US-ABC: U.S. ASEAN Strategic Business Forum

As the American century fades, the Asian renaissance begins.

 Kishore Mahbubani sat down with our CEO Steven Okun for a fireside chat at the US-ASEAN Business Council's Strategic Business Forum.

ASEAN isn't westernizing it's modernizing, on its own terms, shaped for centuries by deep cultural ties to the two giants on its borders, India and China. An image for how the region moves is like a crab: sideways, sometimes backwards, sometimes forwards - never in a straight line, but always moving forward.

You can see it in the numbers: ASEAN's combined GDP: roughly $600B in 2000, $2T in 2010, and an estimated $4.2T today - a growth story still wildly underrated. In 2025, when tariffs were supposed to break the system, global trade grew instead, and Singapore, the world's most globalized economy, grew 5.3%, more than double what was forecast.