Ang Cheng Guan, Reassessing Lee Kuan Yew’s Strategic Thought (London and New York: Routledge, 2023), 182 pages, £120.
Singapore is a tiny, multiracial, island city-state in Southeast Asia that few would have considered to be a credible candidate for the two basic markers of independence: sovereignty and territorial integrity. A British colony that had gained self-governance in 1959, it had merged with a much-larger Malaya in 1963, only to be ejected from an enlarged Malaysia into unwanted statehood in 1965. That had occurred during the Cold War, when the survival of even much larger geographical entities lay at the coquettish mercy of global affairs. It was easy to believe then that Chinese-majority Singapore was a nation of interlopers who would depart once the global scales had turned against it.
Indeed, in 1957, an ambitious Singapore lawyer named Lee Kuan Yew had declared: “In the context of the second half of the 20th century South-east Asia, island nations are a political joke.”[1] Two years later, however, Lee would become Singapore’s first prime minister, tasked with disproving his own dark prediction of his island’s future. That, he did with self-avenging vengeance.
Singapore not only survived but thrived. Lee planned for success through a combination of domestic policies that ranged from the provision of world-class public housing and substantial provident funds for all citizens, to stringent laws that included preventive detention for communists, communalists, and others whose capture of political institutions would have spelled the end of the democratic socialist state envisioned by his ruling People’s Action Party. His impatient and abrasive personality towered over the island, informing every nook and cranny of the obedient efficiency and unforgiving integrity that marked it out in Asia. Dissidents fell by the wayside, but there was no doubt about the direction in which the future lay. The future said that the world did not owe Singapore a living. Hence, Singaporeans owed themselves a living. Only then would they own a nation.
These domestic details of Singapore’s provisional journey to early nationhood are well-known, certainly within the country. What this book does is to analyze the relentless realism of Lee’s strategic vision of his nation in the world: a world governed by the unforgiving balance-of-power struggle among the great powers, principally the United States, the Soviet Union, and China during the Cold War, a balance that readjusted itself to contemporary reality after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the emergence of China, Japan, India and (to an extent) Russia as major global players.
Ang Cheng Guan, Professor of the International History of Southeast Asia and Associate Dean of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, is effectively the dean of international historians in Singapore. He has sought in his scholarly work at large to underscore the global underpinnings of Southeast Asian affairs, thus helping to bring the region closer to academic interest and public reach everywhere. In this book, he casts the same discerning eye on Singapore as a part of Southeast Asia. The book is an expanded version of his seminal volume, Lee Kuan Yew’s Strategic Thought, published in 2013. Lee’s death in 2015, and yet the endurance of his strategic ideas, makes this updated book worth reading for even those familiar with its earlier incarnation. The book is timely also because it marks the centenary of Lee’s birth. It is a tribute paid to a person without whom contemporary Singapore might not have existed or might have survived without the instinctive global recognition that it commands today.
Intellectually, the book inserts itself into the divergence between the panegyric and critical schools of Singapore historiography centred on Lee. Ang distances himself from both the laudatory hagiography which holds that Lee could do no wrong (well, almost) and the prickly revisionism that dismisses him as a crafty manipulator of circumstances whose outcome he passed off later as his contribution to Singapore’s destiny. Ang dissects Lee’s strategic philosophy, not with a view to deifying him or to dethroning him, but with an agnostic appreciation of the international contingencies within which Lee had to fashion a pragmatic solution to the concrete problems facing Singapore during, and well beyond, its foundational years as a sovereign entity.
As the book highlights, Lee was a vocal internationalist for a national reason: Beyond Singapore’s deterrent military efforts, credible though they were, only the state of international relations could determine its survival. He said,
Whether Singapore will be able to live peacefully in Southeast Asia depends not on Singapore alone, but on the balance of power which enables international rules to be observed. It depends on the United Nations Security Council, the US, Japan and other big powers... Our defence forces can defend Singapore against a sneak sudden attack. But if the enemy puts us under siege and blocks the Malacca Straits, how can we survive? The destiny of Singapore depends on the international condition (p. 138).
Thus, Singapore’s foreign policy must “encourage the major powers to find it, if not in their interests to help us, at least in their interests to not have us fail” (p. 43). Restating the point, Lee declared that “quite simply, Singapore takes the position that we are price-takers; we are not price-makers. Our strategy simply is to make ourselves relevant to all the countries that matter to us” (p. 146).
Few leaders of countries large or small would have owned up to the limitations of state power so candidly. Lee’s abhorrence of national hubris and its consequent international hypocrisy made him speak of affairs as they existed in an imperfect world, not as he or anyone else would wish them to be. In that spirit, Ang notes the “remarkable consistency” in Lee’s views about the balance of power, the relationship between economics and politics, and the definitive role of the great powers in the international system (p. 161). That consistency is what enabled Singapore to be on the winning side of the Cold War, although the agency of contingency continues to shadow the best efforts of all small states that are bent on the quest for survival. “He always stressed the need for Singapore to be nimble and alert to ensure that in any arrangement or shifts in the balance of power it had the preponderant force on its side,” Ang writes (p.160).
This book chronicles the degree of that alertness through the uneasy decades beginning in the 1950s. It offers a detailed account of Lee’s response to the crucial events of the times, including the appearance, course and prospects of the Non-Aligned Movement; the British withdrawal east of Suez; the Vietnam War, as well as the Indochinese refugee problem, the Kampuchean conflict, the Vietnam-Kampuchea conflict, the China-Vietnam war, and the emergence meanwhile of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as a nascently viable regional organization. Intertwined with these regional and global developments is the story of Singapore’s bilateral relations with Malaysia and Indonesia, its two most important neighbors. The end of the Cold War and its effect on relations among the United States, China and Japan are studied as well. In this way, Ang shows how Lee’s obsessive preoccupation with national survival succeeded because it kept pace with the changing flows of international relations, all of them lying beyond the economic, military and political reach of a city-state. Singapore succeeded by being on the winning side of history.
The obvious question raised by Ang’s insistently cerebral book is: Which is the winning side of history today? Anticipating that question, the book’s penultimate chapter (which concludes its chronological treatment of Lee’s strategic ideas before the last chapter assesses his strategic legacy) mentions the detention in Hong Kong in November 2016 of nine Terrex Infantry Carrier Vehicles belonging to the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) that were enroute from Kaohsiung to Singapore. (The vehicles were released eventually in January 2017.) Many believed that one reason for China’s punitive action was Singapore’s support for the July 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration on the South China Sea (pp. 150-151).
The arbitral tribunal had ruled overwhelmingly in favor of the Philippines, determining that major elements of China’s claim—including its nine-dash line, recent land reclamation activities, and other activities in Philippine waters—were unlawful. China dismissed the ruling as being null and void. In one (admittedly American) assessment, “China may take assertive and inflammatory steps to defend its position. The extent to which China abides by the ruling in the long term, and to which the international community supports and seeks to enforce the ruling, will have consequences for the utility of international law as a tool to ensure the peaceful, stable, and lawful use of the seas going forward.”[2] China made its displeasure clear to Singapore, not so much over the SAF’s traditional training access to Taiwan, from which the Terrex vehicles had been back on their way to Singapore, but over the Republic’s determination to defend its adherence, in word and deed, to the rule of international law that mediated relations equitably among states both large and small.
That one incident brought to the fore questions over the implications of China’s economic and military rise, the countervailing rise of India, the displacement of conventional international wisdom regarding Sino-American ties formed in the wake of the implosion of the Soviet Union, and the strategic positioning of small states in the new global order (or disorder fomented by the American invasion of Iraq, the civil war fomented in Syria, or the failed pacification of Afghanistan). The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 unsettled assumptions about the stability of trans-Atlantic affairs based on deterrent stability achieved between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and Russia (the rump Soviet Union, after all). What Lee, who passed away in 2015, would have made of either the Terrex incident or Russian imperium cannot be known, and Ang correctly avoids posing counterfactuals because they have no historical answers.
However, this book shines cautionary light on the future lurking behind unknown corners with the earthy insights of a statesman who transformed his island-state from idea to reality. Lee’s belief in the fundamental necessity of the international rule of law, the ameliorative role of diplomacy when that necessity fails, military deterrence should diplomacy fail, and defence should deterrence fail, cannot but provide a viable guide for Singapore no matter how the great-power coordinates of international relations change.
Those ideas form the basis of theory. A minor quibble with the book is that it does not pursue the formative concept of pragmatism, which permeated Lee’s strategic choices, to its theoretical conclusion. Pragmatism is a well-defined philosophical position, at least in the American sphere. Its application to international relations is less clear because it does not occupy a recognized position among the meta-theories of Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism or their offshoots. Yet, the theories and their mutations must be pragmatic ultimately in the sense of being able to further national interests, however defined. How did Lee’s pragmatism do this for Singapore? How, therefore, should pragmatism define Singapore’s strategic choices today, primarily between American imperium and Chinese revisionism?
These are the questions that Ang Cheng Guan might well consider for his next book.
Asad Latif is an editorial writer for The Straits Times, Singapore. He is the Co-General Editor of the 50-volume Singapore Chronicles series, and the author of several books, including Between Rising Powers: China, Singapore and India (2007), Three Sides in Search of a Triangle: Singapore-America-India Relations (2008), India in the Making of Singapore (2008), and Lim Kim San: A Builder of Singapore (2009). He graduated with Honours in English from Presidency College in Kolkata, was a Chevening Scholar in History at Cambridge, and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard. He served on the editorial committee of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs and was a member of the president’s committee of the Cambridge Union Society, the university debating club.
[1] Bilahari Kausikan, “A ‘happy mistake’: Bilahari Kausikan on Singapore’s biggest foreign policy blunder,” The Straits Times, January 21, 2020, https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/a-happy-mistake-bilahari-kausikan-on-singapores-biggest-foreign-policy-blunder
[2] Caitlin Campbell and Nargiza Salidjanova, “South China Sea Arbitration Ruling: What Happened and What’s Next?,” US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, July 12, 2016, https://www.uscc.gov/research/south-china-sea-arbitration-ruling-what-happened-and-whats-next
