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US, West ‘uncomfortable’ with losing world dominance amid China’s rise: Singapore’s George Yeo
- George Yeo said the US and the West are ‘uncomfortable’ with the idea of a multipolar world given their long dominance
- The ex-foreign minister of Singapore also said the rise of China has prompted countries to increasingly view Beijing as a challenge and even a threat
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Dewey Simin Singapore
The United States and other Western nations are “uncomfortable” with the idea of a multipolar world given their long dominance but they should not resist it, Singapore’s ex-foreign minister has said.
George Yeo, who was the country’s top diplomat from 2004 to 2011, said the West had been used to the “dominance of their values being universal [and] of judging others against their own standards”.
“But it’s changing,” he told a forum on Tuesday organised by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
While the rise of China has been the starkest – which has prompted countries to increasingly view Beijing as a challenge and even a threat – recent developments including the war in Ukraine has shown that other powers, like India, were a “satellite of nobody”.
“The US doesn’t like multipolarity and is fighting it. My fear is it will exhaust itself fighting because it will fail,” he said.
China, on the other hand, has always dealt with multiple influences due to the fact that it borders so many nations.
Yeo also spoke about the inevitability of a multipolar world, pointing to some estimates which suggested that by 2050, one in two babies born would be Muslim.
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