“What the US did for eight decades was to provide, first, the market; second, technology; [and] third, capital and rules-based economic integration. The first beneficiary of that, apart from Europe, was Japan, and then you had the Asian Tigers — Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore — and then the rest of Southeast Asia. But the real winner of rules-based free trade has actually been China,” says Balakrishnan at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum 2025 on Nov 19.
The “messy transition” in international relations today is not a localised storm but the broad impact of “geopolitical climate change”, says Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan. “It’s like an iceberg or a continental ice shelf falling but actually, climate warming has predated that.”
The US’s role as a “benign hegemon” since the end of World War II is “historically unprecedented”, Balakrishnan adds, and pressure has been mounting on the US to “give up on this”.
