PETALING JAYA: Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad believes that the United States is "provoking" China toward a catastrophic conflict.
In an interview with Time magazine, the former prime minister was scathing of American efforts to contain the rising superpower that is China.
"China will do everything to retain the market and is doing exactly what the Europeans were doing before," he said.
Dr Mahathir went as far as calling United States "freedom of navigation" sorties in the South China Sea "destabilising" and called for them to withdraw.
"Suppose China sends warships to the Caribbean and conducts (exercises) there, what would America do?
"This is not America, this is the South China Sea, this is Asia. The US is a world power, but you have to use that power judiciously, not to provoke conflicts between nations," he said.
When asked about China's surprise live-fire drills off New Zealand in February, Dr Mahathir was unmoved, telling Time with a winsome grin: "New Zealand is still the Far East."
The former prime minister was interviewed in his office in Kuala Lumpur recently, and Time noted that despite being a venerable 99-years-of age, he sill arrived at his desk at 8.45am and rarely left before 5pm.
"I always advise people when they age, they should be active. Keep yourself busy and your brain busy. If they go to sleep, they lose their power," he told Time.
In 2020, Dr Mahathir had warned that US President Donald Trump's return would bring "disaster" and nothing in the intervening years has changed his mind, Time said.
“Talking about taking over Greenland, Panama, and expelling people from Gaza — these kinds of things cannot be done now.
“You have to consider the rights of people. This is not the way you run countries,” he told Time magazine.
Dr Mahathir said Trump had also threatened to annex allies, bargained Ukrainian sovereignty with Russia behind Kyiv’s back, and launched an internecine trade war.
"The US used to talk about human rights, development and things like that. Of course we thought that was great because the US itself was a British colony but became independent and a world power.
"So, we wanted to learn from them. But now, we are seeing a new United States," he was quoted as saying in his interview.
"I don't think he (Trump) understands the world. He's 100 years behind the times," Dr Mahathir said.
On the conflict in Ukraine, Dr Mahathir told Time that it was a matter of the West "provoking" Russia.
He argued that Nato should have been abolished after the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact counter bloc was dissolved following the fall of the Soviet Union.
"Instead, Nato decided to take all the Warsaw Pact countries and join Nato and confront Russia. Before Ukraine could join Nato, Russia took preemptive action," he said.
During the interview, Dr Mahathir also recalled meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2005, two years after he had stepped down as prime minister for the first time. Putin had visited him at home.
"Actually, I told him, 'You cannot come to my house, protocol-wise it's wrong', but he insisted," Dr Mahathir said.
He added that Putin's entourage had been aghast to learn that his house did not even have a perimeter wall.
"For (Putin's) security, to have somebody like me with no fence was unthinkable," he laughed.
He added that they had a four-hour meeting and Putin was interested in seeing how Malaysia managed to become industrialised from being an agro-based country.
"When I talked to him, it was about development, increasing trade, basically to be less communistic, to make use of capitalist ideology," he said.
