How the Iran War Is Shaping a Post-American World

36:20And you offered in that piece a sort of subtle critique of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and his speech at Davos this year, in which he poured scorn on the hypocrisies of the liberal international order and sort of even offered a kind of obituary for it. Unlike Carney, you were not willing to let that order or some of its structures go so easily. You wrote, a world in which powerful states no longer feel compelled to justify themselves morally is not more honest, it is more dangerous. Why is that the case? Ever since America became a great power, it portrayed its foreign policy in the language of moral superiority.

37:08The idea that there was something exceptional and exceptionally good about U.S. power, that America could promote certain values and certain political forms, like republicanism against the horrors of monarchy, like human rights, like an international order based on laws and institutions that were multilateral and gave the little guy a voice and a vote. And these ideals were very hard to implement all the time. America itself has a long colonial past from Central America to the Philippines, to Europe, interventions across the board, in the Middle East, in Africa, in Latin America. So the disconnect between ideal and reality was always there.

38:05So there was always some hypocrisy. But that hypocrisy was a very powerful tool in the hands of weaker nations who could then turn to the United States and point out the disconnect between word and deed, and then ask America to behave better. That in turn gave domestic groups inside the United States, civil society in particular, a very powerful tool to try and make their officials behave better. So, for example, when a series of hearings in Congress unveiled the degree to which the CIA had been in cahoots with various autocratic regimes across the third world to topple their leaders and sometimes killed their leaders, Congress reined in the executive on the argument that America should do better in the altar of all these principles that are centered on moral superiority.

39:11So hypocrisy has been a very important oil for the machine of the global order for a long time. And whenever leaders pretend to be better than they are, they grant others the opportunity that demand that they actually do. When you throw hypocrisy out of the window, what you have is a world of amorality. You no longer pretend to be better than you are. You simply say it as it is. and while that might be refreshing because your audiences now know that you're not lying to their faces or you're trying to dupe them into thinking you're better than you actually are now they have nothing to grasp they have no tool through which they can demand better behavior because you're not promising to be better than you are.

40:11So you can have the leader of the free world threaten genocide of a society on a tweet. How do you begin to deal with that? How do you try and manage power that way? So my argument in that piece was, we will miss that world. Hypocrisy in international politics is as important as hypocrisy in interpersonal relations. It's a common glue that holds society together, opening the possibility that third parties can demand that we do better than we actually do. And losing that, I think, opens the door to a world that is nastier. And in a context of very heightened geopolitical competition, what a shame to be on the ground without the resource to the language of morality to try and steer the conversation not only among the great powers themselves, but between the great powers and the rest of the world.

41:17And lastly, I'd like to close by asking you on that note, what can countries in the global South do, should they want to, to ensure that the world doesn't just head down the path of amorality and nihilism and the exercise of power, and that some of these principles that so many have worked hard to uphold in the last 70, 80 years don't just erode and crumble and fall away. In my view, there's only one productive pathway ahead, which is to double down on institutionalized cooperation, I don't know whether that's by rescuing international institutions to the extent possible, even if at times the great powers will hesitate.

42:02I don't know if that means accepting that America will no longer be part of these deals, and it's now a time for China to reign in many of these international institutions, from the UN to the World Trade Organization or the World Health Organization, or whether they should be done by building new fora and new sort of geometries whereby countries across the board can cooperate in a way that is institutionalized. But unless we have some kind of cooperation that is centered on regulations, on institutions that protect the weak against the strong, but also protect the strong in their ability to provide public goods, we're in deep trouble.

42:55So what I would like the Global South to do is to engage very proactively in the recrafting, rebuilding and the creation of new, if necessary, international institutions and do as much as they can to ensure that the great powers of the day seed in those institutions and talk to one another. There's nothing more dangerous now, I think, than instances of world politics in which the major powers do not speak to one another. And we can see it already in the global non-proliferation regime. This is the first time in a long time when we are in really dangerous terrain, because not only there's a danger that Iran will pull out of the non-proliferation treaty, now you have great powers threatening to use nuclear weapons, which had never happened before.

43:51And for the first time, the major owners of arsenals have stopped sharing information, talking to one another about the prospects for nuclear war and nuclear proliferation. And that is really very dangerous. So anything and everything that will reverse that trend, I think would be an invaluable contribution that the global South can make. That was Matias Spector speaking to us from Sao Paulo. After the break, we'll turn to Kishore Mebubani in Singapore on how Asia is responding to the war.

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46:05And now to my conversation with Kishore Mebubani. Kishore, welcome to the podcast. My pleasure. Yeah, we've been learning from your work within and without the pages of foreign affairs for decades now. So it's wonderful to finally have you on the show. I should note that we're speaking on the morning of Tuesday, April 14th. Over the weekend, talks between Iran and the United States in Islamabad collapsed. The U.S. has now imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports. And unsurprisingly, the price of oil has once again gone up. What's probably been insufficiently appreciated here in the West is just how much the war in Iran has affected people's lives in many parts of Asia.

46:52Something like 80 % of the gas and oil that habitually passes through the Strait of Hormuz is normally bound for Asian countries. So the closure of the Strait has led to huge fuel shortages across the region. You're in Singapore, in the heart of Southeast Asia. How does the fallout of the war look from there? Well, Kanesh, you're right about Singapore being at the heart of Southeast Asia. And clearly, we are witnessing some serious challenges in our region. I'm sure you've read the news reports about people queuing up to get gasoline in Thailand, about Philippines asking people to work for four days a week, and Malaysia considering whether or not to reduce its fuel subsidies.

47:39So it is having a serious impact on the region, which is why most people in the region believe that this war was completely unnecessary. But having said that, I also have to add that most Southeast Asian countries have relatively competent technocratic governments that are quite used to managing crisis like this and know what needs to be done to keep the situation going. So in that sense, while there is deep concern about what's happened, I wouldn't describe it as panic in the region. When you look at the sort of alarm in cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, what does that look like from Singapore?

48:28In many respects, those sorts of cities, they imagine their futures and their prosperity much in the same way with the inspiration of a place like Singapore, a city that would be open to business, would be open to the world, and would use its relative peace and stability as a way of generating growth for its residents. What does the sort of panic and alarm that has descended on those cities, how does that resonate in Singapore? Well, I think it has provided Singapore and, by the way, the rest of Southeast Asia, a very powerful lesson that if your countries want to grow and prosper, first you must get your geopolitics right.

49:14And this is where many in the rest of the world haven't understood that even though Southeast Asia is by far the most diverse region on planet Earth, so out of 700 million people almost, you have 250 million Muslims, 150 million Christians, 150 million Buddhists, Mahayana Buddhists, Hinayana Buddhists, and you have Taoists, Confucianists, Hindus, and also lots of communists in Southeast Asia. Now, this diverse region of planet Earth It has been described as British historians as the Balkans of Asia, correctly. And yet, by and large, this region has been remarkably peaceful since the last war in the region, the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979.

50:06Now, that's a remarkably long period of peace that this region has had, almost five decades. And that peace is a result of geopolitical competence of the highest order. And ASEAN, every year when ASEAN meets, every year, it invites all the great powers to come. Every one of them, rising, falling, United States, Russia, EU, Japan, India, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, everybody. And so what we have done is created a political ecosystem in which everyone has a stake in keeping it the way that it has. and so this unusual geopolitical calm you see in Southeast Asia is a result of decades of effort which I've actually documented in a book called The Asset Miracle and what you're seeing in the Gulf by contrast is unfortunately a high degree of geopolitical naivete which sort of believe that if you can trust one power you're okay you're being protected.

51:27And that's always a mistake. You must always endure politics, hedge your bets, and keep up the good ties with as many great powers as possible. That's the lesson of Southeast Asia. Both the Gulf and Southeast Asia, Singapore specifically, have prospered and grown tremendously in recent decades on the backs of what we called globalization and economic interdependence. We have become used to talking in recent years about weaponized interdependence and the dangers of becoming over-reliant on particular suppliers for commodities. And after this energy shock, I've seen, for instance, that Japan is considering greater use of nuclear energy, which is important because of its sort of tricky, fraught relationship with that source of energy.

52:27Indonesia is speeding up geothermal and solar energy projects. You've said that Southeast Asia has managed this shock fairly well, even though it has been fairly challenging for many people there. but do you see meaningful shifts ahead in this kind of diversification of sources of energy and other kinds of commodities? I think you use the right word, diversification, because some people like to say that what the world is witnessing is deglobalization. Now that's rubbish. Now it's true, as Mark Carney said in Davos, that there has been a rupture, But the big economic lesson of 2025 to the world is that there was rupture and there was resilience in the global system.

53:23Because you remember when President Trump launches Liberation Day tariffs in April 2025, all the experts, including IMF, including OECD, including the World Economic Forum, said, gosh, the global economy is going to shrink and global trade will diminish. Guess what? The opposite happened. and for us in Singapore, what was truly remarkable over 2025 is that Singapore is by far the most globalized country in the world. You know, our total trade is about three and a half times the size of our GNP and we were praying in 2025 for 2 % economic growth because our per capita income is very high, right?

54:13$94 ,000, although when I was born, it was$500. And at$94 ,000, growing at 2 % is respectable. But in 2025, we grew at 5%. Now, when the most globalized country in the world grows at 5 % in a difficult year, 2025, it shows that there is no deglobalization that is going on. People are rewiring, adapting, adjusting, looking for new sources, looking for new markets. And that process of rewiring is going on every day as you and I speak. And that's why, even though in the short term, people are worried about the impact of the Iran war on us, in the medium term and long term, the bullishness for this region is still carrying on.

55:10Has that process of rewiring, as you say, received further impetus from the sort of erratic tariff policy coming out of Washington and the United States' now ambiguous commitment to its old upholding of free trade? Certainly. But at the same time, what's interesting is that the U.S. trade with the world is also carrying on. And, you know, as you know, what makes it very difficult for people is that the United States imposes tariffs and the United States gives a lot of exemptions. But, you know, in critical sectors like pharmaceuticals and so on and so forth, all kinds of exemptions are put in place.

55:54So, you know, in many ways, the United States also, at the end of the day, understands that it needs the rest of the world for many critical things. And certainly the United States also discovered in 2025 that it has a very critical dependence on China for some very essential materials which are not irreplaceable anytime in the near future. And so the United States also, for the first time possibly, maybe in a hundred years, is realizing, hey, we can be held hostage too in this game of interdependence. Everyone thought only the United States was the only country which had the cards. So I'm hoping, therefore, that as a result, as they say, don't waste a crisis.

56:49I hope that some of the more thoughtful, sober minds in the United States would start to think long term and think strategically about whether or not it is in United States' interests to reduce its dependence on the rest of the world. And by the way, that results in a world that is much more closely wired to China. That's the natural consequences. Or is it better to have the rest of the world wired to the American economy? Now, that's a critical, long-term strategic decision that American policymakers should seriously ponder about as they think about the future, even for the United States. I want to ask about China, but let's stick for now to the war in Iran.

57:39And let's shift a little bit to the political fallout of the war. Across Southeast Asia, there's been a range of responses to the US-Israeli attack. Malaysia, for example, condemned the war. Indonesia was more careful in its wording, though it has now, I believe some Indonesian officials have suggested that they might reconsider involvement in Trump's so-called Board of Peace. And other countries, including Singapore, have issued narrower statements of regret and concern. But behind such rhetoric, and you've sat in these chairs, How do you think the war and its conduct is sitting with leaders in capitals across the region?

58:24I think, frankly, globally, in all the private conversations that are taking place, and I can suspect this is true of Latin America and Africa also, the big question they're asking is, why was this war necessary in the first place? you know this was truly by any definition a completely unnecessary war because after the June bombings last year the United States announced that Iran's nuclear capability had been destroyed right and what is absolutely unclear to anyone in the world is what is the long-term strategy in this game and I know that I mean if the New York Times report is right in saying that Bibi Netanyahu, when he went to the White House, convinced the White House that a simple decapitation would just solve the problem of Iran overnight.

59:29That statement showed a dramatic ignorance of the long history of Persian civilization, which has gone through so many moments of near death and resurrected itself. So here you're not dealing with a Venezuela. You're dealing with a very strong and ancient civilization. And one thing I learned as I get older is that as I look around the world and the performance of societies, I see increasingly it depends on what I call your civilizational sinews. What muscles do you have as a civilization? and clearly Persian civilization has demonstrated over thousands of years that it's one of the strongest civilizations and to think that two weeks of bombing can destroy it I think is very short-sighted and as you can see at the end of the day one can obviously disagree with Iran about how it violated international law, and it has violated international law.

1:00:53But it has, in defense, accumulated a weapon that clearly is almost bringing the global economy to a crawl. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, you know. And, you know, the one lesson of geopolitics that I learned after practicing it for several decades is that when you go into a situation, please never go into it with plan A, with the best case scenario. In any geopolitical issue, you must have plan A, plan B, plan C. Because in many instances, plan C is for the cock-up. And that happens so frequently. And clearly, what's happened in Iran is a major cock-up.

1:01:43I mean, I'm not allowed to use the word. You know, so you must sit back and also look at the larger picture about whether or not this really in the long-term benefits, for example, American national interests. Because I've been saying for years now that every war that the United States fights in is a gift to China. Obviously it is. because the Chinese know that every decade of peace that they buy, they become so much stronger at the end of each decade. So each war gives China a free decade. And that's a huge gift. You mentioned civilization and you were involved, I believe, in 1993 in our pages in the debates around Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations.

1:02:42And when you're watching this war against Iran unfold, and you see some of the rhetoric coming from certain officials in the White House, thinking of Pete Hexeth, the defense secretary in particular, and even from Trump and some of the curious iconography he has spread on social media, which seems to cast the war in a curiously religious and Christian nationalist dimension. How do you see civilization rearing its head here? Or maybe not civilization, but civilizational identity. So we are living in a very complex world today, which is very hard to capture in any kind of simple black and white scenarios.

1:03:30because on the one hand, it's very clear that we are seeing the end of the era of Western domination of world history. And by the way, the West has done a remarkable job dominating the world for over 200 years now. But I always hasten to add that the end of Western domination of world history is not the end of the West. The West is still going to remain the single strongest civilization on planet Earth for a long time. But its capacity to dominate and drive world history has diminished significantly and will continue to diminish in the coming decades because other civilizations are emerging. And certainly the two obvious candidates are China and India.

1:04:21The return of China and India are the two biggest things that are going to change the code and chemistry of the world significantly. But at the same time, neither China nor India will emerge as anti-Western civilizations because China knows that the reason why it is succeeding now is that it has injected critical elements of the DNA of Western civilization into its body politic. For example, mastery of science and technology. For example, free market economics in its private sector. So it has injected various elements of Western DNA into society. And of course, the thing that surprises me most, of course, given how the Chinese aesthetic is so different from the Western aesthetic, that the largest number of new Western classical orchestras are now emerging in China.

1:05:29That's an example of fusion of civilizations. So in this complex world that is coming, and believe me, it is going to get more and more complex, the stronger civilizations will re-emerge and show their civilizational strengths in this coming century, which is why the 21st century is the best century to be living in. On the terms civilization, you know, the ruling dispensations both in India and China like to cast their countries as not nation states, but civilization states. When, in fact, one could argue that the country that the Communist Party in China presides over was created in 1949, and the country that the BJP government in India presides over was created in 1947.

1:06:24Why is it correct to accept that kind of framing of those countries as civilizations and not just nation states? You know, I'm really glad that you chose as the title of my essay, The Dream Palace of the West. Now, every civilization has a dream palace. and the citizens of that civilization get their identity by identifying themselves with the peaks of their civilization. This is an example I give. Do you think that when President Xi Jinping goes to bed at night in China, Is his dream to revive communism and make Karl Marx the centre of world history? Or is his dream to revive the great Chinese civilisation and show the rest of the world?

1:07:33look at how glorious we were and how glorious we are today after a century of humiliation that we suffered. And similarly, the interesting thing about Narendra Modi is that in contrast to all the previous Indian prime ministers, for example, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was a good friend of mine. I served on his Global Advisory Council. He always wore a jacket and a tie. Always. at meetings. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi refuses to wear a jacket and tie. Now that's also what I call a civilizational signal there of identity and so on and so forth. But we must also remember and to be completely candid, a hundred years, if I had been having this conversation with you a hundred years ago, in 1926, All the leading minds of Asia felt ashamed by their civilizations.

1:08:36Ashamed! They could see how far they had fallen. And in India, they resented the fact that 100 ,000 Englishmen could rule India so effortlessly. Right? That was 100 years ago. Today, if 100 ,000 Englishmen return to India, they'd be massacred. It's almost inconceivable. And just to illustrate the point about how relative weights and strengths are changing, in the year 2000, when the 21st century opened, the British economy was still 3.5 times larger than that of the Indian economy. Today, the Indian economy is larger. And by 2050, India will be four times the size of the United Kingdom. Now, just imagine that in 50 years, the UK goes from being almost four times bigger than India to becoming one quarter the size of India.

1:09:36Now, this kind of incredible shift of power doesn't happen often in history. we are actually living through a time of massive shifts of power and especially frankly the return of asia because that's the story of the 21st century and you think that that kind of shift is not best captured by thinking of it in terms of the jockeying or rising and falling of nation-states, but you see it as a wider sort of cultural shift. Definitely. And I think one of the great weaknesses of the Western mind that has developed as a result of the West dominating the world history, the Western mind keeps believing that the only societies that can succeed in the long term are societies that in one way or another become replicas of the West.

1:10:40And in their minds, exhibit A is Japan. You see, Japan became a great power because it imitated the West and the emperor wore coattails and you had European traditions in the court and the Japanese were very happy to be part of the G7. Now, you know what? That era of Asian states believing that the way to succeed is to become carbon copies of Western societies is dying. And a new era is emerging where none of these societies believe that they're going to succeed by becoming replicas of the West. And frankly, the very sorry performance of Europe on many counts, economic, geopolitical, even cultural confidence, very few people in Asia look up to Europe and say, hey, that's the future.

1:11:42Frankly, they look in Europe and say, isn't this a wonderful museum? But you don't want to replicate a museum in your country. Your last piece for us, published earlier this year in the March-April issue, was titled, as you've mentioned, The Dream Palace of the West. And it was a response to Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, and his essay for us, in which I think he made a point that you just echoed here, that Western governments, Western societies can't expect other countries to follow the same path that the West has and can't expect other countries to embrace the same sorts of political systems that the West has, which in my mind, I suppose, strikes a note of greater humility than you're suggesting.

1:12:31I think you agreed with much of what he said, but you argued that Western countries don't understand and don't listen to the viewpoints of those in the global South sufficiently. And I'm paraphrasing you, but you said that people around the world have grown tired about European preaching, about Russian crimes in Ukraine, while the West in large part condoned the kinds of carnage that we saw in Gaza. You wrote, No one respects an adulterous priest who preaches marital fidelity in church. But aren't lots of countries, and not just those in the West, prone to hypocrisy? I mean, that's true. Not just all countries.

1:13:16Frankly, most human beings are prone to hypocrisy. It's a natural human failing. And sometimes, as they say, hypocrisy is a kind of complement to virtue. because you're saying, you're trying to say, hey, I'm actually very virtuous, which is a good thing rather than come out and say, actually, I want to be evil, right? We don't want to be evil. But at the same time, it's important to emphasize two facts. First is that the respect and reverence for the West that we saw, especially in my childhood, in my early years, was very real and very powerful, very real. And believe me, as a child and as a young man, I believe that the only way we could succeed is by emulating the West.

1:14:06That's why I believe it. In fact, I also, to be honest with you, in my memoirs, I describe how as a child, I believe that me with my brown skin, I was intellectually and culturally inferior to the white-skinned men. I believe that. I really believe that. I mean, I'm not exaggerating it. I live in a British colony and I believe it. So the respect and reverence for the West wasn't phony, it was real. As I mentioned 100 years ago, it was even more powerful. But today, that's gone. And today, the West, which makes up 12 % of the world's population, as I emphasize in my article, has got to make a massive effort to understand the 88 % with whom they share planet Earth.

1:14:53And they've got to understand that all these societies are going through massive changes and frankly rediscovering themselves and rediscovering their own civilizational strengths. And so, for example, in the case of Ukraine, as you mentioned, what Russia did by invading Ukraine was illegal. It is illegal. It was illegal. And that's why 141 countries condemned Russia. But then when the West went ahead and imposed sanctions on Russia, the West should have noticed that 85 % of the world's population didn't impose sanctions on Russia. Now, that was as loud a wake-up call as you can get. And the West should ask themselves, why is it the president of Brazil, you know, Brazil is not a crazy state.

1:15:45It's a serious Latin American state, said, hey, it's not that simple black and white. You were also trying in some ways to rub sand into Russian ice by expanding NATO recklessly without thinking about how about their own long-term legitimate security concerns. And frankly, Ukraine should have been a bridge between Europe and Russia rather than to try to be used, as I say in my article, as a knife in the back of Russia. And, you know, if you look in, if you look at Southeast Asia, right, we in ASEAN, ASEAN was created, by the way, as an anti-communist organization. And we thought when Vietnam fell to the communists, everything was dead.

1:16:34Southeast Asia was going to collapse under communist advance. Guess what? Vietnam didn't become an eternal enemy of ASEAN. We actually got Vietnam admitted into ASEAN. I was in Hanoi last year when Vietnam organized the ASEAN Future Forum. I was stunned. In the 1980s, I, as the Singapore ambassador to the UN, fought by Vietnamese ambassador every day over the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s. Ten years after I fought them, Vietnam joined ASEAN. and today Vietnam is probably the most enthusiastic member of ASEAN. I give that as an example of how Europe should have tried to find a formula for integrating Russia into a different kind of European fabric which doesn't insist you must become exactly like us.

1:17:36No, Vietnam is still, by the way, run by Communist Party. even though ASEAN was set up as an anti-communist organization. But we've broadened our tent because the world is diverse and big. And I think one of the advantages that Asians have as they try to understand the world of tomorrow is that we in Asia are used to dealing with diversity. And we never expect, I mean, a Chinese would never expect an Indian to become a Chinese. And an Indian will never expect a Chinese to become Indian. They're different. They're very different, right? But you can get along. And you know, in Singapore, it's 75 % Chinese.

1:18:21I belong to a minority within a minority, 10 ,000 Sindhis in Singapore. But as a minority, I can identify with the majority. So there are ways and means of getting along that the West hasn't learned because the West doesn't know what humility means. Let's talk about China briefly. You mentioned that you believe that China is a beneficiary of the ongoing war between the US and Iran. And in a piece you wrote for us a few years ago called Asia's Third Way, you described the tricky balancing act that many countries in the global South have to manage threading between the United States and China. Most governments, you wrote, are primarily concerned with economic development and do not wish to take sides in the contest between Beijing and Washington.

1:19:16In the wake of the turbulence of the past few years, and indeed of the shocks right now coming out of the Middle East, does that basic assessment remain the same, or do some countries now feel more inclined or feel more pressure to choose one way or the other? I think the net effect of the Iran war, I mean, by the way, one lesson I learned because I'm very old, is that it always takes time to see the outcome. Frankly, you know, if you had told me in 1985 when I was fighting Vietnam every day, that 10 years later, Vietnam would join ASEAN, I would say impossible. but it's impossible to happen. So in the same way, I think everybody understands today that China's rise is unstoppable.

1:20:06You know, the Chinese have this capacity to not just think long-term, but act long-term. And I just give one statistic. In the year 2000, China's share of global manufacturing was 5%. 5 % in 2000. Today is almost 30%. By 2030, it could hit 45%. Now, a country's share of global manufacturing does not grow from 5 % of the world to 45 % of the world in 30 years without the most rigorous, careful, thoughtful, long-term planning and equally importantly, execution. because you try plan A and you start, oh, it doesn't work. Sorry, we have to dump it. What about plan B? Try something else. And the Chinese have done a brilliant job.

1:21:02And today, frankly, the strongest economy in the world, not necessarily in size, but the strongest economy in the world in terms of being able to manufacture and deliver products in so many dimensions, which, by the way, benefit a lot of people. China makes it so cheap that in the most distant villages in Africa, you now have electricity and access to the world. Now, frankly, that's a gift from China to the world in many ways. So, I mean, it's true that the Chinese have trade surpluses that have to be dealt with and the Chinese should be more sensitive to the impact of their exports to the rest of the world.

1:21:45The Chinese should open up their markets more. But I think they understand that. In fact, China is the only country, and I attended a fair few months ago in Shanghai. China is the only country that organizes the China International Import Exposition. C-I-I-E. Not export, import. Right? So the Chinese also have to understand that they have to be aware of the impact on the rest of the world, which is definitely growing. They have to become more sensitive. and probably learn a few lessons from Europe's lack of sensitivity. How do you then understand the motivations in Beijing that underlie aggressive posturing and indeed even moves around territorial disputes, whether it's the Himalayas with India or in the South China Sea and other maritime disputes?

1:22:37What is animating that kind of friction? there has been a lot of assertive posturing by China no question China today you know I give a very simple example you and I began this conversation there was a cat sitting next to me I'd be feeling very relaxed and comfortable talking to you I turned around half an hour later the cat has become a tiger I don't feel comfortable China is a country that has gone from being a cat to a tiger. Now, please don't expect a tiger to behave like a cat. The second largest economy in the world, the second most powerful country in the world, surely is going to be assertive.

1:23:20This is what geopolitics has been like. But the question is, will they become aggressive? And this is where the Chinese have learned a lesson from their old wisdom, that the stupidest way to win a war is to fight it. And the best way to win a war is to not fight it. So you mentioned South China Sea. China and the Philippines have had clashes. Guess what? The Chinese patrol boat attacked the Philippines boats with water. Okay? Hoses of water. I would love to go to Gaza. and see in Gaza, the Israeli troops attack Gaza with hoses of water. There's a big difference, huge difference. The Chinese, by the way, have incredible firepower today.

1:24:23Please, whatever you do, don't underestimate the military capabilities of China. It's a very serious, very powerful country But if we in the neighborhood of China Can persuade China You can become big and strong You should become big and strong But please understand what our concerns are And learn how to work with us And surprisingly, we do manage to get through to the Chinese Do you think this war in Iran will affect in any way Chinese calculations about whether or not in some point in the future they launch a war to take Taiwan? I'm quite confident that the Chinese won't try to take Taiwan militarily.

1:25:17Unless, of course, by the way, if a Taiwanese government declares independence tomorrow, China will attack Taiwan the day after tomorrow. That's 100 % certainty. That's a given. But it's very clear, or the survey after survey shows that the people of Taiwan are sensible. They know that they don't want to go to war with China. And that's why they don't support independence, right? They may not necessarily support reunification, but they don't support independence either. So if you can preserve the status quo, there'll be no war. So, you know, in geopolitics, you've got to watch what they call the correlation of forces.

1:26:01The correlation of forces are working so powerfully in China's favor vis-a-vis Taiwan that the Chinese don't have to go to war. Eventually, the huge magnetic strength of China will draw Taiwan closer to it. And you saw, by the way, the visit of the opposition leader to China. That's an indication of how you try to solve problems by talking between two sides, which, by the way, both claim to be completely opposite. So, you know, this idea that everything is going to be resolved militarily in one form or another is an idea that somehow or others affected the Western mind. And as a result, you notice that the West, as Samuel Huntington says, has been grown to power more by the use of violence than anything else.

1:27:03And that's, frankly, a very bad habit that the West has got into. Today in these pages and elsewhere, you see furious debates about the shape of world order. Is unipolarity over? Is the world now multipolar? You've been involved in these debates for decades, at least as far back as the end of the Cold War. What's your perception of the trajectory ahead? And how might this current war in Iran shape that trajectory? I think the current war in Iran, again, with the qualification that it takes some time before you see how the dust settles and what is the outcome, is clearly, number one, as I said at the beginning, ending the era of Western domination of world history.

1:27:50It's a demonstration of how there are limits to what the West can do. And two, it's clearly going to be a multi-polar world. The unipolar world was a very brief moment of history, maybe the 1990s, 2000s. but over time, as China emerged and as India is emerging as Russia is showing that he's not a weak straw that can be pushed around in the way that some Europeans thought that they could and frankly, in some ways, as Iran is demonstrating there are societies that have decided that they want to be part of the modern world but in their own terms. And so it's a whole new global fabric that is being created as we speak because there's a massive amount of rebalancing that is going on.

1:28:51And by the way, I also predict a happy future for the United States because if the United States can learn how to revive many of the old friendships it has developed for decades and decades, then the United States can also be a comfortable player in this multipolar world. Well, on that note, Kishore, we'll close the conversation. You know, it's been a pleasure talking to you and reading you over the years, and we look forward to doing so again. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

1:29:30Thank you for listening. you can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Mary-Kate Godfrey, Rachel Powell, and Connish Kruir. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Irina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.

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