Shadow Warrior: Fwd: COVID-19, the future of global supply chains, and Asia's technocratic model

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Fwd: COVID-19, the future of global supply chains, and Asia's technocratic model

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Parag Khanna
Date: Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 11:26 PM
Subject: COVID-19, the future of global supply chains, and Asia's technocratic model
To:

Is the world organized according to infrastructure or borders?

Dear Rajeev --

In just the past few weeks, the Covid-19 pandemic has awakened interest in tracing global supply chains to understand everything from how the virus spread so quickly from China to Italy (as I explained in Wired) to why the US is facing shortages of medical supplies (see my discussion with National Geographic). .

My 2016 book Connectography (2016) was devoted to explaining how infrastructure and supply chains constitute a new layer of functional geography that transcends our political geography of borders. We are witnessing daily how this connectivity enables both the flows of goods as well as diseases, but also how essential the friction of borders remains to ensure our safety.

As we all experience this extraordinary and nearly simultaneous global quarantine, I hope you'll take the time to read the book and appreciate the custom-made maps of our globally networked civilization at work, from the new Eurasian Silk Roads to our undersea Internet cables.

Though we have achieved global connectivity, we are also deepening regionalism. Due to the US-China trade war, America's largest trading partners are Canada and Mexico. China now trades more with Southeast Asia than with the US. 70 percent of the EU's trade is internal. We have a tripolar economic order, and Asia now represents more than 50 percent of global GDP (in PPP terms). In The Future is Asian (2019), I explore in detail the rise of the Asian system from four thousand years of diverse civilizational history to today's trade agreements and technological leapfrogging. The coronavirus has kept China front and center in the headlines, but you may be surprised by my forecast that China won't dominate either Asia or the world.

The pandemic response has, however, put a spotlight on how some societies such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore have demonstrated the blend of trusted leadership, independent expertise, public consultation, crisis preparedness, and national resilience we expect from the world's best governments. Note that all of these role models are in Asia. For my 2017 book Technocracy in America, I scoured the world for the best practices in inclusive and responsive governance from Switzerland to Singapore and constructed a model I call "direct technocracy". I even created an organizational chart for how the US federal government could be sensibly redesigned to be far more representative of both public interests and inclusive of meritocratic expertise. In light of today's crisis in American government, I hope you'll take the time to learn how Washington can and must do better -- now more than ever.

Bringing all of these themes together, I was very pleased to join Samuel Mathew of Standard Chartered Bank and moderator Manisha Tank for an interactive webinar on "Global Supply Chains: Trends and Tremors" which you can view using this access code: SCBVIP.

I hope you are safe and healthy wherever you are, and that despite our self-imposed distance, we remain closely connected.

As always, you can keep up with my latest writings, appearances, and analysis at www.paragkhanna.com and find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

All the best,

Parag