“Having lived through the Asian financial crisis and the SARS crisis, if you add the two together, this (Covid-19) is possibly more challenging...

(For the world) we can hope for good leadership to emerge, but I sometimes wonder if we have got the right (global) leadership right now. Where we are now… there is a dark path ahead. It might emerge in light, we could be better people, but there is a long way to go, and there will be challenges every step of the way.”

--Prof Simon Tay, Chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs and a tenured Associate Professor of international law at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law

In this podcast, we have an in-depth conversation with Prof Tay, who digs into his extensive experience to go over how Singapore is balancing its fight against Covid-19 between mitigation and suppression. In a wide-ranging discussion, he walks us through the need for pragmatic governance (independent of ideology), the grim path ahead for the world’s economies and societies, the myriad challenges faced by China, the US playbook at the current juncture, the outlook for Asean, and the urgent need for international cooperation, both at the regional and multilateral levels.

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