 We're here at the Crawford Australian Leadership Forum in Canberra and I'm joined by Professor Kishore Marbubani who is the Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Kishore, can you give us a bit of a sense of the big numbers that define the entanglements in the economy across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations? Well, ASEAN has done a remarkable job in promoting economic growth and development in Southeast Asia which used to be one of the poorest regions in the world. And just to give you three statistics, in 1970 the combined GNP of ASEAN was about $36 billion now is close to $2.5 trillion, an increase of over 70 times. And ASEAN's total trade with the rest of the world in 1970 was $14 billion and now it's over $2.5 trillion, an increase of 180 times. And in the case of ASEAN's intra-ASEAN trade which everyone is discounted, total intra-ASEAN trade was $1.2 billion in 1970 and now it's over $600 billion, an increase of over 500 times. So these statistics show what a remarkable job ASEAN has done in delivering economic and growth and development in Southeast Asia. Kishore, you spent many decades working in the Singaporean Foreign Service. Can you give us some impression of the role that the Singaporean Republic has played over those years? Well, Singapore is kind of a unique creature in the Southeast Asian space because as you know it is a city-state which has been exceptionally successful when Singapore celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. I wrote an article saying that Singapore has been the most successful society in human history in terms of the comprehensiveness of its national development. So the good news for the region is that we have now created various universities, think tanks and intellectual institutions that are basically generating a lot of ideas which are quietly changing the face of Southeast Asia. The good news is that Singapore tries not to claim too much credit and likes to say it all belongs to you. But it is an open secret that if you in a sense want to come to the intellectual hub of Southeast Asia, you come to Singapore. So given that role and the prominence of Singapore in the debates about the future of the ASEAN region, can you give us your sense of whether the ASEAN experiment is going to fail? Is it possible that ASEAN might break up? Well, ASEAN has been clearly the second most successful regional organization after the European Union over the last 50 years. But today ASEAN faces probably the biggest threat to its existence because it's a result of geopolitics and the main geopolitical competition in the next decade or two will be between the number one power in the world, United States, and the number two power in the world, which is China. And unfortunately, geopolitics is about geography. And since Southeast Asia is positioned at a place which is going to be at the heart of U.S.-China competition, there is a danger that ASEAN could break apart. Now, I personally am optimistic that it will survive, that it is resilient, it will overcome this challenge, but it will be a mistake for ASEAN to underestimate this new geopolitical challenge that it faces. That's a wonderful note on which to end. Professor Kishu Mahbubani, thank you very much for joining us at the 2016 Crawford Australian Leadership Forum. My pleasure. Thank you very much.