Mahbubani is lucid about the US, correctly identifying its rampant inequality, high incarceration rates, its foolish forays into overseas conflicts, its self-destructive domestic politics, and its à la carte attitude towards international commitments. A big problem is the disparity between the author’s treatment of China and the US. But the book soon gets muddled, far too often seeing China’s impending rise as a geopolitical given divorced from real-world contingencies. The initial chapter, where he recounts Beijing’s surprise that it found few defenders among US business leaders against Trump’s trade war, is promising. Mahbubani, a former Singaporean ambassador to the UN, sets out to chart China’s coming challenge to the United States’s global supremacy. But, on China, in particular, this is a jarringly dispassionate book. Real-time history can be cruel to books about international relations and one sentence in Kishore Mahbubani’s Has China Won? jumps from the page: “The prospect of a direct war with Russia is practically zero, although proxy wars may take place in territories like the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine.” Mahbubani got one thing right there but you’d need to be particularly dispassionate to see the war in Ukraine as a proxy one.
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