Asia’s former tigers are flirting with irrelevance
Perhaps it is unlucky for those who run the former “tiger” economies of south-east Asia that Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, delights in the comedy of the absurd: in his skit at their annual dinner this year in Kuala Lumpur, he portrayed an improbable future in which he was briefed by a Kremlin official about the merciless demands of the world’s only superpower
