With all due respect to the eminent and knowledgeable speaker, his arguments have a couple of fundamentally difficult assumptions First that if we are not more exceptional then we are doomed economically (and this as a sovereign state) because our regional neighbors are so much better endowed with natural resources To a certain extent this is trivially and tautologically true of all small resource poor countries including Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark etc But countries compete in terms of comparative advantage with similar countries for eg we compete far more with HK, Taiwan, or even the U.S. and Europe than our resource rich, labour abundant neighbors This would be true for eg if we were located somewhere else. It is in fact our position in the centre of fast growing, developing Asia together with our unique comparative advantages ( geographic, communications, rule of law multi ethnic cosmopolitan population and efficiency etc) that gives us more opportunities than say a land locked country like Switzerland in a slow growing region like Europe We can be exceptional precisely because we can be their hub. To say watch out because our neighbors are so well endowed is pointing to the wrong and tired bogeyman Second he implies that the ethnic diversity of the region implies a greater fundamental challenge and danger to sovereign survival. While not minimizing the point that regional political regimes are far more unstable than in Europe, this is a function far more of their internal political structures than their ethnic composition relative to our Chinese majority In this I agree with him that regional cooperation in the form of a strong ASEAN is one of the best ways to encourage regional stability This, together with internal political democratic reform is the way the EU has mended centuries of far greater national and ethnic bloodshed than SE Asia had ever experienced To this end proactive win win diplomacy and a strong internal democratic polity together with a strong defense policy is our best sovereign strategy
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 03:04:13 +0000