Asia's Cauldron (16 page)

At the end of history there is somnolence: that is the lesson of Singapore. Pragmatism carried to the furthest degree may not inspire the Western humanist mind, but it has been the only way for Singapore to survive as a physical speck of a city-state at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, whose location is coveted by the great powers. Singapore's inner logic follows from its geographical vulnerability.

Singapore occupies a natural, deep-water port at the narrowest point of the funnel that is the Strait of Malacca—the most important maritime choke point in the world. Throughout history, this little island has been both violated and fought over. The ancestors of the people of Singapore belonged to ethnic and tribal groups that lived off the high seas and especially piracy—Chinese, Indians, Siamese, Riaus, Javanese, and Malays. Singapore always belonged to someone else's empire or kingdom. The fact that it has been an independent city-state since the last third of the twentieth century constitutes something unique in history.

Singapore, according to a senior serving official, emerged as an
embattled state purely because of philosophical reasons. It was thrown out of a Malay-dominated federation in the 1960s because Singapore's leaders insisted on a multiethnic meritocracy. Thus, Singapore found itself alone amid a newly constituted and hostile Malaysia, which controlled Singapore's access to freshwater, while a pro-communist Indonesian demographic behemoth was breathing down Singapore's neck.
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Singapore was as small and alone in its region as Israel was in its; it was no irony that Israel played a large role in training Singapore's armed forces. The Singaporean business model would decades later be an argument in favor of soft power, but some Singaporean officials despise the term. One Singaporean after another told me:
Soft power is only relevant after you have developed hard power
. The Israelis would concur.

Whereas in the West the concept of balance of power is often seen as a cynical term, reeking, as it seems to, of coldhearted realism, Singaporeans equate the balance of power with freedom itself. Because of great powers all around, only a proper balance of power between these large states can allow for the independence of such a small state like Singapore, which, unlike Brunei, has no oil.

“We have no sovereign waters, even as we are located at the world's most critical naval choke point,” one serving diplomat told me. “Independent and secure sea lines of communication are an existential requirement for us.” Indeed, freedom of navigation in the South China Sea means that maritime trade of $750 billion annually accounts for three times Singapore's GDP, whereas it is only a third of GDP for neighboring states.

But Singapore faces a particular challenge that is best summed up in the language of political science: while China is a geographical fact, the United States at least in Asia is merely a geopolitical concept. Translation: China is close by and therefore threatening; whereas the United States does not necessarily have to be present in the region to the extent that it is were its foreign policy to undergo a fundamental shift. “China is big, we're small,” a high-ranking military officer told me. “China says that it is a status quo power. But its economic and military growth for decades changes the status quo.” Another lesson of Singapore is that it is helpful to be a little paranoid.

And yet Singaporean officials are relieved by their long memories. They are not really worried about the United States reducing its forces in Asia, despite budget woes in Washington. They remember much darker times: the end of the Vietnam War, when quasi-isolationism in the United States regarding Asia was a real possibility; and the presidency of Jimmy Carter, when an attempt was made to withdraw American forces from South Korea, an idea that struck people in Singapore as—to say the least—wildly naive.

In fact, no foreign policy and security elite in the world struck me as quite so cold-blooded as that of Singapore's. Example: though the Philippines, like Singapore, is enthusiastic about countering Chinese power, the Filipinos, in the Singaporean view, “are emotional and unstable and thereby make the security situation worse.” The Singaporeans are more comfortable with serious adversaries than they are with unserious friends. One Singaporean summed it up this way: “At the end of the day, it is all about military force and naval presence—it is not about passionate and well-meaning talk.” Typically, everybody I met in the various Singaporean ministries insisted that frank conversations must be off the record: public diplomacy, in their view, is overrated, and is another thing they have no illusions about.

Singapore's independence began less with a declaration of such than with the building of a formidable military. “Spider-Man needs a suit to make him strong; we needed an outsized armed forces,” explained a defense official. While Singapore has only 3.3 million citizens, it boasts an air force the same size as Australia's, whose population is 23 million. “Like the Israelis, the Singaporeans believe in air superiority. They pay their pilots well. They have AWACS,” a defense official from a neighboring country told me. In addition to its one hundred or so fighter jets, Singapore has twenty missile-carrying ships, six frigates, and, notably, six submarines—an extraordinary number given that far more populous countries in the region like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam each have fewer. “Nobody can squeeze us through a blockade.”

It is not enough that Singapore has these air and sea platforms.
For it is deadly serious about using them effectively. Because Singapore lacks empty space for military training, it regularly has four air squadrons training in the United States, ground troops training in Taiwan, and helicopter crews training in Australia. It allots sixty-five days a year for army maneuvers with leopard tanks. “We will not be hemmed in by our neighbors.” Too, Singapore has a conscript military. Said the same defense official: “There are only three developed countries in the world that are very serious about national service—South Korea, Israel, and us.”

But the vast latent power of China still unsettles the Singaporeans, so much so that they feel they have no choice but to rely directly on the United States. As another diplomat told me: “We see American hard power as benign. The U.S. Navy defends globalization by protecting the sea lanes, which we, more than any other people, benefit from. To us, there is nothing dark or conspiratorial about the United States and its vast security apparatus.”

In 1998, the Singaporeans built Changi Naval Base solely to host American nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines. “We designed the piers to meet the dimensions of American warships,” a high-ranking military man here told me, in order to lure American naval platforms to Singaporean waters. “It's kind of like, if you serve good coffee and tea, people will come.” Indeed, in 2011 there were 150 American warship visits to Singapore. Then there were the three American littoral combat ships that, it was announced in 2011, would be stationed in Singapore.

Finally, beyond military might, there is the power of diplomacy. Singapore externalizes its security not only through the American navy and air force, but through an alliance like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. ASEAN is about “socializing other states to a set of core values.” Those core values revolve around the independence of small and medium-sized states banding together in the face of a rising great power like China, even though no diplomat in the region will ever say that on the record.

Whenever I met with senior civil servants in Singapore they were accompanied by younger colleagues who were present throughout
our conversations. This was in order that the younger generation, as I was told, could learn from “our governing philosophy” and thus “carry on the tradition.” In fact, the more visits I made to Singapore, the more it occurred to me that despite their differences and remaining inequalities, the various ethnic groups of this city-state—Chinese, Indian, and Malay—talked and acted alike: as though a philosophical principle could erase ethnic differences. Well, of course, it could. For this was what the United States was all about with its Protestant Creed that American Catholics, Jews, and others subscribed to. But maybe because of Singapore's small size, the expression of the same phenomenon here seemed that much more intense and noticeable. It was as though I were inside a version of Plato's Republic, with a reigning philosopher king.

Indeed, there was a reigning philosopher king, who these diplomats and defense officials kept mentioning and quoting from: who I must now introduce. For he is Singapore's version of Deng Xiaoping. In fact, it was partly from him that Deng got his vision to modernize China.

Just consider: in three decades, Singapore had gone from a malarial hellhole of overpowering smells and polluted, life-threatening monsoon drains to a global economic dynamo that topped businessmen's lists for efficiency and quality of life. The old Singapore was a place of slums, rats, garbage, and stray dogs. The new Singapore was so clean, sterile, and easy to negotiate that I thought of it as beginner's Asia. In the early 1960s, Singapore was as poor as many countries in sub-Saharan Africa; by the 1990s, this city-state, one fifth the size of Rhode Island, had a standard of living higher than Australia's. Credit for the miracle went to one man: an English-educated ethnic Chinese barrister, Harry Lee, who, when he decided to enter politics, changed his name back to the traditional Lee Kuan Yew.

Whenever in the 1990s I sat with influential figures in the Arab and ex-communist worlds, I always posed the question, Who was the greatest minor man of the twentieth century—not someone on par
with Churchill or Roosevelt, but a tier below—the kind of man your country needs at the moment? The answer I got was never Nelson Mandela or Václav Havel, but invariably Lee Kuan Yew. Some journalists and intellectuals who had never wielded bureaucratic responsibility over large groups of people, and who preached moral absolutes from the sidelines, disliked him. But Western leaders—Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Margaret Thatcher, to name a few, each of whom understood the need for moral compromise in the face of implacable, violent forces—rightly held him in awe. Lady Thatcher observed: “In office, I read and analyzed every speech of Harry's. He had a way of penetrating the fog of propaganda.… He was never wrong.”
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In the best short analysis of Lee's career, Australian editor and intellectual Owen Harries writes that Lee's political philosophy was the upshot of his experiences in the 1940s: in the first half of the decade he knew the utter brutality of Japanese occupation; in the second half studying at Cambridge he experienced a civil society established under the rule of law.
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“The three and a half years of Japanese occupation were the most important of my life,” Lee writes in the first volume of his memoirs,
The Singapore Story
. “They gave me vivid insights into the behavior of human beings and human societies, their motivations and impulses.” He goes on. “The Japanese demanded total obedience and got it.… Punishment was so severe that crime was very rare.… As a result I have never believed those who advocate a soft approach to crime and punishment, claiming that punishment does not reduce crime. That was not my experience in Singapore.” Lee says he “learnt more” from the Japanese occupation “than any university could have taught me.” Nevertheless, at university after the war he also learned much. He and his fellow Singaporean and Malayan students at Cambridge “were enthusiastic about the mature British system, under which constitutional tradition and tolerance allowed fundamental shifts of power and wealth to take place peacefully.”
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Lee tempered the Japanese fascist penchant for order with the lawful rule of the British to achieve a developmental miracle on this small
island that comprises 214 square miles at low tide. Lee tells how he accomplished this in two massive volumes of compulsively readable memoirs. Most political memoirs are dreadful ghost writer-assembled hackwork that are little more than a stitching together of banal justifications. But Lee's two-volume set,
The Singapore Story
and
From Third World to First: Singapore and the Asian Economic Boom
, are contenders for inclusion in Plutarch's early-second-century
AD
The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
.
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Lee's books tell a story that challenges the philosophical underpinnings of the Western intellectual elite, because it implies that virtue is not altogether connected with democracy and that meritocratic quasi-autocracy can in a poor country achieve economic results quicker than can a weak and chaotic parliamentary system.

Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore constitutes a more worthy model of leadership than Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia. Both men imposed an authoritarian style over newly wrought democratic systems. Yet Lee is without Mahathir's decidedly nasty prejudices and petty meannesses, while harboring a more acute strategic vision that, unlike Mahathir's, goes far beyond the Muslim world. Mahathir is head and shoulders above most other Muslim leaders; whereas Lee, as I indicated, is head and shoulders above most other leaders worldwide in the twentieth century.

At the beginning of the first volume of his memoirs, Lee assesses Singapore's situation as he found it in the 1950s, the time when he established the People's Action Party by combining an English-speaking elite with a broad working-class base. Though located at “the heart of the British Empire in Southeast Asia,” with the decline and dissolution of empire, Lee feared that Singapore would become “a heart without a body.” As he explains, British defense spending accounted for 20 percent of the city-state's GDP, and created employment for 10 percent of its workforce. Thus, the end of the British Empire would signal Singapore's greatest domestic crisis since the entrepôt was founded in 1819 at the ultra-strategic southernmost tip of the Asian mainland, with deep harbors and sheltered anchorages dominating the Strait of Malacca—where the Indian Ocean ends and
the Western Pacific begins in the form of the South China Sea. Seventy-five percent of Singapore's population of two million back then were ethnic Chinese, surrounded at the time by 100 million Malay and Indonesian Muslims. “How could we survive in such a hostile environment?” the young aspiring politician asked himself.
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