Few Asian statesmen know America as well as George Yeo. Singapore’s former foreign minister studied at Harvard and has spent decades dealing with Washington. In this interview with ThinkChina, he sets out why he believes American power is contracting, and why the deepest wound lies inside American society itself.
A structural retreat
Yeo starts with the numbers. The United States now spends more on servicing its debt than on defence, and the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, the flywheel that has financed American power for decades, looks increasingly fragile. He sees Washington pulling back towards the Western Hemisphere as a result.
Donald Trump, in Yeo’s view, accelerates a retreat that began long before him. Trump has little sense of history, Yeo argues, and the world is reorganising around several poles of power while America turns inward.
The pain beneath the politics
Yeo then turns from economics to society. A country where so many people reach for drugs, he suggests, is numbing a deep pain, the symptom of what he calls a sick body politic.
He finds the same pain in a slogan. “Make America Great Again” accepts, in its own four words, that the greatness belongs to the past. Both major parties, he observes, look backwards to different golden ages, and neither offers a clear vision of the future.
That leads to his warning. A wounded lion can be the most dangerous animal of all, and a declining power that cannot recover may lash out.
A question from old classmates
When the host asks whether this is simply America being its loud, vibrant self, Yeo answers with a story. At a Harvard reunion, his American classmates asked him a question he had never heard from them before: do you think we are on the decline?
Why it matters for Asia
For Asian governments, American decline is a planning question. Security arrangements, trade routes, and currency reserves across the region rest on American commitments. If Yeo is right, capitals from Tokyo to Jakarta will need to prepare for a Washington that is less willing, and less able, to carry those commitments, and for a period when a hurt superpower behaves unpredictably.
Is America in structural decline, or can it renew itself as it has before? Watch the full conversation and decide.
Further reading
George Yeo, George Yeo on Bonsai, Banyan and the Tao
Source: ThinkChina Conversations (SPH Media). Interview by Chow Yian Ping.
