Kishore Mahbubani is a renowned diplomat, scholar, and one of the most insightful analysts of global power dynamics. He served as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations and as President of the UN Security Council, and is the author of books including Has China Won? and Has the West Lost It?

Mahbubani joined Current Affairs to explain why the United States is losing ground to China—not because of Chinese aggression, but because of internal dysfunction, elite failure, and strategic incoherence. He critiques the emotional, zero-sum mindset dominating U.S. foreign policy and calls for a more rational, cooperative approach to global affairs.

Nathan J. Robinson

I want to start with the good news. At the beginning of your book, Has the West Lost It?—which I think many readers in America, Britain, and the rest of Europe might find disquieting, disturbing—you begin with actual good news: for all the anxieties and fear that many in the West feel, the world has been becoming a much better place in many ways. There are many places around the world where people do feel positive and excited about the human future, which may come as a surprise to some Americans who see a future of never-ending doom and gloom. So tell us the good news.

Kishore Mahbubani

Well, the good news is that the human condition has never been better. More and more people are leading better, longer, more fulfilling lives. And if you want to get a sense of how the explosion of human well-being has happened, let me just mention the statistics from three significant growth regions of Asia. If you look at the 1.4 billion people living in China, the 1.4 billion people living in India, and the approximately 700 million people living in Southeast Asia in ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), that makes 3.5 billion people, almost 40 percent of the world’s population. Now among these 3.5 billion people, in the year 2000, only 150 million people enjoyed middle-class living standards. Only 150 million out of 3.5 billion. But by 2020, that number had exploded 10 times to 1.5 billion people, and by 2030, which is not far away, the number could reach almost 3 billion out of 3.5 billion people.

Now, never before in human history have we seen such a massive advancement of the human condition, bringing so many people out of misery and poverty towards middle-class living standards. So in many ways, in terms of the human condition globally, there’s never been a better time to be born a human being.

Robinson

But as you pointed out, much of this explosive development and improvement is occurring in Asian countries. In the United States, certainly, people feel a great deal of anxiety, in part because there’s been a stagnation in the United States because of the very thing that you’re describing. That is to say, the huge growth in the economies of Asian countries is seen as a deep and existential threat to the power of our country. And in many ways, in your books, Has China Won? and Has the West Lost It?, you are warning Americans that this fear that has sort of consumed the country, and is definitely present in the second Trump administration, is very dangerous and a misunderstanding. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Mahbubani

Well, I think it’s very important to emphasize that economics is never a zero-sum game. It is not the case that if I become rich, you necessarily have to become poor. You can have positive-sum games, but clearly it is still, nonetheless, a fact that the bottom 50 percent of America’s population has been stagnating for several decades. And the question is, why?

Now, of course, the most popular explanation is that China sucked away the jobs of middle-class Americans. But that’s not true. Actually, what has happened is that the problem is an internal one, that the United States has functionally become a plutocracy. And I’m not the one who said to use the word plutocracy. The late Paul Volcker, the former head of the Fed, described the United States as a plutocracy. The Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz describes the US as a plutocracy. Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, describes the United States as a plutocracy. And essentially, what’s happened is that the political system has been hijacked by the very rich. And therefore, as I document in my book, Has China Won?, when public policy decisions are made by the United States Congress, instead of trying to help take care of the bottom 50 percent, the United States Congress, in one way or another, inevitably makes decisions that benefit the top 2, 5, 10 percent, and abandons the bottom 50 percent, and that’s the structural problem. And so it is not China that is stealing away jobs from the United States. It is the United States’ inability to deal with its own structural problems within its own society.

 

Robinson

Now, you argue there that U.S. policy is in some ways driven by a rational effort by those at the top to preserve wealth and power within the internal class system of the United States. But one of the things that also comes across in Has China Won? is your belief that much of U.S. policy towards China is just driven by emotion and prejudice rather than any real rationality at all. You say that “in electing Donald Trump, the rest of the world was shocked that America had elected a president who could not pass an Economics 101 undergraduate class.” You also talk about the history of Yellow Peril rhetoric. So, here you’re talking about things that aren’t even really the pursuit of self-interest by American elites, because they’re not even based on strategic thinking.

Mahbubani

Yes, I think the American elites have a lot to be held accountable for because they have failed their own populations. They haven’t been able to create a social and political system that distributes the public goods to their own population and improves the lifestyles and lives of their own populations. But that’s a failure of American elites. And that’s precisely because the masses—the 50 percent at the bottom—have not seen any improvement in their living standards and have become a very angry population, and they wanted to vote for somebody who would give Washington, DC a big kick in the butt. And there’s no question that Donald Trump is clearly giving Washington, DC a big kick in the butt and saying, you guys have not taken care of the people of the United States.

Now, of course, unfortunately, his belief that there’s only one solution to all these problems, to increase tariffs on every country in the world, I fear, is not the answer. Economics 101 will tell you that when you impose tariffs, the cost of the tariffs will not be paid by the exporting country, but will be paid by the consumer. And so American consumers are going to find in these coming months that life will be very difficult for them as a result of these tariffs, of course, assuming that the suspension is removed. Of course, if it remains in place, then the tariffs won’t do as much damage.

Robinson

You pointed out that global economics is not a zero-sum game, and another theme that comes across in your writing is that essentially, if we are going to have a prosperous, peaceful 21st Century that deals with the major crises that we face, such as climate change, we will have a world that cooperates, a world of mutual respect, and a world where countries are capable of understanding one another. And in the rhetoric that you hear in the United States, Donald Trump openly says China is our enemy. That’s his quote. The rest of the world is ripping us off. It is really quite the opposite of the story that you’re telling. You tell the story of us all inhabiting one planet and a need to work things out. In the United States, the Trumpian narrative is that we inhabit a world of enemies, those enemies need to be tamed or destroyed, and we need to build up our ability to crush them militarily if necessary. So, it would seem that much of the story told in the United States is really going in the opposite direction of the one that you feel generates the understanding necessary to live well in the 21st Century.

Mahbubani

Well, you’re absolutely right about that, but I can fully understand why Donald Trump wants to try and improve the livelihoods of the bottom 50 percent of Americans. I think that’s a noble goal that he has. I can understand why he wants to make American industries more competitive and re-industrialize America. That’s also an understandable goal. But I think he will find that the best way to achieve those goals is actually to work with the rest of the world. And one thing I’ve learned after studying geopolitics for 55 years is that you’ve got to be cold and calculating if you want to succeed in geopolitics, and if you’re emotional, then you’re at a major disadvantage.

So, for example, how did China become so wealthy so quickly? What they did was to work closely with the United States. Even though, technically, during part of the Cold War the U.S. was an adversary, China worked with the United States to grow its economy. And I think that’s one thing that is taboo in the United States, that actually the best way for the United States to regenerate its economic growth and make it grow faster is not to try and bring down China, but to work with China. Just as in the time when you were worried about Japanese cars taking over the United States, what did you do? You have voluntary export restraints. You encourage the Japanese to set up factories—Toyota factories, Honda factories—in the United States. The same thing can be done with China. It can only be done if you are rational and calculating in your moves and not emotional and say, oh, no, we can never work with China. Why can’t you work with China? If working with China is going to bring benefits to the American people, why not work with them? Because at the end of the day, it’s very clear that all efforts to stop the rise of China by the United States will fail. You cannot stop a 4,000-year-old civilization that has its own civilizational cycles, and as it is rising, depriving them of this technology or that technology is not going to stop the rise of China.

Robinson

And you point out that for most of human history, the Chinese and Indian economies were among the largest in the world. They have the largest global population. And so to try and reverse the trend towards a more equal balance of power in the world, you argue, is futile.

Mahbubani

Yes, that’s a fact that everyone should know, that from the year 1 to the year 1820, for 1,800 out of the last 2,000 years, the two largest economies of the world have always been those of China and India. It’s only in the last 200 years that Europe and North America have taken off. The last 200 years of Western domination of world history have been a major historical aberration, and all aberrations come to a natural end. So it’s perfectly natural to see the return of China and India. But what’s important to emphasize is that the reason why China and India are coming back is that they are studying, absorbing, and implementing Western pillars of wisdom, and that’s why they’re succeeding. And paradoxically, at a time when, for example, China—a Communist Party run country—is discovering the virtue of free trade agreements, free trade agreements have enabled China to become one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and the United States is walking away from them. But this is where Economics 101 theory is right. The United States should be signing more free trade agreements and not walking away from them.

Robinson

Now, you mentioned there China being a Communist Party run country, but one of the points that you make in your book, Has China Won?, is that one of the major misunderstandings of China comes from seeing it as an ideologically communist entity in the kind of classic Marxist-Leninist sense.

Mahbubani 

Well, I think anybody who thinks that China is a communist country should go visit China. I mean that literally: every American who believes that should go visit it. I actually visited Moscow in 1976, and trust me, that place was so controlled, so oppressed. And when you went into the biggest department store in Moscow, and you wanted to buy a toothbrush—I’m not exaggerating—you had a huge cabinet, and you had one toothbrush separated from the other toothbrush by one foot. Even the toothbrushes were scarce commodities. A small 7-Eleven in the United States has more toothbrushes than the largest department store in Moscow. Everything was scarce.

Now, you go to China today, and you will see the most advanced economy in the world in terms of how it produces both private goods and public goods. If you go and see the infrastructure of China, you begin to realize that after going from Kennedy Airport to Beijing Airport, you’re going from a third world airport in the United States to a first world airport in China. And by the way, incidentally, also a first world airport in New Delhi and Mumbai. So there are areas in which Asia has surged ahead, clearly, of the United States, and the United States should consider the possibility that it could possibly try to emulate what the East Asian economies have done.

Robinson

You point out, perhaps more controversially, that even on the question of personal freedoms, there are important ways in which China is certainly distinct from the Soviet Union. In fact, I believe in one of your books you cite going to the Soviet Union, and you’re not allowed to use the lavatory on the train because there’s no law saying you can use the lavatory on the train. So, whatever isn’t permitted explicitly is forbidden. You don’t argue that China is, in fact, a democracy, or that it doesn’t have abuses of power—it’s clearly a different system than the United States. But you point out that Chinese tourists travel all around the world in a way that Soviet tourists certainly didn’t. So even there we sort of misunderstand, and by not understanding that, we don’t understand why many people in China might actually think that they have good governance.

Mahbubani

As I say, in the old Soviet Union, which I visited several times by the way, not a single ordinary Soviet citizen was allowed to go on tourist holidays overseas. They were afraid that any Soviet citizen who went out would defect and not return home to the Soviet Union. Now what’s amazing is that in the year 2019, before COVID came along, 139 million Chinese people left China freely to go overseas, and if Communist China was a gulag that was oppressing their people, the 139 million people in China should never have come back. They should have said, hey, we will enjoy freedom overseas. But guess what? They all came back, massively. And as you know now, even students graduating from the American Ivy League are coming back. Professors teaching in Ivy League universities in America are coming back to China.

And it’s true that the Chinese political system is certainly not as free as the American political system. But at the same time, the Chinese also believe that in a good society, the needs of the society are as important as individual liberties. So many Chinese are happy to accept restraints on social behavior because they believe that’s how you create a good society, and that’s a different cultural assumption, whereas in the United States, you believe the most important good is individual freedom, and any kind of social control is bad for the society. But the Chinese are not saying that America should become like China. But what Americans and the West have got to understand is that in this new Asian 21st century, when the Asian societies come back, they’re not going to become carbon copy replicas of liberal democratic societies. They’re going to find their own balance, their own formulas for success. And it’s good for the West to understand that in many ways, it may not necessarily be bad for the world if different societies and different civilizations make different choices to create good societies for their own people, which their own people are happy with.

Robinson

My feeling certainly is that if we in the United States wish to make the case that liberal democracy, with a very high value on individual personal liberty, is the model for the good society—which I personally think it is—the way we could do that is by proving that it works in our own country, and then other countries might want to adopt it. But we don’t, at the moment, do a very good job of making the case that a society with our kind of political system is going to end up terribly functional.

Mahbubani

Yes. And in fact, you know, in my book, Has China Won?, I cite the works of Angus Deaton, who wrote a book called Deaths of Despair. And if you look at the data, it’s extremely sad how the working classes in the United States are struggling, how their incomes are stagnating, and how many of them are losing their medical benefits. And I think it’s very important in a good society that you’ve got to take care of people in the bottom 10 percent. I studied philosophy both in Singapore and in Canada at Dalhousie University. And one philosopher I studied was America’s then-greatest living philosopher, John Rawls, and in his book A Theory of Justice, he emphasizes that the only way you can justify greater inequality is, if as a result of the greater inequality, the bottom 10 percent are also better off, and not just the top 10 percent. So that’s what’s missing in the United States, that the top 10 percent have seen their share of national income and wealth increase exponentially, but the bottom 10 to 20 percent have been stagnating, and that’s something that can be fixed with good social policies.

Robinson

I want to go back to something that you said earlier. People might have been a little surprised to hear you talk of the virtues of being cold and calculating. And when you read your books, one of your prescriptions is to become more Machiavellian. I think this is very interesting because people might be surprised to hear Machiavelli praised—staying on the subject of political philosophy. But one of the interesting things that comes out of your books, your analysis, is that actually, when the United States thinks it’s being cold and calculating—there’s certainly no lack of callousness or coldness in a lot of American foreign policy, or willingness to destroy the lives of others, but there is a certain absence of strategic thinking. And one of the things that you point out is that we mistake what real strategic thinking is. For example, you cite Sun Tzu saying, if you don’t know your enemy as well as yourself, you’re going to lose half your battles. It seems like in the United States, we don’t know either our enemy or ourselves. It might be considered non-strategic or sappy or excessively empathetic to try and understand China, but you say, no, understanding China, understanding how Putin thinks, these are not things you do out of an excess of emotion and sympathy. These are things you do because you are a strategic, careful thinker.

Mahbubani 

Absolutely, and it’s a bit sad that the United States, when it launches geopolitical contests against China, decided to do so without first working out a comprehensive, long-term strategic plan. In an early chapter in my book, Has China Won?, I say there are 10 questions that anyone should ask if they’re formulating a strategy. And I’m actually trying to help the United States formulate a comprehensive long-term strategy, because if you don’t have a comprehensive long-term strategy, you just carry out emotional actions and end up hurting yourself. So, for example, the Biden administration thought they could stop the development of semiconductors in China by imposing all kinds of sanctions. And you can see the result a few years later: China’s share of the semiconductor market used to be 10 percent, and now it’s 50 percent. So all the efforts to stop China didn’t work because no one thought strategically. And just to make a very important point of detail, when the United States cut off supplies of advanced semiconductors to China, it was cutting off his nose to spite his face. Because by depriving yourself of 30 percent of your revenue, you lose all your R and D budget, and when you lose all your R and D budget, you’ve lost your capacity to compete. So, you’ve got to think strategically when you carry on an action—is it going to do more damage to my opponent, or is it going to do more damage to me? And I’m actually trying to help the United States work out policies that will be beneficial for the United States.

 

Robinson

Yes. Another example of this kind of this kind of paradox, where the thing that the United States does to counter China is actually helping China and not the United States, is as you say, irrational and wasteful defense spending. This might surprise some people, but you say it’s in China’s national interest for American wasteful defense spending to continue. The more money America spends on weapons systems that will never be used against China—because, as you say, a war between the two countries would result in the destruction of both countries—the better off China will be, and American military expenditures are geopolitical gifts to China. That is certainly something that those authorizing those expenditures don’t believe.

Mahbubani

Yes, and the tragedy here is that the way America spends money on defense expenditures, in theory, you should first work out a strategy and say, what kind of weapons do we need? And then you work backwards and say, okay, in this new strategic environment, maybe instead of piloted jets, we need pilotless jets, because drones today are as good as piloted jets. You spend so much money on an aircraft trying to protect the body of the pilot, but once you have a pilotless jet, everything is much cheaper, and the planes can go faster—they don’t have to worry about the human body in there. Similarly, today, with advanced missiles, aircraft carriers have become sitting ducks. You no longer need aircraft carriers anymore to project power. But the reason why you cannot change course is that in America, and this is part of being a plutocracy, the arms industry can lobby the US Congress to pass bills to buy weapons that are outmoded and that are no longer needed. So America is producing a lot of weapons that will not be useful when the real war comes. The aircraft carriers will be sitting ducks in the face of all these hypersonic and supersonic missiles that are being developed. You have vested interests in deciding what should be purchased. But if you do a zero-based thing, you can actually defend the United States much more effectively with half the budget, or one quarter of the budget, with much more effective weapons. But of course, a large part of the military industrial complex will complain, then they will go to Congress, and you won’t be able to arrive at a rational decision. So in that sense, it is not China that is distorting your defense expenditures. It’s the American political system that is preventing the United States from having rational defense policies.

Robinson

We’ve been talking here about how United States policy towards China is ultimately irrational and self-defeating and pseudo-Machiavellian, without actually thinking sensibly about what is in the interests of this country. But it’s not the only example that you give of self-defeating Western policy. Just opening up your book here, Has the West Lost It?, you have a section, “Strategic Errors: Islam, Russia and Meddling in World Affairs.” And you make a series of arguments there that, for example, the United States’ treatment of Russia after the Cold War actually led to the rise of Putin, which was preventable, and that the United States, through its disastrous wars in the Middle East, has created, in many ways, or exacerbated, the problems that they that supposedly we are trying to solve.

Mahbubani

Yes. Certainly, the Iraq war was completely unnecessary—completely unnecessary. You spent $3 trillion of blood and treasure, and at the end of the day, delivered a broken state which is not safe for Americans to live in. And similarly, by the way, the removal of Gaddafi was a huge mistake, especially for the Europeans, because Gaddafi was acting like a cork in the bottle, preventing a surge of migrants from Africa towards Europe. But as soon as Gaddafi was removed, the floodgates opened up. So it’s not in your interest. It’s important to do a rational calculation of where your interests lie, and it is not in America’s interest necessarily to fight forever wars and to have 800 military bases around the world, because the United States is a very safe country. You are protected by two wonderful, huge oceans, and you’re protected by Canada and Mexico. You don’t have hostile republics as your border, so you can actually cut down your defense expenditures dramatically. And instead of making it a sole American mission to keep international waterways safe, work with other navies in the world cooperatively, because we all share common interests in keeping international sea lanes safe.

Robinson

I believe you were in the UN Security Council in the lead up to the Iraq war.

Mahbubani

That’s right, 2001-2002.

Robinson

Can you tell us a bit about that?

Mahbubani  

Yes, you could see the tension building up in the Security Council because the United States was trying to pass a resolution to justify an invasion of Iraq, and it was very clear that Russia, China, Germany, and France thought it was a wrong decision. And frankly, if the United States had listened to its good friends, Germany and France, who said, you shouldn’t fight this war, you will lose a lot of money, and you will be worse off, the United States could have saved $3 trillion, and by the way, used it to develop the infrastructure of the United States and make it as gleaming as that of China. So why spend $3 trillion fighting an unnecessary war? And I’m surprised that no one has been held accountable for this unnecessary war. I should also mention that I’m making these points because I actually believe that the United States can become, once again, a very strong country. And the goal of all my prescriptions is not to weaken the United States, but to strengthen the United States and to make it a more effective actor in a complex world environment.

Robinson

Yes, there’s one part in your book on the West where you say, some of my friends in other countries might wonder why I’m giving advice to America on how to become stronger, but I genuinely want all the countries of the world to reach their potential. And you come as a friend. You say this over and over in the book. You go, I’m not here to just list the flaws and follies of the United States. I’m pointing out ways in which this country is hurting itself.

Mahbubani 

Yes. So, my goal is to help the United States become stronger and more effective.

Robinson

I want to talk a little bit more about the United Nations, because the U.S. relationship with the United Nations is a little strange. You say that in your time there, just looking at your memoir here, one constant was U.S. domination of the United Nations Security Council, and in many ways, the United Nations Security Council is—I think “rigged” is a strong word, but set up in a way that gives a certain disproportionate or unfair power to the great power countries, and is an unfair system. And yet in the United States, we still disdain the UN and international law for putting too many constraints on U.S. action, despite our outsized role there. Can you talk a little bit about the U.S. relationship with the United Nations?

Mahbubani 

Well, the U.S. relationship with the UN is a paradoxical one. The Americans always complain that the UN is constraining them. The reality is that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—the United States, Russia, China, UK, and France—are essentially five dictators. What do I mean when I say five dictators? They cannot be removed. If you had an election in the UN General Assembly to say that we would like to remove, let’s say, France as a permanent member, France has the right to veto the resolution. So you cannot remove them. There are five dictators. But because of the power that they have, they effectively control the UN and one thing that the P5 agree upon, even though they quarrel on many issues, is that all five don’t want to have a strong Secretary General. In fact, when they select a Secretary General, the first quality they look for is that the Secretary General must be completely spineless. And if he’s not spineless, he cannot be selected. Of course, subsequently, some Secretary Generals discovered a spine, like Kofi Annan, who was a very good Secretary General. He was not spineless. But the present Secretary General [António Guterres], most people feel, should have taken a much stronger stand on issues like Gaza, Ukraine, and all that—to play a more active role. But he’s been very passive. And that’s not necessarily a good thing. I’ve argued that the five permanent members should realize that it is now in their interest to see a more effective United Nations. So when they select the next Secretary General, try to pick a dynamic CEO, someone who’s brave, ambitious and driven, and see whether we can push the organization to a better direction.

Robinson

One of the things that comes across in the portion of your memoir about your time at the United Nations is just what an extraordinary institution it is. You say that you know the representatives who come to the United Nations are really the representatives of the people of those countries. You say they are genuinely putting forth those countries’ positions. And so you actually have the whole world hashing out these important debates. And if we had an institution a little more fairly structured, we really have something that is the prototype, or the beginning, of an institution that could really perform quite effective global governance.

Mahbubani 

Yes, because at the end of the day, there are 8 billion people on planet Earth, and if you’re going to have any kind of global government or global cooperation, you have to involve all 8 billion people in the world. The only place where the 8 billion people in the world are represented is in the United Nations. I use a simple boat analogy to explain why we need to cooperate more. In the past, if you had 8 billion people living in 193 separate countries, it was as though they were living on separate boats—they were separated from each other—and indeed, if one boat caught COVID, another boat wouldn’t catch COVID. You’re on different boats. But the world has effectively shrunk. There’s no question whatsoever we live in a small, interdependent world, and so the 8 billion people no longer live in 193 separate boats. The 8 billion people now live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat, and that’s why, when one cabin got COVID, all 193 cabins got COVID. COVID was a signal that we were all on the same boat.

So if you’re on the same boat, there’s no point trying to protect your cabin if the boat is sinking. Therefore, that’s the reason why we must step out of our cabins. You must protect your cabins, and you must also protect the global boat as a whole, and that’s why you need the United Nations. That’s why you need to develop in the West, especially, leaders who can speak out intelligently and thoughtfully on why some of the global challenges we face, whether it’s climate change, pandemics, or global financial crisis, they can only be solved if all of us come together to solve this problem. And this is a time when the United States of America, instead of moving towards more unilateralism, should be moving towards more multilateralism for the national interest of the United States, to serve the interests of the United States. That’s something our young Americans will understand and grasp and push for.

 

Robinson 

Just to conclude here, and to return to where we started, while your books are full of quite depressing examples of horrific strategic blunders that have cost many human lives—of missed opportunities, of misunderstandings—your books also contain warnings about the terrible things that could happen in the future if the West does not heed these lessons and develop a certain sense of humility and self-understanding and understanding of the direction that the world is taking. While all of that is the case, ultimately, you always conclude with this note of optimism. That is to say, if we can develop this kind of deeper understanding of our world and one another, there really is no limit to the human potential, and we could build quite a remarkable future. You yourself grew up in deep poverty in Singapore. Your memoir, Living the Asian Century, is an incredible story of not just the change in your own circumstances, but the change that you outlined at the beginning in the Asian countries generally. You saw that happen. You saw really wondrous transformations, and there’s no reason we couldn’t have more of that in the future.

Mahbubani 

Yes, I’m still very much optimistic about the future because I think we have now developed the capabilities to improve the human condition dramatically. So, less and less people are starving—except in Gaza—and less and less people are dying. And in conflicts, even. So, we are moving towards a better human condition, and we can possibly create a much more peaceful and prosperous world than the one we have. We have the resources, we have the means, and we have the intellect to do that. But what is holding us back is that our minds are still set in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in geopolitics, and we are focused on zero-sum games about, am I number one or are you number one? And frankly, it doesn’t matter if you have the biggest cabin on the boat if the boat is sinking. It makes this meaningless to say I should have the number one cabin. What’s more important is to save the boat as a whole and create a better planet for everybody. And I think it can be done, but to achieve this, the West has got to go through a major mental reboot because the West doesn’t understand how to deal with people of different cultures and different civilizations. Because they do think differently, they do act differently, and you have to understand how they think and feel if you want to work with them. And that’s what a lot of my writings try to do. To point out that, hey, the rest of the world, they may think very differently from you, but they’re also more than willing to work with you if you treat them with some respect and approach them with some humility.

 

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.