By Kalinga Seneviratne
The rise of Donald Trump has been accompanied by a new word introduced to the international media vocabulary ‘MAGA’ (Make American Great Again) – movement backed by over 70 million Americans – who voted him into power for a second time. There is a genuine fear that they are losing the power to shape and exploit the world to a rising Asia and the Chinese are being scapegoated for it, and the Indians will not be far behind.
What China has spearheaded in the past 2 decades is Asia’s own MAGA (Making Asia Great Again) without making any noise about it. Its not only China, other Asian nations such as South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and lately India have joined the movement that is rattling the West, and especially the United States (US) that is seeing its economic hegemony crumbling from under its feet.
Along with China, the so-called Asian Tigers and lately India, are all transforming from ‘Third World” economies to “First World” economies within a span of one generation. It took European nations about 300 years to achieve that economic progress and that is after sending gunboats to invade, occupy, enslave, plunder and exploit two thirds of the world – which today calls itself the “Global South”.
China and Asia have done none of it and they rose in a global economic order that was rigged by the West under the so-called Bretton Woods institutions like the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) to benefit themselves.
While the Western mindset is still buried in the 19th century thinking of military conquest to maintain their global hegemony, the Chinese and the Asians have shown another way. Through hard work, intelligent study and practice of economics and business, and building infrastructure and communities – not destroying them – and rational management of their human resources (which the West calls authoritarianism) they are creating Asia’s own MAGA.
In a post that went viral on Facebook just after his death at the age of 100 last year, the former US President Jimmy Carter (who was then a Christian paster) was quoted on advice he has given to President Trump in a telephone conversation during his first term in 2019.
Carter has pointed out to Trump that while China has spent decades laying tracks for the future, building cities, schools, trains that move faster than thought. America has built military bases, debt, and an empire of rust. “China chose infrastructure. We chose interference. They built railways across continents. We bombed bridges across borders. They invested in AI, medicine, and education. We invested in overthrowing oil-rich governments, branding it freedom’” he said. “We spent $300 billion trying to bend the world to our will. They spent it making their own nation unshakable”. Carter warned that “the war we’re losing isn’t to China. It’s to our own addiction to dominance. And our refusal to invest in anything we can’t control”.
Carter has perhaps described Asia’s own MAGA and this is the lesson the Australian media need to understand. China’s rise is not a “security issue” for Australia, that needs a military response.
There is so much news that could be reasons for optimism, but that is missing from our newscasts.
China’s and Asia’s rise offers that optimism for the future. With the development of intra-regional connectivity, innovative IT applications, new and cheaper green technologies, expansion of tourism and cultural linkages bringing people together. Even when you hear about these in the Australian media, it comes with a negative slant, such as debt traps, unfair trade and over tourism. The media is trying to divide us.
I just cannot understand the Australian media’s general support for the AUKUS agreement that will cost Australia some 300 billion dollars to build nuclear powered submarines to defend Australia against its biggest trading partner. This is at a time when huge funds are needed to improve the ailing Medicare system, to fix a public housing crisis and reskill Australia to wean itself of dependency on migrant skills.
Very soon, Asia could have its own QUAD that is different to the one Australia belongs to. It is time for India and Japan to ditch the US and Australia initiated QUAD (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) and join forces with China and South Korea to form an Asian Quad – lets call it QUADD (Quadrilateral Development Dialogue) that is focused on economic, trade, and development issues, not on so-called “security Issues” that are designed to create military conflicts and help to boost the wealth of the American military industrial complex.
This new QADD (or whatever you call it) could develop into an Asian Union later with the induction of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) and SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) as associate members.
In the late 1980s when the Asian economies were rising, the then Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad proposed an East Asian Caucus that would include the 10 members of ASEAN, and Japan, China and South Korea. He argued that Asians need a strong voice in international affairs as its economies rise.
This idea was scuttled by the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, when during a speech in Seoul on 31 January 1989 he proposed an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation grouping that included Australia’s Anglo-Saxon cousins – the US, New Zealand and Canada. Ten months later, 12 Asia-Pacific economies met in Canberra to establish APEC. A furious Mahathir refused to attend the first APEC Summit in Seattle in November 1993.
Time is ripe for Asia to launch its own regional union. Japan has now realized the futility of its flirting with the West to form an Asian NATO; China is involved in a fierce tariff battle with the US; South Korea impeached a president backed by the pro-American Christian evangelicals and now elected a liberal; and India deeply resents US pressure to cut its trade ties with Russia – and lately President Trump’s attempt to interfere in the Kashmiri issue, which is a red line for India – these issues have all created the environment for such a grouping to be born.
Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing have recently shown signs of the formation of such an alliance and New Delhi need to be drawn into this. Since the June 2020 border squirmiest between China and India where India lost 20 soldiers, Washington has been fiercely wooing India with offers of access to hi-tech arms and nuclear technology among others which are mainly military in nature. The US would like India to be its regional policeman to confront China, but Delhi has not fallen into that trap (one hopes).
Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s excellent address to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2023 on the ‘rules based order’ where he argued that such an order cannot exist if the “rule -makers subjugate rule-takers. After all, rules will work only when they apply equally to all”. Though he did not name any country, it was obviously directed at the West, and the US in particular. China would have quietly applauded that speech.
One of the obstacles to creating an Asian Union are the US military bases in South Korea and Japan, a relic of the second world war and the Korean war. If China is a partner in the new Asian QUADD that threat does not exist. Trump may perhaps hasten the dismantling of these bases if he insists on the Koreans and the Japanese paying for the cost of stationing US forces in Asia.
For long, East Asia has seen India as an outsider ignoring history where Indian philosophy and culture shaped most of the Southeast and East Asian nations for centuries. Buddhism was the gel there, and it could again play that role.
In the 1990s, when APEC was formed, India was not included, because it was seen as a stagnant, backward nation immersed in poverty and internal conflicts. But, today India is a global economic and technological powerhouse. It is the world’s most populous country, with the world’s third largest economy measured at international purchasing-power parity, at $17 trillion. India is also a digital technology innovator.
While Trump is trying to lure Japan into an anti-China trade block at the moment, and G7 is trying to make India an associated member without any voice of course (like what Japan has been for the past many decades), around 20% of Japan’s total commerce is with China, larger than its trade with the US. India-China bilateral trade has been on the rise, with China being India’s largest trading partner. In 2023, the total trade between the two countries reached $136.2 billion.
After a high level meeting of trade officials from both countries in late April, in a significant move that promises to reshape the economic landscape between two of Asia’s largest economies, China has announced its readiness to open its markets to a greater variety of Indian goods. According to World Bank figures South Korea’s trade with China valued at over $ 152 billion is almost double of that with the US at just over $82 billion.
A formal trade and development based QUADD arrangements in Asia between its 4 economic powers could hasten Asia’s MAGA and dwarf anything Trump’s MAGA can achieve. It could also be able to control outside influencers who are trying to use the Philippines to create trouble in the South China Sea, and funding the Dalai Lama’s pro-western followers to destabilise the Himalayan borders between India and China (after Dalai Lama goes).
Where would Australia stand in this new order? First and foremost, the Australian media need to shed its Anglo-centric mindset that heaps on 19h century thinking about the region. Australia cannot guide or lead the region with a set of “superior liberal values”. Australian media need to open itself to viewpoints from Asia, and gradually make up its mind on how Australia could fit into the Asian MAGA.
With Australia’s population becoming more Eurasian, perhaps it would take a generation or two to fit Australia seamlessly into this new Asia.
Contributing Author: Dr Kalinga Seneviratne is a Sri Lanka born Australian journalist and international communications scholar. He is the author of the recently published book “ Global News Media: Countering Western Hegemony In International News” (Atlantic, 2025) and “GeoPolitics and the Media in Asia and the Pacific: Pulling in Different Directions” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024). He is currently a Research Fellow at Shinawatra University in Thailand.
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