Quotes from Kishore Mahbubani

The US and Thailand signed an accord in October 1985 setting up a war reserve weapons stockpile in Thailand, making it the first country without a US military base to have such an arrangement.

Indonesia's strategic location in the Indian Ocean and its control of the Melaka and Sunda Straits made the country exceptionally important for US strategic and security interests in the region.

Marty Feldstein, who explained clearly how America's trade deficit came about. He said: "foreign import barriers and exports subsidies are not the reason for the US trade deficit… the real reason is that Americans are spending more than they produce…

No other region in the world can match its cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic diversity. In a relatively small geographical space, we find 240 million Muslims, 130 million Christians, 140 million Buddhists and 7 million Hindus. This range of religious diversity is remarkable in itself. But it actually masks a deeper cultural diversity.

one weakness of ASEAN is that the 600 million people who live in Southeast Asia do not feel a sense of ownership of ASEAN.

the primary goal of China's rulers is to preserve peace and harmony among 1.4 billion people in China, not try to influence the lives of the 6 billion people who live outside China.

From their strategic location at the Straits of Malacca, early Malay-Indonesian seafarers dominated both the China trade and the Indian Ocean trade. The Indonesians "traded with India by 500 BCE and China by 400 BCE, and around the beginning of the Common Era, they carried goods between China and India".24

By the 11th century, after the fall of the Tang and as the rise of the Song dynasty led to new demand from China, Srivijaya's dominance of Southeast Asia was challenged from an unusual quarter, India.

However, America also began to see its many Cold War allies in a new light, questioning their usefulness and seeing their flaws in sharper relief. Since it would have been seen as unethical (not to mention ungrateful) to use and then abandon allies, America needed an ethical justification. Under Jimmy Carter in the 1980s, America started bringing human rights into foreign policy conversations. By the 1990s, human rights were used as a tool to create distance from inconvenient or former allies.

In reality, the rulers of Southeast Asia were keen to send tributes to China because they found it to be immensely profitable.

China usually gave much more than it received from these missions, reflecting the court's attitude that its smaller neighbours had little to offer their great nation, and demonstrating Chinese generosity".

Most Americans are unaware that the average income of the bottom 50 percent of their population has declined over a thirty-year period.

China has no such economic necessity. Its economy can grow well, even without American investments.

Two thousand years of Chinese history have created a strategic culture that advises against fighting unnecessary wars in distant places. The likelihood therefore is that, while China's strategic weight and influence in the world will grow significantly, it will not behave as an aggressive and belligerent military power.

The mutual benefits of two-way trade, and the willingness of Southeast Asian rulers to submit, at least symbolically, to China may also explain the relative lack of military conflict between China and Southeast Asia over the centuries.

despite its openness, America has its own sacred cows. One such sacred cow is that America is number one and will be number one forever

in the case for China, it should attract American, and Western, investments out of strategic necessity. The strategic reason for doing so is to create a major stabilizer in China's relations with America and with the Western world.

Chinese people need to realize is that it would serve China's long-term strategic interests for China to continue opening up its economy even while the Trump administration has been creating more difficulties for foreign businesses to either invest or export to America. Over time, this will mean more countries will be trading and investing more with China than with America.

any American effort to decouple itself from China could well result in America decoupling itself from the world.

Americans hold sacrosanct the ideals of freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion and also believe that every human being is entitled to the same fundamental human rights. The Chinese believe that social needs and social harmony are more important than individual needs and rights and that the prevention of chaos and turbulence is the main goal of governance.

Negotiations only succeed when countries have the flexibility to make compromises at the negotiating table. American diplomats are severely handicapped in this respect. Both absolute power and conflicting demands from domestic agencies leave American negotiators with little room for flexibility.

When China built walls and cut off communication with the rest of the world, it fell behind. When China opened up to the world, it thrived. To guarantee its continued long-term success, China should completely abandon its two-thousand-year-old Middle Kingdom mentality and decide to become the most open society in terms of economic engagement with the rest of the world.

The common cause of the massive blindness of the Chinese officials in the nineteenth century was a huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world. As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed. It didn't need the rest of the world. That painful century of humiliation finally led to China opening up.

the weaponizing of the US dollar has created a powerful global incentive to create an alternative currency for global trading purposes.