Kishore Mahbubani on the Catastrophic Response to the Crisis in the United States
In Conversation with Andrew Keen on the Keen On
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global crisis.
On today’s episode, Kishore Mahbubani, past President of the UN Security Council and author of The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World, discusses the reflection of the fundamental shift in international politics and the shock to the United States’ response to the pandemic.
From the episode:
Kishore Mahbubani: I thought the one thing that the United States was good at and one thing the United States led the world in was in mastery of advance science and technology. If you had asked anybody in the world if the world faced a major crisis, a pandemic, or a possible space collision, where would the world go to to turn for advice and assistance? They would have said, We must go to the United States. It’s the most competent country in the world.
So the handling of this Covid-19 pandemic has shown how much the world has changed and how much more competent China has become and how much more incompetent the United States has become.
*
Subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!
________________________________
Kishore Mahbubani is a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS) and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS. From 1984-1989 and 1998-2004, he was Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the UN, and served twice as President of the UN Security Council during the second term. Mahbubani is best known in the West as the author of Can Asians Think?, The Great Convergence (which was selected by the Financial Times as one of the best books of 2013) and Has the West Lost It?.
