| Abstract: | Beijing Review: In your book, you wrote that if both China and the U.S. were to fo-cus on improving their peoples' wellbeing, they would find no contradictions in their long-term strategies. It seems that China has been doing so, but the U.S. seems to be preoccupied with retaining its global domi-nance. What's your take?
Kishore Mahbubani: I'm glad you raised a very critical point that I made in my book: the U.S. should not engage in a contest for su-premacy.
Yet unfortunately, it would be difficult to change the views of many Americans, because their strategic thinking is still stuck in the 19th and 20th centuries. When you had this zero-sum games between great powers, this was the day when European powers used to fight and go to war with each other. But we no longer live in that world. We now live in a very small, interdependent world where we have many common interests and challenges to deal with. |
