The long-termists: Lessons from GIC's pioneers relevant as ever

Singapore's reserves were not built in a day. Here's how Yong Pung How and Lee Ek Tieng moulded GIC to manage them.

- Lim Chow Kiat

recent decades, Mr Rubio said that after the Cold War, "we were the only power in the world, and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem".

Mr Rubio went on to say that "it's not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet".

These words could have been echoed by Mr Putin or Mr Xi. It's the kind of analysis that forms the usual fodder of Brics summits and sympathetic literature. It also has the virtue of being essentially correct as a piece of analysis.

One does not need to sympathise with the Maga foreign policies of the last six months to conclude Mr Trump represents one possible reaction to wider global changes. The US is certainly not isolationist, but it is self-interested to a more brazen extent than before. This is a reality that all nations, whether they love or loathe the US' global presence, will have to become used to.

So whether in Anchorage or in the next great geopolitical drama, prepare to witness what will increasingly resemble not simply the Trump, Putin or Xi show, but the multipolar show.

It is the countries that grasp this the quickest, in ways that make sense to their nations' own unique historical and geographical circumstances, that will be the ones which thrive in an age of geopolitical change.

Dr Samir Puri is the director of Chatham House's Centre for Global Governance and Security and author of Westlessness: The Great Global Rebalancing.