MALAYSIA'S foreign policy has impacted the world culturally, economically, historically, socially and through trade. We were there, vociferously and principled, in imploring an equitable world and a sane voice in forging the Non-Aligned Movement.
We implored the United Nations to protect hapless nations from superpowers' bullying, while succeeding in the long struggle to end South Africa's apartheid regime.
But now, the biggest remonstration of our times is confronting Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, a tenuous task given America's historical coddling of the Zionist state. If it's one thing to fight Israel militarily and diplomatically, it's another when they lump their "coded" defence of accusing anything anti-Israel as "anti-Semitic."
Under President Joe Biden's hawkish embrace of Israel, Americans might use "anti-Semitism" to impose sanctions to influence the world, arms trade, and migration at Tel Aviv's behest.
In battling this farcical international mantra under Tel Aviv's subtle puppeteering, we implore Datuk Seri Mohamed Hasan, barely a month into his task as foreign minister, to oppose Israel's deceit in our steadfast backing of the Palestinian struggle.
Yet, other impactful external issues will affect Malaysia in 2024: at a glance, heightened tensions in the South China Sea, foreign immigration and security, and this one's an uncertainty, dealing with artificial intelligence (AI).
Malaysia's conundrum with foreign workers is problematic: up to 2022, 2.2 million documented migrant workers held steady jobs, helping grow our economy, but 1.2 million to 3.5 million illegals are creating social ruckus and small-time organised crime.
Then, there's the ultimate foreign incursion: the growing AI phenomenon that's gnawing into our lives while we dawdle at its unregulated leaching. The ultimate in AI technology is the Terminator scenario: malevolent, self-aware robots destroying humankind, but we hope, nervously, that it's only a moviemaker's imagination.
However, in reality, AI, riding on its makers' huge stock market valuations and unlimited prospects, has disrupted traditional media's business and will soon eat into other traditions we take for granted. AI has the creepy versatility of becoming a journalist, doctor, teacher, software engineer and even a religious preacher, of which a national fatwa has not even been mulled. The implications are unimaginable. While the other foreign engagements are resolvable, AI represents a new existential paradigm of which we have zero control, unless we preempt its expansion.
