Opinion | Amid escalating US-China tensions, Indo-Pacific leaders need to play key role in keeping regional peace
- Entering the post-American world, an increasingly equitable network of relations among major players in the region has emerged
- Peace and security in the Indo-Pacific region depends on the ability of major powers to establish common rules of the road, Richard Heydarian says
“When China was poor people were worried about China. Now that [they] have become rich they are [still] worried for other reasons,” Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told the author earlier this month.
And the reason is fundamentally one of physics, Asia’s senior statesman maintained: “The world has always been afraid of China because of [its] … enormous size.”
Though Mahathir has made headlines in the past year for criticising China, his take on the evolving regional geopolitics is highly nuanced and, in fact, increasingly even more critical of the United States as well.
As the Malaysian leader put it: “[President] Trump is unusually aggressive and inconsistent; we don’t really know what he is going to do next.” Uncertainty and belligerence are the hallmarks of American foreign policy, Mahathir argued, a toxic combination especially because Trump “may change his mind sometimes three times a day”.
The views of the 93-year-old prime minister, arguably the most prominent Asian leader alive, are paramount, precisely because Mahathir is the epitome of an influential and independent-minded leader in charge of a small power.