Trump ‘dominates the political scene’ like no other recent U.S. president, says famed diplomat Kishore Mahbubani

“(Trump) is emerging as a far more important president than any of his predecessors,” said Kishore Mahbubani, a famous Singaporean diplomat and author who served as president of the United Nations Security Council.

“He has moved the agenda very clearly and is dominating the political landscape in a way that no other American president has done in recent times,” Mahbubani added while addressing the Fortune Innovation Forum in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday.

Mahbubani, whose books are widely read Can Asians think? and Did China win?He added that the American economy is still one and a half times larger than China’s economy, and that it possesses a powerful weapon: the US dollar.

“In many ways, the Chinese still need to use the US dollar – they cannot escape it. When the US imposes US dollar-related sanctions, it can cause great discomfort for China,” the diplomat said.

Mahbubani added that China’s meteoric rise cannot be denied, even for Americans. This was underscored in October when Trump referred to his meeting with Xi Jinping as a “Group of Two” meeting, a reference to the rising power of their eastern counterpart.

Mahbubani said: “When the United States imposed tariffs on more than 100 countries, there was only one country in the world that could effectively retaliate against them, and that was China,” noting that the latter’s control over rare metals gives it a strategic counterweight to the strength of the US dollar.

He added that the main mistake the Western mind continues to make about China is that it sees the world in black and white terms, as a competition between white democracies and black authoritarianism – but the reality is not that simple at all.

“There is no doubt that Western societies are on the right side of Western history in pushing for democracy and liberation, but there is also no doubt that China is on the right side of Chinese history,” Mahbubani said.

China, after all, is the oldest continuous civilization in the world, and for them, maintaining stability and harmony is far more important, he added, adding that the West, however, has been slow to realize this, preferring to cling to a worldview where freedom fuels innovation and control kills it.

“The idea that the Chinese mind cannot be innovative is absolutely crazy, but it shows you that the Western mind has trapped itself in a bubble that does not understand the rest of the world,” Mahbubani said.

While the world watches, the American drive to stop China will continue for at least another ten or twenty years, Mahbubani predicts.

He said: “The United States has been number one for 130 years, and no superpower gives up its number one position (easily).”

China, too, must remain on its toes, the diplomat said, because “there is something powerful and dynamic about the American economic and social system that explains its high performance.”

“So whenever I meet my Chinese friends, I always tell them to never underestimate the United States of America.”