that's not the goal of the chinese the chinese don't have a strategic goal to take over the world to run the world in a way that united states believed it had a mission to save the world china doesn't believe it has a mission to save the world china's main goal even to today is to overcome the century of humiliation that china suffered from 1842 to 1949 to become very very strong and very very powerful so that no one tramples on it and at the same time make sure that it continues to have a strong and dynamic economy and how does china have a strong and dynamic economy and i can tell you for those of you who haven't read xi jinping's speech in davos in january 2017 it's worth reading very carefully because he made a very important point in that speech he said why did china fall backward basically because it build walls and cut itself from the rest of the world what is china going to do today in the future he says china must jump into the choppy sea of globalization and when we jump into the tropic of globalization we drank water we struggle but at the end of the day we became much stronger swimmers and today we can take on the challenges of uh globalization and today the big difference within china and the united states is that paradoxically it was united states that launched globalization in the world and china actually rejected it initially and today the united states as robert says walking away from tpp and other things united states is frightened of globalization frightening of losing jobs to globalization china is actually very confident and believes they can it can do very well in uh globalization so china's approach therefore is not to look for friends but to look for economic partners with whom we can it can grow and develop and and these do not be friends so for example japan is clearly not a friend of china by any definition but guess who's who's the largest trading partner one of the largest trading partners in japan is china so that's how china is going to operate and and of course robert also earlier put his finger on it when he talked about the belt and road initiative being part of a very carefully thought out long-term strategy and guess what out of 193 countries in the world over 120 countries have joined the belt and road initiative now they're not going to be friends of china but they're going to work with china so the model with which china operates in the global environment will be very different from the american model but it will work for china and i would say china's growth rate of influence and and in a sense power in the world will grow and that's a reality uh robert kaplan i'm going to take one more question from the viewers uh the question is about the risk of conflict clearly both you and peter mahoney think that the risk of direct confrontation between the u.s and the chinese are fairly small but what about proxy wars um well there certainly will be proxy battles for influence around the world uh the chinese are very interested in iran not because it's a fellow to uh authoritarian state but because iran is the demographic geographical economic organizing principle at the junction of the middle east and central asia even if iran was democratic china would be just as interested in it so to speak so there's going to be a competition for the youth for us china iran especially if there's a democratic president after november who will want to improve u.s relations with iran the chinese in the united states will compete for the affections of the vietnamese and others remember china is in asia it is the organizing principle of asia the us is half a world away so that even american allies have to get in asia have to get along with china they face no they have no other choice so the us really has to offer them something a vision or something or else they're going to eventually drift and that is where you won't have proxy wars but you will have proxy diplomatic and other forms of competition i don't see the chinese getting involved in an aggressive military way in the way that the russians have in syria or the way the iranians have in yemen that i don't see with china china china uses its military in a maritime trading sense you know it's built to poor a military base in djibouti at the choke point of the red sea i think it has its eye on a military base in western uh western pakistan near the iranian border next to guadalajar again near the entrance point of the persian gulf uh china sees you know military and trade and naval all it all together in that sense um whereas the u.s and the russians tend to separate them out professor mohammadi how does singapore deal with this issue you you've asked me a very difficult question i think singapore is going to face a very very challenging environment as you know as i predict in my book the the u.s china joe burger contest will definitely grow and it's not driven by personalities as i said in my opening remarks is driven by structural forces and singapore will be put in a very very difficult position because in many respects we are very very closely tied to the united states old relationships political ties defense ties economic ties but we are also and i think robert emphasized it very well we are also in asia and china is today becoming the number one actor in asia without a without a doubt and so singapore really doesn't want to be caught in this contest and doesn't want to choose and i thought our prime minister was actually very brave when he published his essay in foreign affairs in this month's issue july is your foreign affairs saying we hope that this contest doesn't get out of control but we really do not want to be caught in the middle we want to be friends with united states we want to be friends with china and i think that's the right approach for us to take but i also want to add as much as i say it's an important realistic point it's going to be difficult well it's going to be difficult without any question i had so many questions left for both of you but unfortunately we run out of time i think we'll have to create a independent webinar with the two of you another day where we can sort of duke it out for a much longer much thorough way thank you very much robert kaplan kishore mahoney for your time thanks to our viewers

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Rating: 4.6607141 out of 5

Keywords: DBS, DBS Bank, live more, bank less, sparks, dbs sparks

Id: DdirOEN77zs

Length: 46min 26sec (2786 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020