Message to Manila: Be friends to both US and China!

KISHORE Mahbubani, the founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, told earlier this month an audience at Ateneo de Manila University that the rivalry between the United States and China is the defining contest of the era, and that the Philippines, which sits on its fault line, must be “very, very careful.” The danger would touch every ASEAN country, he said, but “may actually be especially difficult for the Philippines.”

It was a surprise to me that it was held at the Ateneo, the bastion of Yellow and Pink thinking here. But then I was told it was at the initiative of progressive-thinking, nationalist businessman Robby Kwan Laurel’s Enterprise Fund. Mahbubani was Singapore’s ambassador to the UN, Permanent Secretary of that nation’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, and a prolific author of books on geopolitics, the most recent one being the open-access The Asian 21st Century.

Be friends to both the US and China, not just the US, diplomat-academic Mahbubani urged his audience. That is what most nations on this planet do, after all, and the most rational foreign policy in this period of great-power transition.

Speaking, as he put it, as a friend, Mahbubani built his lecture on five messages. Two concerned the US-China contest itself. The others held that international law will not protect small states, that Ukraine shows what happens to those who misread great-power politics, and that no country, not even Australia, is exempt.

Structure

The contest, Mahbubani said, is the product of a great-power transition, and such transitions are dangerous. He pointed to the studies of Harvard’s Graham Allison, whose Destined for War traces the pattern back to Athens and Sparta, and noted that for the first time in about 130 years Washington believes another power can challenge it. “Geopolitics is not driven by personalities,” he said. “It’s driven by structural forces.” The contest is bipartisan, he stressed, so a change of administration in Washington will not end it.

He traced the rivalry across administrations: Obama’s pivot to Asia and his 2015 warning against letting China write the trade rules; Trump’s 2018 trade war and curbs on Huawei and SMIC; and under Biden, AUKUS, the CHIPS Act, tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, solar cells and semiconductors, and four additional US access sites in the Philippines. Biden and Xi Jinping knew each other personally, yet the pressure on China rose. Mahbubani added a cultural layer, a Western “fear of the yellow peril” that he dated to the Mongol advance on Europe 800 years ago.

He had expected 2026 to be bruising. Instead came Trump’s state visit to Beijing in May and Xi’s to Washington on September 23 to 25. Mahbubani credited China’s demonstrated ability to retaliate: after Trump’s April 2025 tariffs, which reached 145 percent on Chinese goods, Beijing’s control of rare earths threatened to halt American industry. He said China alone hit back. That is overstated, since Canada also imposed counter-tariffs in 2025. His broader reading finds support, though. Brookings called the summit’s results modest, the Center for Strategic and International Studies called the truce fragile, and Reuters reported that it was extended by only two months. “The calm never lasts,” Mahbubani said. “Get ready. Something surprising will happen.”

Mahbubani said the Philippines should understand better than most what a great-power transition can do. Spain colonized the archipelago in 1565 and ceded it to the United States in 1898, with Filipinos, despite the resistance, having no say. America was then a rising power flexing its muscles, he said, and the 2020s resemble the 1890s.

Dangers

He said he wanted to alert the country to the dangers coming. The present stakes are material. The 2023 EDCA sites raised the number of US access sites in the Philippines to nine, even as Manila’s economy depends on both powers. The Philippine Statistics Authority reports that China was the largest source of imports in 2025, at 28.6 percent of the total, while the United States was the top export market, at $13.46 billion.

In the question period, asked how hard the next 10 to 15 years would be for the Philippines, given the US-China rivalry, Mahbubani answered “very difficult,” saying the country is “punished by geography.” But careful handling, he said, can manage the risk, and 90 to 95 percent of countries want to be friends with both powers.

His prescription was the one ASEAN has adopted: befriend Washington, befriend Beijing, and take no side. “It’s wiser not to take sides,” he said, citing a 2019 speech by then-Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who said Asian partners want good ties with both powers and should not be forced to choose. Southeast Asia has stayed largely at peace that way, Mahbubani said, and “you must continue to do that.”

To show that distance and wealth offer no shelter, he turned to Australia, which he said will have the hardest time of any developed country over the next 10 to 20 years, “torn” between a heart tied to the West and a geography tied to Asia. As Lee noted in 2019, China is the largest trading partner of American allies in the region, Australia and the Philippines among them. Australia, Mahbubani noted, has many thoughtful long-term strategic thinkers who have consistently warned it to be careful in the contest.

Mahbubani quoted Australian strategists urging restraint. Hugh White, a former official turned academic, has written that a US-China conflict would be devastating “whether we join the fighting or not,” with trade with China and East Asia halting and possibly not resuming for a long time. If Australia let US forces operate from its bases, White warned, it could face direct attack from Chinese long-range forces. A former ambassador to China has said Australia must not become “a cheerleader for either side,” and must stay helpful to both Washington and Beijing. Former foreign minister Gareth Evans has urged care about taking sides, and Bob Carr has called automatic alignment with Washington “pure dystopia, our national nightmare,” one that could “spell the end of the Australian national story as we know it.”

Poorer

The implication for Manila, which is poorer, smaller and far closer to China’s coast, is plain, though Mahbubani left it for his audience to draw.

Many Filipinos, he said, believe international law will protect them because Western governments profess to revere it. He offered two counterexamples, one of which holds up better than the other.

In 2019 the International Court of Justice advised that Britain should end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago, home to the US-British base on Diego Garcia. Britain tried to comply, Mahbubani said, until a phone call from Washington made it retreat. The record bears him out in outline. Britain signed a treaty with Mauritius in May 2025, but ratification is paused, and the government told MPs in April that it could not let the treaty take effect without US support. The call itself is undocumented.

The other example was the Northwest Passage, where, he said, the dispute with Canada ended when Washington “sent a destroyer straight through.” Mahbubani is dramatizing things though to make a point. It was not a destroyer but the Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Sea that transited in 1985 without Canada’s permission, and a 1988 agreement requires Washington to seek Canadian consent for icebreaker voyages while both sides keep their legal positions. “Power decided the outcome,” he said.

“If you fail to understand, the result is Ukraine,” Mahbubani said. He called Russia’s invasion illegal but rejected the claim that it was “unprovoked,” pointing to NATO’s eastward expansion and its 2008 declaration that Ukraine and Georgia would one day join. Western governments reject that framing. He also said Boris Johnson helped kill a near-deal at Istanbul in March 2022 by urging Kyiv to keep fighting, a claim that makes Johnson “effectively” a war criminal in his words. Johnson denies it, saying he only “expressed concerns,” and Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia, whom Mahbubani quoted, has said Moscow’s price was neutrality that Kyiv judged unsafe. The war-crimes label is Mahbubani’s own.

His larger point concerned proxies. The Soviets, he said, were happy to fight Americans “down to the last Vietnamese,” and the United States to fight the Soviets “down to the last Afghan.” A small country that fails to see the game, he warned, becomes “the battering ram for somebody else’s interests.”

The US, in my opinion, now would be happy to fight China in the South China Sea, to the last Filipino.

He ended where he began. “The great powers will not suffer,” he said. “We will suffer.” That must have been a shock to the pro-American audience at the Ateneo.

Ask defense secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. his reaction to Mahbubani’s lecture, and I’m quite certain he will say, “Mahbubani is a Chinese propagandist.”

(Transcript of Mahbubani’s lecture will be posted in my website rigobertotiglao.com)

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Message to Manila: Be friends to both US and China!
Source: Breaking News PH