Woods Hole, MA -
“Don’t make us choose between the U.S. and China,” Singapore Foreign Minister Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan recently told us at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We’re being increasingly asked to choose sides,” he added with a note of frustration.
Singapore is a friend of the United States, of course, but it exists cautiously within Beijing’s orbit. It’s used diplomacy and economics for many years to walk that tightrope. Balakrishnan said the world has always been multipolar and that the West must understand the presence and inevitability of China as a superpower. A world with several competing superpowers is the “natural condition of things,” not the brief aberration after the fall of the Berlin Wall that found the United States as the only superpower, he suggested.
Moderator and New York Times correspondent David Sanger said about China’s long-term view of all of this, “So we had a crummy 400-500 years, but we’re back.” China’s leader Xi, Sanger added, is now “making it clear there are other ways to organize the world beyond the post-1945 order.”
All that said, while we must tread cautiously in forcing nations to choose sides, which was the sometimes-clumsy move in the Cold War playbook, we must compete aggressively with China across the board. Sure, there are more ways than one to organize the world. Xi’s oppressive, dictatorial, and insecure approach should not be one of them.
Image courtesy of Reuters.