26th Lecture - Geopolitics with Kishore Mahbubani

Date: Monday, 30 June 2025

Time: 16.00 - 17.30 (GMT +7)

Platform: Zoom Meeting and Youtube Livestream

Speaker: Kishore Mahbubani, Founding Dean, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy; Distinguished Fellow, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore

Moderator: Sukmawani Bela Pertiwi, Lecturer at BINUS University

The Dangers of Geopolitics

Geopolitics is a very cruel business, very cruel business. In business, you go bankrupt, you carry on. In geopolitics, you have wars, you lose lives. In the worst case scenario, nuclear war, everybody dies. And therefore, you have to understand it well, because if you don't understand it well, your country can get caught in wars. And this is why you have to pay attention to geopolitics, because as I said, if we do it badly, we will have wars.

The Biggest Geopolitical Contest

The biggest geopolitical contest in the world is always between the world's number one power, which today is the United States of America, and the world's number one emerging power, which today is China. There's an iron law of geopolitics that when the world's number one emerging power is about to overtake the world's number one power, the world's number one power will push down the world's number one emerging power. That's exactly what's happening in this contest between US and China. It's about who is number one and who is number two, and therefore you have this incredible impulse in the United States to push down China.

ASEAN Must Stay United in a Dangerous World

We in the ASEAN countries, if we want to protect ourselves from the pressures coming from US and China, we must stick together. United we are strong, divided we fall. ASEAN wants to be friends with United States and ASEAN wants to be friends with China, and we don't want to take sides. If we combine together as a group, then we are protected to some extent from this contest. The fact that there has been no wars in Southeast Asia for 46 years is absolutely amazing. It shows you how wonderful ASEAN is, and if you want to prevent wars, understand geopolitics and make sure that you respect geopolitics.