February 28, 2017
Trump and New World Order
Brought to you by Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy featuring Dr. Amitav Acharya
The election of Donald J. Trump as the US President has caused much anxiety about its damage to the liberal international order. But Trump is the consequence, rather than the cause, of the crisis and decline of the existing order. That decline, as foretold in Acharya’s 2014 book, The End of American World Order, has to do with the liberal order’s own internal limitations – aggravated by a long-power shift in world politics – that a complacent liberal establishment in the West had glossed over earlier. Recognizing the broader and multifaceted nature of those challenges is key to any hopes for building world order 2.0: a decentered and pluralistic Multiplex World, with its own challenges and opportunities.
Amitav Acharya is the Boeing Company Chair in International Relations at the Schwarzman Scholars Program, Tsinghua University, Beijing, and Distinguished Professor of International Relations and the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC.
This talk is moderated by Prof Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS.
Din Merican: the Malaysian DJ Blogger 
//a complacent liberal establishment in the West had glossed over earlier…
A liberal establishment with muscle would be one that was like Lincoln’s GOP that fought a bloody civil war?
Just a mental exercise I am still trying to work out.
Being liberal for me means doing the least for the meekest in the society. As such, political will to dominate World trades has little to do with being liberal. Xi-core faces identical political challenge within China. His speech at Davos highlights the fact that there is little difference between Xi and Trump. Xi-core’s dream of building a modern day Silk Road is actually about “making China great again” as much as Trump’s effort to make America great again. So is the case for Modi’s.
Don’t get me wrong. I am for world trade. It still tickles my mind every time I look back into an experience of sitting in a meeting room representing a Chinese fintech in Shanghai accessing what was done by a few outsourced Indian programmers who weren’t really speaking English with us. Despite the fact there was much tension in the room, I cherish those moments when I noticed how money, Java and JavaScript united the world more than English. Yet, that was nothing about being liberal, or striving for an ideal of helping out the meek in those moments. On the contrary, it was a battle of cross civilization ego.
I guess being liberal in a multifaceted world is exactly that, being complacent? Else, how would issues like SCS would even become issues?
Yet, at the very same time, should an average American be so heartless to witness an Islamic world that is literally falling apart without opening doors to those who merely seek to survive. Is standing firm in the idea of no interference in Syria liberal? I was a baby who could barely remember what was shown on the screen when my dad put me on his lap watching ‘deer hunter’ in the theater.
Yet, LaMoy was there in the jungle. Isn’t LaMoy a liberal too when he shared his support for Sanders?
I could hardly shared that liberal LaMoy with my niece who just got into UC Berkeley? What…
A liberal establishment with muscle. What’s that?
Is Singapore liberal? Yes! Yet …
People have forgotten that little man with a little pencil, in a littele room putting a little cross on that little paper and placing it in that little box. Apologies to the Late Sir Winston Churchill. Big ideas, bigger and bigger projects, more and more expenisve luxuries has resulted in that little man who puts that little cross being marginalised. Governance should look to giving power to that little man not before he put that cross but after has done his constitutional duty.