Once again, the high-altitude air of Davos has proven to be a potent hallucinogen. In the pristine, oxygen-deprived peaks of the Swiss Alps, where the world’s most expensive suits gather to pretend they give a damn about the very peasants they spend the other 51 weeks of the year exploiting, Singapore’s President Tharman Shanmugaratnam has stepped to the podium. His mission? To convince us that the impending collision between two nuclear-armed, ego-bloated superpowers is actually a delightful little engine for 'global progress.' It’s the kind of high-level gaslighting that requires a PhD in economics and a complete lack of shame. Tharman, representing a city-state that has mastered the art of being the world’s most efficient waiting room, told the World Economic Forum that the rivalry between the United States and China could actually benefit the world. It’s a charming thought, isn’t it? The idea that we should all be grateful for the friction between a decaying empire desperately trying to remember its lines and a rising surveillance state that treats its population like a collection of data points in a frantic spreadsheet.

Tharman’s logic is as thin as the mountain air. He suggests that the competition for dominance will drive 'broad innovation benefits.' This is the classic technocrat’s prayer: that if we just let the titans fight, the crumbs falling from their table will be high-tech enough to justify the collateral damage. He’s essentially rebranding the Cold War 2.0 as a spirited R&D session. In Tharman’s world, we aren’t witnessing the fracturing of global stability; we’re just watching a very intense hackathon where the prize is planetary survival. He claims that innovations born of this competition could lead to breakthroughs, ignoring the inconvenient truth that most 'innovations' born of superpower rivalry usually involve better ways to vaporize cities or more efficient methods of spying on teenagers.

Then comes the 'restraint' clause—the punchline to this geopolitical joke. Tharman insists that this rivalry will be a net positive only if both powers exercise restraint in sensitive areas like nuclear technology and artificial intelligence. Asking the US and China to exercise restraint in the realms of AI and nukes is like asking two starving hyenas to share a carcass but please, for the love of God, don't use your teeth on the 'sensitive' bits. Restraint is a word politicians use right before they lose control of the leash. History is a graveyard of 'restrained' rivalries that ended in mass mobilization and scorched earth. To stand in Davos—a place built on the very lack of restraint that defines modern capitalism—and preach the virtues of self-control to the world’s two biggest bullies is a level of irony that would be poetic if it weren’t so pathetically predictable.

The President of Singapore added that the world needs to manage these tensions to ensure they don't spiral. It’s the typical middle-manager approach to the apocalypse. If we just have enough committees, enough white papers, and enough speeches at private Swiss resorts, maybe the laws of human nature will simply cease to exist. The reality is that the US and China aren’t competing to 'benefit' the world; they are competing to own it. Their 'rivalry' isn’t a healthy race to the top; it’s a desperate scramble to ensure they aren't the ones at the bottom when the music stops. Tharman’s call for 'global progress' is a nice sentiment to print on a brochure, but it ignores the fact that for most of the world, this rivalry looks less like a source of innovation and more like being trapped in a room with two giants who are about to start throwing the furniture.

And let’s look at the setting. Davos. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is the ultimate monument to human vanity. It’s a place where the people who broke the world’s economy meet to discuss how they can be the ones to fix it, provided the fix doesn't involve them losing a cent of their net worth. Tharman’s speech fits right in. It’s intellectually sophisticated, grammatically perfect, and entirely detached from the grim reality of the 21st century. He speaks of 'broad innovation benefits' while the world watches the decoupling of supply chains, the rise of techno-nationalism, and the slow erosion of any semblance of international cooperation. But sure, let’s focus on the 'benefits.' Maybe if the US and China fight hard enough, they’ll invent a new type of battery that can power the bunkers the elite will retreat to when their 'beneficial rivalry' finally goes sideways. It’s a tragicomedy written as a TED Talk, and the audience is too busy checking their stock portfolios to realize they’re the ones being parodied.