John Micklethwait

friend or not that friend uh president lula he's up for election this year what what mending that relationship with brazil is that a priority or do your your dogs just bark every time you mention him are you going to call one of your dogs lula

If you look at Latin America, when we first met, you were a sole voice on the right, if we call it that way.

I was more lonely than Adam on Mother's Day.

Now I have quite a few friends.

Yes, that's a very good parallel.

Since then, Chile and Bolivia, you have two friends.

But then you have Chile and Bolivia.

Now we do have elections in Colombia and Brazil.

Have you identified people there who you want to support to carry on the same kind of wave of reforms that you would hope to see change in Latin America?

It works, and it is only just... President Millet, there are many things that you can defeat, but one of them, perhaps the most socialist things of all, is time, and we have sadly run out of it.

Thank you very, very much for talking to us.

Please, can you all... We have to get President Millet out very quickly, so can you stay in your seats, and then we will go out.

Thank you.

To bring you down to earth a little bit, you could argue that the success of Singapore has been based around two things, being a bastion of free trade.

and also being somewhere between East and West.

And now you have protectionism on the rise, and we have that struggle between China and America.

I think it worries us all.

But when Xi Jinping and Donald Trump met in South Korea, you called it a temporary truce.

And I wonder, you've just seen this spat going on between Japan and China over Taiwan.

How precarious does Asia feel at the moment?