Tag: Malaysia

Posted on

On Malaysian Foreign Policy in the Age of US-China Decoupling (or, ZOPFAN21)

I am old enough to remember when Malaysia’s foreign policy was already quite clear and bedded in. Yes, we started out as a reliable partner for the West, given our heritage as a British colony. (In fact, we were so hard up for Western approval and protection that we even patterned our national flag after the Star Spangled Banner!) But as the Cold War wore on, we gradually edged towards a more neutral position, marked by our active membership in the Non Aligned Movement (NAM), our active participation in South-South initiatives, and most importantly, our core role as a founding and active member of ASEAN. The latter adopted, on the urging of our very own Tun Razak, a stance of studied neutrality, in accordance with the concept of ASEAN as a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality.

Each ASEAN member, of course, had their own independent leaning, one way or the other between the US and the USSR, but by and large when the stakes were at their highest, we banded together as small-ish nations to insist on a path forward for global affairs that would work, in our own small way, towards averting the nuclear Armageddon of full-on superpower rivalry.

Many years later, after the economic and geopolitical boon of a unipolar world had led to a rapid rise in prosperity for many countries, including Malaysia and its ASEAN neighbours, we are entering a new world of geopolitical rivalry. Thucydides had warned us that this day would come, and now it is here. The ban on advanced semiconductor technologies, the ongoing spat on the status of Taiwan, the threat to ban TikTok – these are all opening salvoes of what must surely be the dominant geopolitical rivalry of the 21st century.

Malaysia has so far been careful to balance itself off the two polar opposites. Pak Lah and Najib were temperamentally inclined to hedge closer to the Americans, but the incendiary scandal that was 1MDB had inevitably led Najib to turn to China to cover up his billion-dollar hole, to no avail.

Mahathir’s second tilt at the premiership was a strange throwback to the 1980s – his close courting of Japan was merely another instance of the maestro happily replaying his greatest hits of the late 20th century.

Muhyiddin and Ismail operated in a world of geopolitical stalemate as the world grappled with a global pandemic, but as we begin to emerge out of that health emergency, and the US marches even more determinedly in the path towards confrontation with China after Trump’s wilful realignment of US foreign policy, we will find ourselves pressed to make choices.

Anwar, of course, has a history of being pro-West. But the world has changed radically from his previous stint in government. Will he, too, like Mahathir, fall prey to the nostalgia of rehashing past glories?

My sense is that Anwar has an opportunity here to place Malaysian foreign policy firmly in the non-aligned camp. To treat with both the US and China as fairly and as equitably as possible, accept gifts as they are offered, but be firmly determined to chart out a more independent path. Perhaps not always equidistant between the two, but certainly never getting too close as to fall inescapably into one orbit or the other.

There are a few structural as well as coincidental challenges here. On one hand, our geographic and cultural proximity to China will always exert a geopolitical pull that may prove very difficult to resist (although resist we certainly must.) On the other, surely it must be more than coincidence that not only is Anwar himself an avowed Americophile, but his Foreign Minister holds a PhD from Temple University. There will be personal and philosophical ties that may well tilt this government towards the West.

As mentioned earlier, we have already survived one geopolitical contest by treading a neutral and independent path. Surviving this one, in this century, may necessarily require us to do the same. We have an opportunity here to lead ASEAN, yet again, in troubled times. A ZOPFAN21 could be Anwar’s greatest legacy for Malaysia, as it charts a trajectory forward in a brave new and dangerous world.

Posted on

On Interregnum

One of my favourite novel series of all time is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.

Anyone who has ever read any of these books will know that Isaac Asimov isn’t exactly Faulkner or Proust. His writing style can be a bit wooden, his characters often very thin vessels who help to carry his plots forward. But that plot! The imagination! The twists and turns of human drama!

In the Foundation novels, Asimov invents his own science of “psychohistory” to imagine a way for human civilisation to rebuild after the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire. Directly inspired by Gibbon, Asimov imagined an outpost, exiled in the farthest reaches of space, where the best and brightest of humanity could seek refuge as galactic civilisation shatters into pieces over the course of several centuries – much like the fall of Gibbon’s Roman Empire.

I have been thinking about the Foundation series a lot lately, whenever I think about the current state of Malaysian politics.

After unbending domination of many decades, the Barisan Nasional has lost its grip over Malaysian politics, reduced to a pale shadow of its former self. A succession of governments and Prime Ministers have come and gone – the narrative of Mahathir as saviour eventually gave way to a parade of expected and unexpected faces, and now, Anwar Ibrahim is at the helm.

The very manner of the cobbling of this Kerajaan Perpaduan, and the recent ensuing developments, suggests to me that Malaysian politics is now deep in the Second Empire phase of the Interregnum, and that we are now waiting for our Mule: that enigmatic, unexpected, random element that refuses to bow to the inexorable forces of psychohistoric prediction. The wild card. The red herring.

For now, the questions remain: How are we retooling the Malaysian economy for the challenges of a decoupled global economy? As multinational companies look to “friendshoring” and rejigging their supply chains, how is Malaysia charting its way forward? How do we set up our geopolitical stance amidst the rising risk of conflict in East Asia? Can we finally come to a reconciliation over the religious and ethnic fault lines that continue to divide our polity? How do we rebuild a consensus around development and civilisational advancement? What does it mean to be Malaysian in the 21st century?

All these questions will remain largely unanswered over these coming few years, it seems.

For now, we merely have to resign ourselves to our political class continuing to work through their neuroses, and hope that they will eventually discover, probably the hard way, that they will continue to be rejected by the voting public who only wants them to (finally) put the public interest ahead of their own petty squabbles and thievery.

For the rest of us, we must simply suffer what we must, until that bright Aurora finally comes.

Posted on

On Deliverance (A Prayer)

Ya Allah deliver this Nation from the grasping hands of these thieves who engorge themselves at the trough of the public trust.

Ya Allah bring Your Justice to bear on these arrogant ingrates who treat the public trust as if it is their own private sport – to play games with the livelihoods of millions of innocent souls.

Ya Allah punish them for their insolence and their greed and their selfishness and their corruption. May their Birkins and Brioni suits and Bugattis bear witness to the evils that they have committed on this Earth! May their ill-gotten gains become the very shackles that tie them down as they rot in your Hellfire!

Posted on

On a Revised Budget

Like many Malaysians, I am looking forward to today’s announcement of a Revised Budget for 2023.

Not so much for the goodies, though. Alhamdulillah God has been kind to me, and I think I’m doing okay. But I know that many people out there are suffering, and for their sakes, I hope the Budget will address their concerns.

For me, rather, this Budget will be the Manifesto that never was: a statement of intent for a government cobbled out of the shattered pieces of the Malaysian political consensus. And it will be, to me, the ultimate litmus test for a Prime Minister who has spent the past 25 years talking about Reformasi. This revised Budget will be acid test of whether those proclamations of reform were of any real substance.

Mari kita lihat, siapa yang kena.

Posted on

On Speechwriting

For more than two years of my life, I was a speechwriter.

Speechwriting is one of those strange professions where your job is almost akin to being a translator: to bring forth someone’s thoughts and beliefs and intended promises, and wrap them all up in a speech that will helpful move, motivate, inspire. In politics, where the art of public persuasion takes its highest form (yes I am a romantic), speechwriters are the architects and the constructors of political promise and power.

Speechwriting is also strange because so much of the esteem that you may hope to hold in the eyes of others is really just reflected glory of whoever it was that was reading those words that you had worked on. No one wants to talk about the speechwriter to some aspiring up-and-coming town councilor in some rural state out in some third world country, but the speechwriter to the President of the United States of America will likely find his way into the pages of the New York Times, and into any dinner party in Washington D.C. that would have him.

I genuinely enjoyed the process and the craft of speechwriting. Of course it requires a love and appreciation for politics, but often it also requires someone with the patience and intellectual bandwidth for the minutiae of public policy. Every politicians needs to sell something, and the politician’s speech is the coin of the realm.

Add another interesting ingredient: poetry. The best speeches of our times – “ask now what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, or “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”, or “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – are not merely words to tell or to promise, but a intricate dance between speaker and audience, a soaring orchestra of rhyme and rhetoric that carries a politicians’ words far above the realm of the sordid, and lifts its audience upwards, to animate and motivate and inspire.

Unfortunately, in Malaysia, speechwriting is still mostly an amateur’s art. There are a number of speechwriters who gain a sort of anonymous immortality through the political acts and speeches of their principals, and any politician worth their salt will often have their own preferred wordsmiths, especially for the “big” speeches: the policy speech at the upcoming party convention, or a nationwide telecast speech in response to an unexpected global pandemic. But for the most part, the recruitment of speechwriters in Malaysia is still very haphazard, and entry into the profession – if it can even be called that, here – is still very much on a who-knows-who, often serendipitous basis.

In such political environments, speechwriting is often for the young political aspirant – willing to accept poor pay and long hours in return for the chance to live out their “Bartlet for America” dreams, and to purchase entry into the knife-fight that is Malaysian politics.

What does it take to be a good speechwriter? I’ve touched on some of these earlier, but it is useful to provide a summary: An abiding interest and passion for politics and history. The patience and grit to dig into the details of public policy. Ability to understand the audience one would be speaking to. Empathy and understanding of the principal’s personality, interests, and political priorities. Intellectual bandwidth and breadth of knowledge, buttressed by lots and lots of reading. A passion for language, poetry and rhetoric – and in Malaysia, the ability to operate fluently in at least Bahasa Melayu and English. Capacity for hard work.

I would like to think I was a decent speechwriter. Sadly I was not one of the lucky few who could carve out a living – let alone riches or fame! – through speechwriting in Malaysia. But I will never lose that fascination for the art and the craft of political speechmaking. (Ok time for another West Wing binge soon, I think!)

Posted on

Today’s 3 Things – SingTel, Nurul Izzah, Zahid Hamidi

  1. I was reading this news report about SingTel being recently majority-controlled by private equity firms, and thought, oh wow, a positive piece on PE ownership that does not demonise private equity ownership as heartless asset-stripping capitalists! Then I realised – oh, it’s a news report from a stock investing app. Figures hahah.
  2. So, prominent economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram says, on the issue of Anwar’s daughter being appointed as an advisor to the Finance Minister: “I am also not keen on the prime minister being the finance minister. I am also not keen on this (Nurul Izzah’s) appointment. But all things considered the reaction to her appointment is unwarranted.” And then goes on to enumerate the ways in which appointed the PM’s daughter as an advisor might bring advantages. Fair enough. Nuanced, right? But then, you will notice that the headline simply says: “Jomo: Nurul Izzah’s new appointment not a liability”. Nice.
  3. “Saya mesti berusaha bukan saya benci, tidak ada satu zarah, satu molekul rasa benci kepada mana-mana individu, tetapi parti mesti diselamatkan,” kata seorang Presiden parti politik yang memalitkan najis rasuah pada wajah partinya sendiri, mencantas pemimpin tempatan yang membawa kepada kekalahan partinya dalam negeri-negeri yang sebelum ini menjadi kubu kuat partinya, menjadi bebanan utama bagi para pemimpin muda parti beliau sendiri, membelakangkan keputusan partinya sendiri untuk tidak bersama pemimpin dan parti lawan tertentu, dan menyanggupi parti tunjang negara menjadi pelakon tambahan dalam pentas politik tanahair. Siapa yang perlu diselamatkan, ya?

Posted on

Today’s Reads XIV – Layoffs, Manchester United, UMNO

  1. Termination via email is yet another reminder that good leadership is really just about being a good human being. Look people in the eye, answer questions fairly, and show sympathy for the travails of others. Is that really so hard to do?
  2. Erik Ten Hag’s Manchester United is a salutary lesson in the inimitable power of good leadership. After the disappointments of Moyes, Van Gaal and Mourinho, the fleeting mirage of the Solskjaer years, the failed experiment with Rangnick, we finally have a manager with the grit and dedication to put together a winning team!
  3. UMNO gaya Orwell: bila Presiden yang terpalit rasuah menuduh orang lain yang menjadi punca “sabotaj” – bila prestasi parti merudum dan kepimpinan enggan mengambil tanggungjawab – bila Presiden sendiri melanggar konsensus “No Anwar No DAP” tapi orang lain dituduh pengkhianat – bila “pembersihan” dijadikan label untuk mencantas lawan!
Posted on

Grieve

  1. It is a strange thing to grieve for. A herd of like-minded people. A vehicle for pursuing, seeking, maintaining political power and domination. A collective of similarly-faced, similarly-named, similarly-garbed humanity, named and marked and made intelligible with insignia and flag and song and creed. 
  2. But also a community of people who understand one another. Who band together to yoke the human powers of a young nation, its sinews and hopes and grit, into sprawling roads and gleaming spires. 
  3. “Keramat”. Hallowed. Noble. Dignified. A rather pompous word to describe a seething mass of ambition and belief and camaraderie and struggle. But deeply felt. More than just a name on a card or an official form. Not merely an annual general meeting of the believers and the strivers and the schemers. A movement. A people within a people. 
  4. To remember a glorious past. Demonstration. Mobilisation. Negotiation.  Declamation. A young people claiming their right to exist. To govern themselves. To give deed to promises made. To forge a nation out of the disparate and messy strands of migration and immigration – the grime of lives made and remade. Deeds now hallowed in history books.
  5. Deeds now made into shallow and mocking echos, mouthed by a mongrel mob. Thin and hollow and blasted – these are the calling cards of an army of pygmies, claiming the mantle of past glories with which to cloak their cowardice. 
  6. The emperor is clothed in lies and deceit and self-deception, but the imperium marches on, wilfully blind and mute and dumb. Ever onwards, ever loyal, ever grieving.