How Will the World Navigate Trump’s Return?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Prime Minister Turnbull, thank you for joining me, and thank you for the piece you wrote in Foreign Affairs several months before the U.S. election on how the rest of the world should deal with Donald Trump, drawing on your own experience doing so last time around. I know it’s being read closely in a lot of capitals these days.

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Oh, that’s good. Well, thank you. As I said in that piece, last time Trump was elected, there were two big misapprehensions that were almost universally made. The first was that [Trump] would be different in office than he was on the campaign trail. And everyone made that mistake. Xi Jinping said to me that he thought the administrative system would institutionalize him, and the wild rhetoric on the campaign trail would not be reflected in government. Well, of course it was, and in some respects it got even wilder. So I don’t think anyone will make that mistake again.

The second mistake that was widely made, and I think will be made again and is being made again, is that the way to deal with Trump is to suck up to him and just lavish him with flattery and sycophancy and so forth. And that is a major mistake because the only people he respects are the people that stand up to him. He’s a classic sort of bullying, narcissistic personality. That’s like saying the Pope’s a Catholic, it’s pretty obvious. And the reality is if you suck up to bullies and grovel to bullies, all you’ll get is more bullying. So this mistake is being made again, and I mean in spades, the cavalcade of supplicants going to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee and kiss the ring of Donald Trump is quite a sight to behold.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, I want to draw you out on that bullying and flattery point especially, but maybe it’s worth just going back to this moment, eight years ago when you’d been prime minister for about a year at that point, I believe, a little over a year.

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Yeah, that’s about right. Yeah.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And you were preparing for Trump 1.0. In the piece, you are pretty unstinting in your criticism— the piece you wrote for Foreign Affairs, you talk about the “powerful narcissistic self-belief,” and you talked about him as an effective and relentless gaslighter, so you are certainly not pulling your punches. But as you think back to what you were expecting eight years ago and what those early interactions were like, what were your expectations and how were those confounded or not in those first interactions with Trump?

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Well, look, I had never dealt with Trump in business, but I knew a lot of people that had. And I knew his type, which is the big bullying billionaire. He thinks he’s got the answer to everything, filled with self-confidence. I mean, it’s a type, and I’d worked with and against many people like that in my business career. So my first sort of run-in with Trump was pretty early in the piece, back very early in the piece, not long after he was inaugurated. I had a call with him in which I wanted to discuss a refugee resettlement deal that I had done with Obama. When I say a deal, I actually mean a written agreement—a signed agreement between the Commonwealth of Australia and the United States of America. So it wasn’t a political handshake or a nod and a wink. And this was to resettle up to 1,250 unauthorized immigrants or asylum seekers who’d sought to get to Australia in the United States, and in return for that, we were taking similar accommodations for the Americans. So it was a bargain.

Anyway, we had every indication that Trump would abide by it, including through people like Stephen Miller and so forth. And then just before the call, Mike Pence rang my deputy, and Michael Flynn rang my national security director, and they both said, “The president is not going to go along with it. The Prime Minister should not raise it.” Well, naturally I had to raise it. It was very important. And we had a huge row, which became the subject of a lot of media commentary because details of this rather incendiary conversation was leaked. And at one point, a redacted, thankfully, transcript of it was leaked in Washington.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Can I just ask you to expand—when you say a huge row, you mentioned he had a temper tantrum.

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Well, he was furious. He was furious. And he said it would kill him to go along with this. And he was very aggressive about it. And I said, “Well, look, we have a bargain. We expect you to honor it. You’re like a new CEO. You’ve inherited a contract you don’t like, but you’ve still got to honor it.” And Donald said, “Oh, you’re a businessman, you must have reneged on deals in the past.” And I said, “No, no, that’s not the way I roll.”

So it was a tough call, and he was furious, and ended up with the call saying it was the worst call he’d had all day. It was worse than talking to Putin. But the important thing was, he started off the call saying, “No way, José, I’m not going to go along with this.” And he ended up saying, “Yes, yes, but I’m pissed off,” basically, is where he got to.

But the important thing was that by having this row and standing up to him, I won his respect. And we got on very well after that. And the next meeting we had was very cordial, and we had some very constructive discussions. I was able to persuade him not to impose tariffs on Australian steel and aluminum, and that was a very rational transactional discussion. And look, we had a lot of discussions about trade, and I was able to point out to him that America had the best deal with Australia possible. We have a free trade agreement with America. They have no tariffs, no quotas, no barriers to investment, and they have a big surplus. So, literally, the United States could not get a better trade deal with Australia. You literally could not improve it. And so in those circumstances, putting tariffs on our exports to the United States is just completely self-defeating, from America’s point of view.

By the time I became prime minister, I was 60, and I was 50 when I went into parliament—I’d been a businessman, partner of Goldman Sachs, and so forth. So in that sense, I had something in common with Trump, I suppose. But the bottom line is, the fundamental thing is that if you want to have a productive relationship with Trump, you need to win his respect. And you’re not going to win his respect by just being another sycophant, because he’s surrounded by them. Right? You see, if you’re a foreign leader, you can’t be sacked. I mean, if you’re working in the Trump White House, if you’re being insufficiently solicitous, I suppose he can sack you. But if you’re the leader of a foreign country, he can’t do that. Although he may get Elon Musk to try to meddle in your affairs like he is meddling in the political affairs of Germany and the UK at the moment.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The model that is often held up as the way to deal with Trump as a foreign leader is Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. And the way that’s talked about is that it really is about flattery and playing to Trump’s ego and going and bringing him golf clubs and presumably letting him win on the golf course and all of that. Do you think that’s the right way of understanding—

MALCOLM TURNBULL

No, I don’t.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

—the Abe approach?

MALCOLM TURNBULL

No, I absolutely do not. And I liked Shinzo Abe, and knew him very well, worked very well with him. I think Trump treated him pretty badly—disrespectfully, often. I don’t know that he got much out of Trump. He was very anxious about offending Trump. For example, when Trump pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership—which he’d said he would do in the campaign, so it came as no surprise. I believed that we should continue with it without the United States. So the key country to persuade to do that was obviously Japan, because once the United States was out, Japan was the largest remaining economy among the 11 countries that were left. And Abe was very concerned that it would upset Trump or offend Trump. He was really anxious about that. And I was able to persuade him, I said, “Look, it’s a case of out of the room, out of the deal. The Americans have stepped out of it, they can’t complain if we keep going with the deal.” And frankly, if we keep the deal alive—and we did, it’s now called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, it’s up and running and has been for some years, and the United Kingdom has recently joined—that the Americans will always effectively have an option to rejoin it at some point if they want to. Whereas if we’d just done nothing for six months, it would’ve just been a pile of papers in a lawyer’s office, and you never could have revived it.

But I’m not quite sure why people regard Abe’s relationship as being—see, it depends what you’re trying to achieve. If your political objective as a foreign leader is to have an affable, backslapping, mutually complimentary sort of relationship, well, I guess flattery and golf and all that stuff helps. But if you actually want to get things done, and if you want to protect your interests, then you’ve got to basically win his respect, and you’ve got to be able to stand your ground. I mean, Japan couldn’t—Japan was hit with those steel tariffs, and they export a lot more steel than we do, hell of a lot more.

So with great respect, I don’t think there’s any evidence that that flattery approach—I mean, there’s obviously always a degree of flattery. I mean, every diplomatic relationship involves some courtesies. But if your only objective is to not upset Donald Trump, then that means he will do what he wants and get what he wants rather than what you want.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Another leader that’s been quite interesting to watch in the last few weeks is the relatively new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, who has basically given back to Trump what he’s given when he’s kind of talked mockingly of renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. She, I believe, suggested in return that the United States should be called “América Mexicana,” and she occasionally has retorts like that. Do you see that as a reasonably smart response?

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Yeah, of course it is. Yeah, I mean, and Trump can’t complain about that. This is a guy who just breaks all norms of behavior. You’ve got to give back as good as you get from it, I think.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Obviously headlines, both in the United States and many parts of the world, have been dominated by Trump’s threats over Greenland and the Panama Canal and Canada in the last few weeks. There are some people who are kind of straining to see method in the madness—that there’s a Trump strategy at play. Do you see any validity to that? And then if you were advising the leaders of Denmark and Panama on how to both make sense of and how to respond to these kinds of threats, what would you tell them?

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Well, the first thing I’d say is that these kinds of threats are hugely damaging to the United States and to the world. I mean, we are saying to Xi Jinping, “You must not use force to incorporate Taiwan into the People’s Republic of China.” Right? And Trump’s administration is full of people to whom that is a very important objective. We’re saying to Putin, “You have no right to try to seize Ukraine, and your invasion is wrong and illegal and criminal and all those things.” If at the same time the United States president or president-elect is saying, “I won’t rule out using military force to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal,” well, I mean essentially what that is saying is, might is right.

So you’re in a position where Xi Jinping can say, “Well, hang on—Greenland has never been part of the United States. There is no connection there. Taiwan has been a part of China in the past.” Xi Jinping would say, “China—the PRC—has a much more legitimate claim vis-à-vis Taiwan than the United States has vis-à-vis Greenland, let alone the Panama Canal.” Shinzo Abe had a policy which we all agreed with. It was really a slogan, I guess: “The free and open Indo-Pacific.” That was about asserting that might should not be right—that, to quote [Former Prime Minister of Singapore] Lee Kuan Yew, we didn’t want to live in a world where the big fish ate the little fish, and the little fish, the shrimps. And so we wanted to maintain the rule of law to respect other countries’ sovereignty and so forth. And that’s been American policy. But how good does that look when you are threatening allies—or anyone, but let alone allies—with actions to seize parts of their territory? So it’s just hugely, hugely unhelpful. I mean, there must be so many very capable, very thoughtful people who are going to serve in his administration who would be, just quietly tearing their hair out about this, because it just undermines the credibility of America’s case against Xi Jinping vis-à-vis Taiwan, let alone Vladimir Putin vis-à-vis Ukraine.

I mean, we’ll never forget when Putin invaded Ukraine. Trump’s immediate reaction was to say it was a genius move. This is completely at odds with everything we’ve stood for. It’s at odds with the UN Charter, et cetera—a long list. But you’ve also got to ask yourself the question: “How does that play out when the United States is not the only superpower?” The case America has been making—the moral position that America has been advancing, obviously inconsistently and not always effectively, but its whole message of respect for sovereignty, rule of law, et cetera, is being undercut by this. And we can’t kid ourselves about it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It’s striking to hear you say that because one message that has been—that you’ll hear quite frequently, both in the last few weeks and also during Trump’s first term, from non-Americans as well as Americans, is some version of: yes, Trump is certainly a divergence from the norm, but when you look past the rhetoric, it’s not quite as sharp a divergence as you all like to think. Because sure, most Americans have kind of gauzier, more moralizing rhetoric, but in fact, the policies aren’t that different. But I’m gathering that you do not agree that Trump is, in many ways in line with that tradition.

MALCOLM TURNBULL

There is a lot of wishful thinking, right? I mean, I remember the [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] meeting in Lima in the end of 2016—so this is November 2016. Trump had been elected the first time, and that’s all that anyone was talking about. Obama was there; it was the last big international conference he attended, at the end of his term. And I remember Michelle Bachelet, the Chilean president, became tired of people quoting Mario Cuomo’s famous saying, “We campaign in poetry and govern in prose.” And this is the proposition that Trump would be different in office than he was on the campaign trail. And Michelle said, “Well, there wasn’t a lot of poetry in that election.” And she was, like me, skeptical about this proposition. But we now know that he is not a conservative. This disruption, this view of the world is not a bug. It’s a feature of the MAGA approach.

And so you’re getting back to that famous, notorious dialogue in the Thucydides history, where the Melians are begging the Athenians to be fair and recognize justice and leave them alone and so forth. And the Athenians say, “You’ve got to recognize that in the world, justice is found only between equals and power. As to the rest, the strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must.” Well, can you even argue that that is not Donald Trump’s view of the world? I think it’s very clear that that’s how he sees it. That’s why he admires strong men—whether it is Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, or at a smaller scale, [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, [Hungarian President Viktor] Orban. So there is no point trying to kid yourself that this is not a big deviation from American values and American policies.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You referred back to the great story you tell in the piece about your conversation with Xi Jinping at that APEC meeting in 2016.

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Yeah.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You’ve spent a lot of time in the room with both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump. How do you expect the Chinese will respond to Trump this time around? What’s your sense of what they’re thinking, how they’ll react to Trump’s threats, and how you expect that dynamic to play out?

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Well, they’ll be pragmatic and transactional. I mean, they’re dealing with a known quantity now. So initially they thought—Xi thought—well, [Trump] is a businessman, he’s a property developer. It’s going to be a more conventional, transactional approach. They’ll feel the relationship out initially, see how it travels.

Trump is riding very, very, very high at the moment. But there are midterm elections in two years, less than two years. So if in two years time, inflation is still high, if interest rates remain high, Trump will struggle to maintain his majority in the house representatives for sure. I mean, most presidential parties do go backwards in the midterms. Then he has two years left—he starts to look like a lame duck. So he’s really got two years to really do as much as he can. That’s when he can be sure of having maximum power. So if he wants to be disruptive and effect big changes, he’s going to have to do it now.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And if you were Xi Jinping, you would look at this with a fair degree of confidence that you could weather it okay, despite all the challenges China faces now?

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Well, I think so, yes, I do. I mean, China is a powerhouse. It’s got this massive trade surplus. It’s got excessive production, which it’s endeavoring to export, whether it’s electric vehicles or solar panels, whatever. But I mean China is now the—it’s so far ahead of the United States in industrial capacity. I mean, look at shipbuilding. I’ve read estimates that China has, some say, 50 times—I’ve read one estimate says China has 250 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. In the clean tech technologies that are so important to the world, whether it is electric vehicles or solar panels or wind turbines or batteries or electrolyzers, China is overwhelmingly dominant in all of these areas. So yes, they’ve got economic challenges for sure, but they’re in a much stronger position vis-à-vis the United States in 2025 than they were in 2017, you’d have to say that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What about the American allies in Asia? I mean, so much of the Biden Asia policy, so much focus has been on shoring up those alliances, building new kinds of groupings, whether that’s AUKUS or upgrading the Quad, the diplomacy between Japan and South Korea. Do you expect Australia and other allies of the United States in the Indo-Pacific to hedge a bit more? Will that be an opportunity for China to gain greater traction?

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Well, I think some of them will. I don’t think—I mean Australia is probably least likely to do that. But I just make this observation. When Trump was first elected, he was erratic. He upset allies. He threatened to walk away from or qualify longstanding alliances, demanding allies pay more money, or suggesting he mightn’t be bound by alliances and so forth. He was deliberately designing to rattle and unsettle America’s allies. And he seemed inconsistent and erratic.

Now, Xi Jinping, I think, in that first Trump administration missed a big opportunity. Because China—that was the opportunity for China to be everything that Trump wasn’t. To be consistent, to be steady, to be respectful, to play a very calm approach. Now obviously there were a lot of other things going on, not least of which was the pandemic. But China instead, undersea, adopted a more aggressive foreign policy, with tempted economic coercion of other countries, including Australia, which completely backfired—did not work at all. And they’ve rolled it back now naturally. And you had the Wolf Warrior diplomacy, so-called, which had the predictable outcome of just alienating people. So I’ve always found the Chinese leadership to be very pragmatic and instrumental, and if a course of action is not working, they will reverse it and do something different. Now, they’ve obviously got to find a way of having an elegant dismount and off-ramp, and they’ve got to manage that. But I think China will not make the same mistake in the second Trump administration as they did in the first one.

But again, if our case against China is to say, “You should not interfere in the affairs of other countries. You should not seek to use gray zone operations to undermine political stability in other countries. You should not threaten to use force to incorporate Taiwan.” How do you reconcile that with what Trump is saying about Greenland, about the Panama Canal, what Musk is doing in the United Kingdom and now in Germany? So if you say the world through the lens of Putin and Xi Jinping is a might is right world, okay, and that was a point of distinction, Donald Trump is projecting the same worldview. And that’s going to be unhelpful.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One thing that was disquieting in reading your piece—it was disquieting to realize that so much of the Turnbull playbook for allies and partners, in the United States at least, requires having a pretty strong and self-confident and assured and politically secure leader in government. And when you look around at so many of those countries now, there are weak governments. There are people on their way out—whether that’s France or Germany, Labour in the United Kingdom, the Japanese government, the chaos in South Korea. It does not look like a global landscape where you have a lot of allies and partners of the United States who can speak truth in a way that you think is good for both the United States and for the system more broadly.

MALCOLM TURNBULL

No, that’s absolutely true, Daniel. And the other thing that is very different is, from between 2017 and now, is that Trump is de facto leading a global populist movement. And so he has his supporters and admirers, whether it is [Marine] Le Pen’s party in France, or whether it’s Nigel Farage’s party in the United Kingdom, or—I can’t attribute this to Trump, but certainly to Musk, AfD in Germany. So that right-wing populism is seeking inspiration from Trump and Trump’s example. And so a leader has to work out how do they manage the relationship with Trump, stand up for their own country and their own interests, but at the same time protect themselves against their political rivals on the populist right in their own country, using any difference they have with Trump as a stick to beat them with at home.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you look at the next four years, to end on a down note, I suppose—as you look at the next four years, what worries you? What do you see as the greatest global risk as you imagine Trump 2.0, and how it might play out on the global stage?

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Well, I think the greatest risk is obviously war, but Trump is not a warmonger. So that’s one thing. But the other concern is will he, in his “might is right” view of the world, will he simply seek to assert dominance in the Western Hemisphere—Panama Canal, Greenland—and give Xi Jinping a free hand with Taiwan, and impose a peace deal on Ukraine, which gives Putin much of what he wants too. So this is the difficulty that we’ve got. We’ve had traditionally American administrations had a very different view of the world to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, just to pick two. I mean, you tell me—you have a wonderful perspective at Foreign Affairs. I mean, does Trump have a materially different view of the world than Xi or Putin?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, he says fairly outright that he wishes he had the freedom of action that they do in many cases.

MALCOLM TURNBULL

That’s right. He says the quiet bits out loud. I mean, he’s basically saying that might is right. Now, that has all sorts of consequences. And of course that you run the risk that America, as I said, America is not the sole superpower any longer.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We will end on that appropriately sobering note. Prime Minister Turnbull, thank you for the fantastic piece and thanks for doing this today as well.

MALCOLM TURNBULL

Well, thank you very much.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And now for my conversation with Bilahari Kausikan.

Bilahari, thank you for your trenchant peace in the new issue of Foreign Affairs—it’s called “Who’s Afraid of ‘America First’?”—and for joining me today.

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

Well, thank you for inviting me.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So to start, much of the piece of course looks forward, but I want to start by going back to Trump’s first term. You’re aware of the way those of us in the American foreign policy world argue about the Trump foreign policy that time around, but I’d be interested to hear how it looked from your vantage, how it looked from Asia, and how you see the Trump 1.0 foreign policy as we try to understand what’s going to happen in Trump’s second term.

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

Well, I have been personally dealing with America in various capacities as a graduate student, as a young diplomat in Washington and so on, for more than 40 years, coming 50 years. And it seems to me that the people I know best in America, my American friends—regardless of whether they’re Democrats or Republicans—they are upset primarily because it has occurred to them that Mr. Trump does not share their values. However, the last election has shown about half of America doesn’t share their values either. And us in Asia, we share many of your values, but not all of them. So we are less upset, shall we say, or we are not upset about the same things.

We are concerned about his policies towards China. We are anxious about China; there are anxieties about China. But we don’t want to see a huge conflict or huge confrontation within the United States and China. We are concerned about his trade policies, but his trade policies are not unique. American attitudes—political attitudes toward trade have fundamentally changed. It’s not going to go back, I don’t think—not in my lifetime anyway. So it’s a new America, and we’ll just have to deal with it. And as I wrote in that piece that you kindly published, we have always dealt with the United States on the basis of common interests, not common values. And that’s perhaps a more stable and a calmer way of dealing with America as it has evolved after the Cold War. Mr. Trump is probably the first truly post–Cold War American president.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What do you mean by that?

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

I mean the Cold War was an existential struggle between two systems. Now, you have a formidable peer competitor in China. You have a very dangerous competitor in Russia—Putin’s Russia. You have the capability or the capacity or the inclination of countries such as Iran and North Korea to cause mischief—dangerous mischief—should not be underestimated. But none of them is an existential threat to America. So therefore, as I wrote, why should Americans pay any price, bear any burden to uphold international order? You have to look to yourself first, after almost half a century of sacrifice from the Second World War through the Cold War. So I see Mr. Trump not as an aberration, but perhaps as a return to the norm.

Big countries like the United States—the United States, India, Brazil, China—they more naturally look inwards than outwards. And that has been your history. If you look at American diplomatic history in the longue durée. It’s only episodically that you engage yourself outwards. And the last 50 years, from 1941 to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, was perhaps, if you look in the longue durée, an aberration. We are now back to the norm, and we better get used to it—all of us.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So you’ve talked about the shift in views of China in Washington, and you knew where they were when you were Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1990s. You know how that debate has shifted in the United States. What’s your assessment of the wisdom of the new consensus on China in the United States? The message from Singaporeans and others in Southeast Asia is: don’t make us choose between the two. But how do you see the evolution of American policy?

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

Look, from 1972 to circa, maybe 2010, 2011, 2012, the overall emphasis of U.S.-China relations was on engagement. Of course, there was a competitive dimension. There were periods of tension over Taiwan, over human rights, Tibet, and so on. But overall, it was on engagement. That is now flipped. It is on competition. And I think this is quite natural because competition, at least the threat of conflict—these are inherent qualities of international relations. What brought the United States and China together was a common concern over the Soviet Union. No Soviet Union, it was almost inevitable that it would drift back to a more competitive dynamic between two major powers—very different major powers. What we would not like to see, and nobody will join you in this in Asia—even your closest allies such as Japan, South Korea, Australia—is a demonization of China. This is not a country of Fu Manchus—fiendishly clever people plotting to take over the world. They make a lot of mistakes and they are not in very good shape these days, not just economically, but geopolitically.

Who are their friends? Pakistan: is that an asset or a liability? Cambodia, big bloody deal. Laos, big deal. Russia: is it an asset or a liability? The very fact you can ask these questions is an answer of sorts. Now, when we say we don’t want to choose—and my own country is one of the most insidious users of that phrase—what we mean is really that we want to choose according to our interests. And our interests may take us in different directions in different domains. If I may use Singapore as an example, in the military security domain we have chosen, we have chosen long ago. You’ve got to be living under a rock if you don’t know that we have chosen in the direction of the West generally and the United States specifically long ago, and we are not going to change that.

On the other hand, on certain political issues, the idea that certain rights are universal and therefore it gives other countries a right to interfere in our internal affairs, our general attitudes are much more aligned with China, and indeed with Russia, which disconcerts our American friends sometimes. And as far as economics is concerned, international law and prudence permitting, we move in different directions. So we don’t see that we need to line up all our ducks in one direction or another. What we don’t want to see is you getting into confrontation or you demonizing China. Nobody will join you. Even your best friends in Asia will not join you.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s a fairly common view among American policymakers and observers of China that, especially in Southeast Asia but in the Indo-Pacific more broadly, China is really seeking to displace U.S. power and establish its own sphere of influence, its own primacy or hegemony. I imagine you think that analysis is wrong. Is that fair?

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

No, I think that is China's goal. But I think it will fail. In fact, it has already failed. You just look at the vast swath of countries from Northeast Asia down through Southeast Asia into South Asia. Japan and Korea. They are never going to submit to China—both Koreas by the way, North and South—because a large part of Japanese identity and Korean identity is not being Chinese. Go down to Southeast Asia. Vietnam, a large part of Vietnamese identity, is not being Chinese. Indonesia is a huge country, an ancient country; it will never submit to any other country—it’s not going to be subordinate to any other country. India, India is as ancient and as vast—a larger country population-wise nowadays than China; it is never going to submit.

There are only very few countries that are completely beholden to China. Maybe Pakistan, I mentioned. Laos, Cambodia—even Cambodia is hedging. And are these consequential countries? So China has that ambition, that’s for sure, I think. It has imagined a role it played maybe in the Ming Dynasty, which was much more ritual than reality, and it wants to recreate that kind of hierarchy. But it has already failed. It cannot succeed.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So let me turn to one of the core arguments of the new piece, which is really that Southeast Asia especially and Asia more broadly have been dealing with the kind of transactionalism that characterizes the Trump foreign policy for some time and have learned how to navigate it. You write to quote you, “Asian countries are more accustomed to Trump’s transactionalism, and their experience holds important lessons for other U.S. partners and allies as they adjust to Washington’s recalibration of the way it works with the world.” As you look at the Asian experience, what is the secret to that success, such as it is, and what are the lessons that you think other players, as they navigate this upcoming Trump administration, should bring to their own foreign policies?

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

I think Europe will have the most difficulty because Europe has deluded itself that its relationship with the United States is based on common values. That commonality is much more in the European mind than in American minds, and they’re going to have a big problem. I think Mr. Trump is not wrong that Europe has been a free rider as far as security is concerned for a very long time. And it’s about time they woke up—and they have woken up, thanks to Mr. Putin.

Asia has always been, shall we say, transactional in its dealing with America. We need America. America is a vital part of any balance of power in Asia. Without America, there is no balance of power, and we don’t expect you to do this as a favor to us. You’re doing it in your own interest. And therefore, we will calculate the balance of cost and benefit in any particular issue, and if the balance comes out right, we’ll do it. If it comes out wrong, we won’t do it. And most times it comes out right—comes out right meaning on the side of America. Because there is no substitute—it is indispensable as far as maintaining a balance of power vis-à-vis China. There is no combination of Asian powers that can balance China without America in that equation. That’s the hard fact, and I think all of us know it. Even those that pretend to be non-aligned.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

To go to some of the risks of a second Trump administration that you get to in the piece, I mean, one of them is a real sharpening or intensification of U.S.-China competition, to the point where the ability to hedge in the way that many of these powers have and the way Singapore has would become more challenging. Lay out that scenario. What would be a worrying escalation in U.S.-China competition that might complicate it? And what would that mean for Southeast Asia and Asia more broadly?

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

There are two extreme scenarios that are bad for all of Asia, not just Singapore. One is if there is a U.S.-China condominium—if there is some kind of spheres of influence deal. I don’t think that’s very probable. In fact, it’s completely unlikely. But that would be one very bad scenario because in that kind of scenario, you have no agency, you have no room to move whatsoever. The other scenario is, of course, conflict. War. Again you have no room to move if there’s war. That is also not very likely because of the nuclear factor. Nuclear deterrence does work. It kept the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union for 40 years. And it’s still keeping the peace, and I think it will keep the peace between the United States and China. But between the extreme of war and the extreme of condominium, there’s a whole range of scenarios.

And I think where things could get out of hand, the most likely flashpoint is actually Taiwan. We must not forget that cross-strait relations has two sides, and I am right now a little bit more worried about the Taiwan side. I see a great sense of entitlement: “You got to defend us. You must defend us because we are the only Chinese democracy in the world. And to boot, we have chips.” Now that’s a very dangerous frame of mind, in the context of Taiwanese domestic politics. The danger of Taiwan is it lies at the intersection of three sets of domestic politics: Chinese domestic politics, Taiwanese, and American domestic politics. And that can get quite hairy. So I think if Mr. Trump brings a bucket of cold water on this sense of entitlement to Taiwan, it’s all to the good. They should get real.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me go to one of the other risks that you lay out in the piece, which is trade, is tariffs, which is of course very central to Trump’s view of the world. So much of Singapore’s success and so much of what you talked about in talking about that orientation, strategic orientation, of Singapore earlier was about trade and about economic access. Trump already has disrupted key elements of the global trading system and global economic system. He very well may further disrupt them in a second term. What are the risks there, and what would a major trade war, a major escalation in tariffs mean for Asia more broadly and for Singapore specifically?

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

Generally speaking, I think the world economy is in a fragile state. Now, I don’t think globalization can be reversed. It will become patchy; it will slow down. It has already become patchy; it has already slowed down. But I don’t think it can be reversed. The danger is twofold, I think. One I wrote about in that article is that I think it can push China, which is facing deep structural problems anyway, into a vicious cycle of slow growth. And that will frustrate China, and what a frustrated China will do is anybody’s guess.

But in Southeast Asia, the three countries that have huge trade surpluses with the United States and therefore are in the sights: Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand. Now, Vietnam is a kind of separate case, but Malaysia and Thailand are teetering on the brink, in my assessment, of falling into a middle income track. Nothing to do with Trump by the way, it’s their own domestic reasons. But if there is a huge push against them because of their large surpluses—and those surpluses are very largely China backdooring through Malaysia and Thailand to export to the United States, similar to Mexico for example, it is what Mexico has been accused of—that may push them into the middle income track.

Now what that means for intra–Southeast Asian politics is anybody’s guess, but it is not going to be positive for sure. So the two worries are that China gets locked into a vicious cycle of slow growth, which it is going to face anyway, and in Southeast Asia our neighbors get pushed into a middle income track. And what does that mean for domestic politics and what does that mean for Southeast Asian politics? That’s my concern.

And generally speaking of course, I think the world economy is in a pretty fragile state. The big drivers of the world economy—China is not in good shape; Europe is not in good shape. The only big economy that is in good shape is the United States, actually. And frankly, all the things that Mr. Trump says he wants to do, and of course we have to take that with a certain pinch of salt—tariffs, immigration, U.S. dollar, and so on—this is all inflationary. So that’s a big uncertainty. But he has kind of backpedaled on some of these things already, begun to anyway. So I think he’s not crazy. In fact, he’s quite smart, not academically smart, but I think he’s not crazy. So anyway, look, four years is not a long time.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me go to a couple of other central issues in American foreign policy that you touched on in the piece and to get your sense of what Trump moves in these areas might mean for Asia more broadly and for U.S. presence and U.S. leadership. The first of these is Ukraine. This is another place where Trump seems to be backpedaling a bit on the pledge to end the war in 24 hours. I think it’s now a few months, and we’ll see if that slips further.

You’ve been, both in the most recent piece and in other pieces you’ve written for us, you’ve kind of stressed that we shouldn’t overstate the significance of the war in Ukraine for dynamics in Asia. That’s true above all when it comes to what lesson China takes from it when it comes to Taiwan. But you’ve generally seen this as a case of Western myopia when it comes to the fixation on the global implications of the war in Ukraine. Can you lay out that argument, and if you imagine a kind of Trump reduction in support for Ukraine, which is one possible scenario, what do you think the implications of that when it comes to China and global dynamics around some of these security questions would be?

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

Well, if I was sitting in Beijing, I would take two lessons from Ukraine. First lesson is that the West is not as effete as I thought. And I hope they took that lesson. A corollary of that first lesson—the West not being as effete as I thought—that Russia is not as great as I thought either. I don’t think the [People’s Liberation Army] is prepared to adopt the kind of really horrifically costly, in terms of blood and materiel, tactics the Russian army has adopted in Ukraine. In fact, no other country would do that. And another corollary of that first lesson is that, if I was Mr. Xi Jinping, I would be looking very carefully about what my PLA generals have been telling me about my own capabilities. The first lesson is one basically of caution.

The second lesson is, gosh, I better try to make myself as sanction-proof as possible. And that’s very difficult because Russia is much less integrated in the world economy than China. Alright, China is doing all it can to improve its relationships, economic and political, with the so-called global South. Big deal. Its most important markets are still in the global North—that’s just a fact. And it’s going to be very difficult for China to become more self-sufficient. Its attempts to rely more on domestic consumption, which has been going on for 20 years, much predate Mr. Trump, have not been very successful. Just as America’s attempts to decouple from China have not been very successful, and will not succeed. Neither will succeed. So these are the two lessons.

Now I think Ukraine, look, as I said, competition, and therefore at least the possibility of conflict—these are inherent characteristics of international relations. And what is so unique about the Ukraine war, except that it’s happening in Europe? Is it less horrific than the war in Sudan or the war in [the Democratic Republic of the] Congo or the wars in the Middle East? I don’t think so. What is unique about Ukraine is that for the first time in quite a long time—not that long by the way, because the Balkan wars were not that long ago, 30 or years ago—for the first time, white people are killing white people, which has not happened for quite some time. That is the only unique thing about the Ukraine war. I mean, to put it very crudely. Yes, it’s not nice for one country to invade its neighbor just because I don’t like your face and all these principles. True, that’s all true, but it’s not unique. It is happening, has happened, everywhere else for a long time. It has never stopped happening on different scales. But this has just happened in Europe. And why should Europe be exempt?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What about, to go to one of the other conflicts you mentioned, the Middle East. How do you expect Trump policy in the Middle East, whether that’s toward Israel and Gaza or Iran, to affect global dynamics?

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

I think this is an endemically unstable region, but what the whole war in Gaza—the last year and a bit of war in Gaza—has proven is that there’s only one external power that matters. That’s the United States. China’s Middle East policy has been exposed as hollow. Russia has got its hands full in Ukraine; it has been unable to affect developments on the ground. So only the United States. And the U.S. has been acting as an offshore balancer in the Middle East quite effectively.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There have been a number of Southeast Asian governments that have been very outspoken about Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza and quite critical of the United States for its support of Israel. Most of those have large Muslim populations or Muslim majorities. Do you see a cost to U.S. power in the region from its Middle East policy, or will that kind of come out in the transactions to go back to your earlier formulation?

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

Well, I think there are two main countries, Malaysia and Indonesia, and they are not the same. Malaysia is playing a very dangerous game. It has a very close relationship with Hamas. It has been facilitating Iran’s breaking of sanctions, particularly oil exports. Indonesia is a different issue. The war in Gaza broke out when the Indonesian presidential election was in full swing, and it was very remarkable that all three presidential candidates said what they had to say in a Muslim majority country and then just left it alone. They didn’t try to exploit it. Malaysia, they are all falling over each other to show how close they are to Hamas. So I think you have to make that distinction. Indonesia, under Mr. Prabowo [Subianto], who is now president, but was the defense minister, significantly improved his defense relationship with the United States. I don’t think that’s going to change. They’re going to say what they have to say about the Middle East and so on, that’s mainly domestic politics, but I don’t think their strategic calculations are going to change in any fundamental way. Malaysia is a bit divided. I think their military security establishment is one view. Their political and foreign policy establishment is a different view. But Indonesia is much more consequential than Malaysia in the overall kind of geopolitical theme.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, as we see how the second Trump administration’s foreign policy unfolds over the coming weeks, there is much in your piece and in this conversation that will, I think, help provide a bit of perspective—a useful bit of perspective. So thank you, Bilahari, for the piece—it’s called “Who’s Afraid of ‘America First’?”—and for joining me today.

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

Thank you for having me.