Making Our Position Known
What should the rest of the world, including ASEAN, do in response to this continuing contest under Biden? Remain passive? Or speak out loudly and clearly to convey their own fears and concerns? It would be fatal to remain passive. As I document in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on US-China relations [to be released by NUS and edx in January 2021], the whole world will be affected, indeed destabilised, if the US-China contest gains momentum. Hence, we should speak out.

But what should we in ASEAN say? We should make three points. The first point we should make is that both US and China should press the “pause button” on the contest. Why? The simple answer is that billions of people — including those in the US and China — are suffering from the massive economic recession caused by COVID-19. Global poverty is rising again. The only way to jumpstart the global economy is for the number one and number two economies to work together. Indeed, if Biden were to announce a simple suspension of the trade war against China and withdraw all of Trump’s erratic trade tariffs, the markets would react positively. The global economy would start growing again. Jobs would come back.

The second point is that the most pressing challenge we face is global warming. Fortunately, Biden, unlike Trump, agrees with this assessment. He will make Climate a priority. Yet it is also true that the US cannot stop global warming alone. Nor can China. Both have to work together. This is why I say in the conclusion of my book, “Humans would look pityingly at two tribes of apes that continued fighting over territory while the forest around them was burning. But this is how America and China will appear to future generations if they continue to focus on their differences while the earth is facing an extended moment of great peril.”

The third point we should make is that the continuation of the US-China contest will not just disrupt American and Chinese lives. It will (as it already has) disrupt lives all across the world. Hence, the first thing the new Biden Administration should do is to send out “listening” envoys to the rest of the world to poll the attitudes of the rest of the world to this contest. In the process of “listening”, they will discover that the rest of the world, in all likelihood, does not want to choose sides between the US and China. Indeed, they want to have good relations with both. This is true of Asia too. As Ambassador Chan Heng Chee observed recently, “The indications are that no country in Europe or Asia would like an exclusive relationship with the US or China… All want to be able to develop relations with both powers.”

In short, to close with another paradox, the whole world faces both a major danger, and a major opportunity, with the Biden Administration coming into office. It could face a major danger if the Biden Administration is driven by structural forces to accelerate the US-China geopolitical contest. Yet, it could also face a major opportunity if the six billion people living outside US and China speak out clearly and call on the world’s leading powers and economies to cooperate and deal first with pressing global challenges we face, like COVID-19 and global warming. ASEAN, including Singapore, should send these clear messages to Beijing and Washington DC.