Kishore Mahbubani
Western organisations built their strategies on assumptions – about US primacy, open multilateralism, and a rules-based order – that are now visibly fracturing. The US-China contest is not a temporary disruption; it is restructuring trade flows, technology standards, institutional loyalties, and investment calculus simultaneously. Most leadership teams are making consequential decisions about market exposure, supply chain architecture, and geopolitical alignment without a working model of how the shift actually operates.
As Western strategic assumptions lose explanatory power, Kishore Mahbubani – former Singapore diplomat, two-term President of the UN Security Council, and Founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy – helps organisations understand the structural logic driving Asia’s rise and the US-China contest.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Kishore Mahbubani
- His analysis comes from Singapore’s structural position: a small, open economy that has always had to navigate between great powers without the luxury of strategic illusion. That vantage point produces insight unavailable from inside either Washington or Beijing.
- His ten books – including Has China Won?, Has the West Lost It?, and The Great Convergence, selected by the Financial Times as one of the best books of 2013 – give audiences a proven intellectual framework, not commentary. Leaders leave with a model for thinking, not just a briefing.
- He operated inside the machinery of global governance at its highest level – UN Security Council President in 2001 and 2002, Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the UN across two postings spanning two decades – during some of the most consequential shifts in the post-Cold War order.
- His argument that Western strategic errors, not Chinese aggression, are the primary driver of geopolitical instability gives boards and executive teams a more analytically useful starting point for risk decisions than the standard Western-media frame.
- Named by Foreign Policy magazine as a Top Global Thinker in both 2010 and 2011, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019, his standing as a public intellectual is verifiable and specific – not attributed to unnamed rankings.
Biography highlights
- Two-time Singapore Permanent Representative to the United Nations (1984-1989 and 1998-2004); President of the UN Security Council, January 2001 and May 2002
- Former Permanent Secretary, Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with earlier posting to Cambodia during the 1973-74 war
- Founding Dean, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore (2004-2017)
- Author of ten books including Has China Won? (2020), Has the West Lost It? (2018), and The Great Convergence (2013, selected by the Financial Times as one of its best books of the year)
- Elected honorary international member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019); Foreign Policy Top Global Thinker (2010 and 2011); Prospect Top 50 World Thinkers (2014)
- Regular contributor to Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post; described by Foreign Policy as “the muse of the Asian century”
Biography
The geopolitical assumptions that shaped corporate strategy for two decades are fragmenting. China’s economic weight, the contested legitimacy of multilateral institutions, and the competing logics of Washington and Beijing are forcing organisations to rethink how they read the world. Very few people have been inside the machinery of that world – at the UN Security Council table, in bilateral diplomacy, and in sustained academic output across three decades – long enough to explain what the structural shift actually means.
Kishore Mahbubani spent 33 years in Singapore’s foreign service, culminating in two terms as Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and as President of the UN Security Council in 2001 and 2002. He also served as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Singapore’s position – an open, trade-dependent city-state that cannot align itself exclusively with either Washington or Beijing – shaped an analytical disposition that is genuinely non-aligned. That is not a diplomatic posture; it is an intellectual asset.
From 2004 to 2017 he built the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore into a leading institution, then turned to full-time writing and research. His ten books – from Can Asians Think? in 1998 to Has China Won? in 2020 and the memoir Living the Asian Century in 2024 – constitute a sustained intellectual project: arguing that the West’s two-century dominance was a historical anomaly, and that the world needs new frameworks for a genuinely multipolar order. The Great Convergence was selected by the Financial Times as one of the best books of 2013. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was described by Foreign Policy magazine as “the muse of the Asian century.”
What distinguishes his value to senior audiences is not simply that he has held senior positions – many speakers have – but that he has argued a consistent, testable thesis about global power across four decades, in public, against the prevailing consensus. For boards and leadership teams navigating the US-China contest, that track record is the credential that matters.
Key speaking topics
- US-China strategic competition
- Asia’s return to global economic centrality
- The future of multilateral institutions and global governance
- Geopolitical risk and corporate strategy
- Non-Western perspectives on the international order
- Singapore and Southeast Asia as strategic bellwethers
Ideal for
- Corporate boards and C-suite teams with significant Asia-Pacific exposure or market decisions pending
- Financial services, investment, and asset management organisations pricing geopolitical risk
- Government and public sector leaders navigating multilateral relationships
- Strategy and scenario planning teams stress-testing assumptions about the global order
Audience outcomes
- A working analytical model for the US-China contest – beyond news-cycle commentary
- Clearer understanding of how Asia’s rise is reshaping trade, technology standards, and institutional allegiances
- A non-Western frame for interpreting geopolitical signals that most Western analysis misreads
- Specific historical parallels and precedents for managing great-power transitions
- A more calibrated vocabulary for internal strategic conversations about geopolitical exposure
Talks
This talk – drawn from Mahbubani’s TED talk and expanded for corporate audiences – argues that Asia’s rise is a structural shift, not a cyclical one, and that Western organisations need a new strategic vocabulary to navigate it.
Key takeaways:
- Why the past 200 years of Western dominance were a historical anomaly rather than a permanent condition
- How Asian governments and economies are operating under a different strategic logic – and what that logic actually is
- Three practical shifts in how Western organisations should read geopolitical signals from the region
Based on Mahbubani’s book of the same name, this talk examines the strategic errors – from the handling of Russia after the Cold War to interventions in the Middle East – that have accelerated Western relative decline, and what a more pragmatic Western strategy would look like.
Key takeaways:
- The specific decisions that weakened Western credibility in multilateral institutions
- Why a minimalist, multilateral approach to global engagement serves Western interests better than unilateralism
- How organisations headquartered in the West can distinguish structural decline from recoverable strategic error
This talk addresses the defining strategic question for organisations with global exposure: whether China’s rise represents a terminal challenge to the existing order or a manageable transition requiring new frameworks for coexistence.
Key takeaways:
- Why the US-China contest is not Cold War 2.0 – and why the analogy is strategically dangerous
- What China’s actual long-term strategy is, and where it differs from Western assumptions about Chinese intentions
- How organisations can make defensible decisions today in a world defined by sustained US-China tension rather than resolution