George Yeo formerly served as Singapore’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Information and the Arts, Health, and Trade & Industry. This essay largely draws on his October 2025 lecture delivered at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Some 20 years ago I helped negotiate the free trade agreement between Singapore and the United States, at a time when free trade was a high ideal in the world. I succeeded in obtaining a special allocation of H1B1 visas for Singapore, which is particularly valuable currency in today’s circumstances. The world has since changed dramatically. When I was in Cambridge, it was the bicentennial of America, and I remember Alistair Cooke’s series on the BBC. I bought his book on America and leafed through it with pleasure. The United States inspired many generations of us in Asia. The American dream had become the Asian dream. A few months ago, I was across the river for my 40th class reunion at the business school, and two of my classmates sidled up to me to ask “Do you think we are in decline?” I was careful in framing my response, not wanting to cause offense, but at the same time wanting to be honest, since this is a question asked all over Asia today.

The author delivers a speech at Harvard Kennedy School in October 2025 | Source: LinkedIn Page of the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School

The 26th U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Speak softly, carry a big stick and you will go far.” Today, the United States is not speaking softly. This raises a question about the quality of the stick. If one really has a strong stick, one can be very polite, humble, and modest, and people will be very respectful in their interactions with that individual. But when you have to raise your voice and flail the stick, then you begin to wonder. U.S. President Donald Trump has been very hard on Asian countries, threatening, dog-beating, and bullying them. And in country after country, you’re finding a reaction. If you’re a small country like Singapore, you would rather be in the shadows and not attract too much attention. If you happen to be China, you have no choice but to stand firm. Even India had to stand firm. It’s not just about Trump, because even if there’s a rebound after him, there will remain a ratcheting downward movement—a sense that a United States feeling more insecure about itself will no longer waste time on pleasant words about the global agenda and will instead insist on its own short-term priorities. And when the United States is able to extract concessions from you, it will boast about them, almost in self-justification.

Those of us who were inspired by the United States, having both studied and worked here, worry: what does it mean if America’s current trajectory continues? If the United States manages to recover, how long will it take? Some of us, at least, may laugh about certain aspects of the MAGA agenda. Yet MAGA, as a strategic ambition, must be a good thing, because if the United States continues its relative decline, the consequences for the world will be profound. Maybe even more so than the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which led to the Dark Ages. Or perhaps the fall of the Ottomans, whose effects we are still seeing all over the Middle East. Similarly, we may recall the fall of the Qing dynasty, which, among many other ramifications, created a Chinese-majority city-state called Singapore. When big empires begin to decline, and when America starts shutting down some of the 800 military bases maintaining peace and stability in different parts of the world, the pieces will begin to move again and everyone will start making alternative arrangements.

Regional hegemons will increasingly throw their weight around. Roman Emperor Trajan expanded the boundaries of the empire all the way to the Persian Gulf. His successor, Hadrian, decided the empire was overextending. Instead, he retreated from Armenia and Mesopotamia, but held the land of the Euphrates. Perhaps Trump, sensing that the United States has overextended and that its global military presence can no longer be financed, wants to retreat. This is consistent with Trump talking about Canada becoming the 51st state, taking over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and sending ships to intimidate Venezuela. If the United States were to retreat into the North and Central American spheres—which include Greenland, parts of South America, and the Gulf of Mexico that naturally became the “Gulf of America”—it would still be a very powerful entity with enormous resources, land area, and a growing population. But of course, Trump cannot talk like that. Yet his moves are telling. In his transactional way, he is sliding down the path of least resistance.

In Asia, all of us accept that China will be a rising power. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), China is at $40 trillion. For the sake of comparison, the IMF’s data suggests that the U.S. is at $30 trillion, Europe at $20 trillion, and India at $15 trillion. These broad figures are not surprising, because if you have $100 and you go to China, it will get you much more than what it can buy you in the United States. As economic science tells us, exchange rates in the end equilibrate around PPP. Once exchange rates begin to move, the numbers in nominal terms reveal themselves. This is why the rise of China is undoubtedly being felt across all of Asia. If the United States retreats, there will be a transitional period where the imbalance will become very unsettling. I do not worry about Southeast Asia because the instinct of policymakers there is not to be aligned to any particular region. Chinese-Australian historian Wang Gungwu once used a wonderful metaphor that “Singapore is where the mandalas of China and India overlap.” Southeast Asia is where the mandalas of China, India and the West overlap to varying intensities in all ten countries.

Take Vietnam as an example. When Vietnam finally withdrew from Cambodia, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Nguyen Van Linh visited Singapore. During the visit he asked Lee Kuan Yew to be Vietnam’s adviser. Lee Kuan Yew was taken aback but said he would visit him. I accompanied him during his first three visits, which occurred at roughly one-and-a-half-year intervals. The Vietnamese deputy minister in attendance was Vu Khoan, who later retired as Deputy Prime Minister. After we both retired from government, I called on him on a visit to Hanoi. I asked him how Vietnam’s relationship with China was. He replied: “foreign ministry to foreign ministry, troublesome, as usual; military to military, stable; party to party, intimate.” Both Vietnam and China are communist countries, and the party decides on all matters of importance. I suspected as much from interacting with my Vietnamese counterpart for trade matters, who had once been the private secretary to one of the party secretary-generals. We had a discussion about China and were comparing notes. He remarked, “I’ve been to every province in China.” When I asked how come, he responded: “I was accompanying my boss, the party, Doi Moi, the General Secretary.” These visits by the Vietnamese party secretaries are not reported in the media, but they reflect a deeper relationship. The question remains: is there a danger that Vietnam and China will get so close that all of us will be threatened? No, there is no such danger, because theirs is a fraught history.

Vietnam’s Communist leaders know that given half a chance, the U.S. will undermine the Vietnamese Communist Party. They know this, but without the United States, how do they manage China? Vietnam is now very committed to ASEAN, because without it they would not be able to maintain a normal relationship with China. They want the United States around, but not too close. Vietnam’s leaders know that if they allow Cam Ranh Bay to be used as a naval facility by the US, China would be compelled to react.

In 2024, Vietnam announced they were building a fast rail connection from Hanoi to Nanning and to Kunming. These are the two connections established by the French to take advantage of inner China’s market in an earlier period after they discovered that the Mekong was not navigable from Cambodia to Laos. From Hanoi, they built two narrow-gauge railroads to the two provincial capitals of China. These will now finally be replaced by high-speed rail. Each of these costs billions of dollars. Hanoi subsequent also announced its plan for a high-speed rail connection all the way from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. China may build that rail connection too. In order not to be too dependent on China, Vietnam will want America around, and too the rest of us in Southeast Asia—Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and even Myanmar. If the U.S. retreats too rapidly, this will make for a highly unsettling situation. In a sense, one might say that all of us want MAGA to succeed. Perhaps not in the sense that Trump defines it, but MAGA in the sense of American revival. It must be our hope that by the time the United States celebrates its third centennial, the mood will be more like that of the bicentennial rather than that of the upcoming 250th celebration.

What is the nature of China? In Southeast Asia, we have seen China in all its previous incarnations. During the Tang dynasty, it fostered Srivijaya. It was a lucrative China trade, so profitable that local kingdoms were vying with one another for a bigger share of it. Around the year 1000, under the Song dynasty, the Cholas from South India, with its capital city in Thanjavur, sailed a fleet into the Sunda Straits between Sumatra and Java. In the course of one monsoon season, they destroyed Srivijaya by sailing downwind preventing Srivijayan forces upwind from supporting cities being attacked in the south. On both sides of the Straits of Malacca, they struck and dismantled Srivijaya’s power. For the next one to two centuries, local Fujian merchants became the warlords in Palembang.

Then, we are all familiar with the Ming dynasty, established by Zhu Yuanzhang in 1368. By 1405, the dynasty’s first great fleet had sailed and reached Africa. There were seven such fleets, supported by a network of supply and repair stations across the Indian Ocean. On the north coast of Java, beneath a hill called the Teak Mountain (Gunong Jati), they maintained a large shipyard. Huge teak trees fell and slipped downslope to replace damaged masts. Chinese ships needed maintenance, and bases were established in different parts of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. Remnants of that era are scattered all over Southeast Asia. Although the great admiral Zheng He was Muslim, he is revered everywhere as San Bao Tai Jian, the great eunuch of the Three Treasures. The Ming did get involved in some local skirmishes, such as in Sri Lanka, but the voyages were generally sailed on missions of peace and maybe intelligence gathering. As a Muslim, Zheng He even performed the Umrah or Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

As the Mongols were threatening again, the voyages were stopped in the 1630s. The eunuchs were put in their place. China’s attention turned northwards. The Ming rebuilt the Great Wall and the walls around Xi’an and other northern cities. China has always been defensive because it is homogenous. One often gets the feeling in China that even if the rest of the world were to disappear, China would still carry on, because it is big enough and vertically integrated enough.

For us in Asia, when a new dynasty rises in China, it is like a cosmic event. It will rise in the same spot, and it will behave in ways not too dissimilar from previous incarnations. There is historical memory in Southeast Asia of how we should respond. First, don’t have the new dynasty as an enemy. But don’t get too close either. Be polite. From this, you’ll get a lot of advantages. If China pushes too hard, lean the other way, and get the support of rival powers. 

Can such a China coexist with the United States? If China were the Soviet Union, possessing the same missionary zeal as the U.S.—thinking the Mahan strategy of naval power—then a clash would be inevitable. But I don’t think this is China’s nature. Think back to the Great Wall. It is astonishing. From horizon to horizon, watchtower to watchtower, it stretches on. This is just a fossil of a living system which had command and control, very strict military discipline, intelligence, forward surveillance, and defense in depth. Why would dynasty after dynasty invest such vast resources into the construction of a great wall? It is defensive in its essence. Why is it defensive in nature? Because China can only be governed if it’s homogeneous. If it starts absorbing large numbers of foreigners and becomes unable to digest them, it will no longer be able to be governed in the old way and on the same scale.

Today one finds analogues of the Great Wall—walls for Hollywood movies, capital markets, a biological wall during Covid, education, and for anything and everything that threatens China’s homogeneity. So, when you watch the 2025 China Victory Day Parade, serried files of marching contingents, soldiers looking almost alike, men and women, it is remarkably homogeneous. This homogeneity is why, when the Chinese leave China and find themselves in Singapore, Malaysia, or elsewhere, they try to avoid politics. They are used to behaving; it is a deep Chinese instinct. My mother was from China. She left Shantou when she married my father at the age of 19. And we learned at home that when foreign friends come, you beguile them with an excess of hospitality, more than you would ever give to your own people. Then, you send them off with relief, because they can be threatening. Foreigners are best managed that way. Which is why, when you visit China, the hospitality is always special. Even if you are from small countries like Singapore, Brunei. We receive better treatment than in Berlin, Paris, or Washington. To Western powers, we are all small fries. But to the Chinese, both small fries and big fries are given a semblance of equal treatment. Every other year, China has this big summit with over 50 African leaders. China’s President Xi Jinping meets all of them in person. It may only be for five minutes, but he makes sure that everyone is given direct contact with him.

China, much like a big tree, cannot grow to the skies. I made a speech at Harvard once that China is like a big California redwood. It adds feet every year, but one day it will stop growing and, one day in the far future, the tree will fall. When that happens, the entire forest will hear it and many animals will be scattered. After an equally long period, a new sapling will grow in the same spot and a new cycle will begin. The Chinese know this. In their most important classic, the I Ching, the book of change, they know that nothing lasts forever. They know that if you have arrived at the pinnacle, the only way is down. In the hexagrams, you don’t want to be all six full bars. You always want to be five full bars, and one still broken. You’re still on the way up. The moment you are at the peak of your power, then the decline begins. When victorious Roman generals went back to Rome and had their glorious parade, the slave would whisper memento mori, remember death. In the Chinese mind, there’s always memento mori. It will not last. There is therefore always an instinct to limit ambition because excess leads irresistibly to decline.

That is my view of China. Others, who might be more detached, may say “you’re too optimistic.” Well, history is a guide, but never completely a repetition. We are left to watch. There will be a trial of strength between the United States and China—perhaps for two or three more decades. During this time, they will be pushing each other and taking a measure of each other. But a dynamic equilibrium is possible for Southeast Asia and that is desperately important for us. I tell American friends, if you come to Southeast Asia and you ask us to choose between China and the United States, we will prefer not to choose, and you may not like the answer. But there are some journalists who have pressed me for an answer, that if Singapore were forced to choose, which way would we jump? My response if Singapore were forced to choose today, it would side with the United States because that’s where our bread is mostly buttered. But 20 years from now, Singapore would jump on the Chinese side because this is the side where the bread will be buttered then. When the crossover point is will depend on what happens in the United States and China. I don’t believe that the view on this question is very different in other parts of Southeast Asia. If the U.S. doesn’t force the choice, confronted with the prospect of a rising China, it goes without saying that the U.S. will be welcome everywhere.

In a strange way, by his actions, Trump is bumbling into what Kissinger has long recommended: the best U.S. strategy is to move closer to every other pole. Then, in every part of the world, the United States can be a vital balancer. It can act as one between Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, or China and Japan. In this way, by being peacemaker, the U.S. benefits from the quarrels of others. Everywhere, it can tip the balance by leaning a little one way or the other. It’s like Tai Chi. Once you get into a balance position, you achieve a maximum result with minimal effort. But if there is no natural balance, and you have to cantilever to maintain stability, you can easily be destabilized. Trump knows in his bones that the U.S. is over-extended unsustainably. The U.S., like the Roman Empire under Hadrian, will have to retreat strategically and consolidate around a strong core. It may mean that bases will have to be closed in some parts of the world. Europe will need to become more autonomous. Ultimately, however autonomous, Europe will always be close to the United States for civilizational and cultural reasons.

What about India? There was a time when India thought it could use the United States against China, and the U.S. thought it could use India against China. Then the Ukraine war happened. There was no meeting of minds on Ukraine or Pakistan. So, it’s an adult relationship. We get along for as long as we benefit each other, but we don’t live together. How can it be otherwise for India? It’s such a vast polity, with a tremendous sense of itself. However, its nature is very different from that of China.

Think about India and the diversity in this vast country. The Bengalis have a sense of themselves which is different from the Tamils, the Maharashtrans, or the Punjabis. There are divisions of history, culture, language, caste and religion. India has little of China’s homogeneity. There are differences in China, but far less than the differences you find in Europe or India. In a multipolar world, the poles are not all the same; they are different. We are heading into a messier world. But it’s a world where we have to be more respectful of one another, refrain from trying to make others like us, and consider each other’s interests. It will not be easy for the United States to do this because of its history. With far less effort, it expanded its influence from ocean to ocean. When the Americans saw the way the Europeans ravaged China, there was a certain guilty conscience. Many of the reparations extracted from the Qing Dynasty went back into the construction of hospitals and academic institutions. They felt it wrong to exploit China like other western powers. China, for the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, invited families of American Flying Tiger pilots and recalled what Joseph Stilwell did at a time when China was in desperate need of American help. Is such a future possible when the two most powerful countries treat each other with respect and friendship? I think it is. It will take time, and there will always be rivalry and competition, but it’s worth working for such a future. The alternative will be tragic. It is important for America to revive itself and for countries like China to know their limits. It cannot be that we are inevitably condemned to mutual destruction. Perhaps some may think I am too idealistic, but as British anthropologist Jane Goodall said in her remarks released after her death, we must “never lose hope.”

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