09/03/2026
George Yeo, one of Singapore's longest-serving cabinet ministers (23 years!), explains current global geopolitics is fundamentally driven by US "retreat" and "decline", forced by a financial reality that no US administration can reverse: its debt servicing already exceeding its entire defense budget.
To Yeo, this explains why the US insists so much that its "allies" in Europe and Asia spend more of their GDP on defense - to basically pick up the tab for an empire America can no longer afford - but it also means that, inevitably, "once your allies begin to have their own military capabilities, they will think differently, and they will not follow you in everything that you want to do."
As such, American decline becomes self-reinforcing: the more it asks allies to carry their own weight, the less reason
George Yeo's keynote reflects on the 250th anniversary of The Wealt...