Lee Kuan Yew's Strategic Thought

Ang Cheng Guan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135122676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Lee Kuan Yew, as the founding father of independent Singapore, has had an enormous impact on the development of Singapore and of Southeast Asia more generally. Even in his 80s he is a key figure who continues to exert considerable influence from behind the scenes. This book presents a comprehensive overview of Lee Kuan Yew's strategic thought. It charts the development of Singapore over the last six decades, showing how Lee Kuan Yew has steered Singapore to prosperity and success through changing times. It analyses the factors underlying Lee Kuan Yew's thinking, discusses his own writings and speeches, and shows how his thinking on foreign policy, security and international relations has evolved over time.

Part I The Cold War years

1 From the 1950s to the mid-1970s

DOI: 10.4324/9780203075890-3

“The foreign policy of Singapore must ensure, regardless of the nature of the government it has from time to time that this migrant community that brought in life, vitality, enterprise from many parts of the world should always find an oasis here whatever happens in the surrounding environment”¹

“… a capacity to anticipate, and if the unanticipated takes place, to have enough resilience to over the ‘unanticipated’ … That’s the most difficult … And it is this capacity to meet changing circumstances which is critical”²

There is not much information on Lee Kuan Yew’s views on international politics and foreign affairs before August 1965 as compared to the period after. However, it is still possible to get some insight into his strategic thought in the earlier period. He was a law undergraduate in Cambridge between 1946 and 1950. Returning to Singapore in August 1950, Lee got involved in local politics and formed the People’s Action Party (PAP) in 1954.³ Singapore achieved internal self-government in 1959 but foreign policy and defence remained under the purview of Whitehall until 1963 when Singapore merged with the Federation of Malaya to form Malaysia. From 1963 until Singapore’s independence in August 1965, foreign policy and defence were controlled by Kuala Lumpur, and not by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, although Lee did have some leeway in expressing his views and establishing personal ties with foreign leaders which more often than not contributed to tensions between him and the federal government.⁴

On the nature of international politics pre-August 1965

Two events in 1956 shed some light on Lee’s thinking on international relations – the Anglo–French–Israeli invasion of Egypt (also known as the Suez Crisis) and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. With regards to the former, Lee approved of the American response to the Anglo–French–Israeli invasion of Egypt which had “shocked and angered the whole non-European world” and was “a reminder of the perfidy and ruthlessness of the gun-boat policy of the imperialist powers of a bygone age”. According to Lee, “fortunately, for the peace of the world, the Americans refused to support Britain and France, but instead joined the rest of the world in condemning the blatant act of aggression. … The Egyptian blocking of the Canal symbolized the end of the gunboat age for Britain and France”. As for the invasion of Hungary which he described as a “bloody and brutal armed suppression of Hungarian patriots”, Lee noted that “history may well mark this event as the turning point of Soviet Communism in the West and perhaps in the whole world. Never before has any single event in the Communist world split the Communist parties of Europe as Russia’s cruel action in Hungary has done…”⁵.

To Lee, foreign or external affairs were “a matter of life and death” and were “an extension of domestic affairs” – “what we say and what we do in the field of foreign politics is so often the external manifestation of our domestic politics, our internal hopes and fears that the embassies that we established … reflected the affinity and identification of political attitudes and political premises”.⁶ In a speech to the International Institute of International Affairs (Australia), which is perhaps his most substantial discourse on this subject pre-August 1965, he said that international affairs were as old as the subject of man.

From the first tribes to the modern nations, man may have learned how to use wood and stone and metal and gunpowder, and now nuclear power. But the essential quality of man had never altered. You can read the Peloponnesian wars, you can read the Three Kingdoms of the Chinese classics, and there’s nothing new which a human situation can devise. The motivations for human behaviour have always been there. The manifestations of the motivations whether they are greed, envy, ambition, greatness, generosity, charity, inevitably ends in a conflict of power position. And how that conflict is resolved depends upon the accident of the individual in charge of a particular tribe or nation at a given time. But what has changed is the facility with which men can now communicate and transport not only ideas but also man himself and his weapons. Therefore, in a very old situation has been introduced a very alarming possibility which puts the whole problem of international relations now in a very different perspective.⁷

To Lee, “no tribe in proximity with another tribe is happy until a state of dominance of one over the other is established. Or until it has tried to establish that dominance, and failed, and it is quite satisfied that it is not possible, whereupon it lives in fear that the other tribe will try to assert dominance over it. And the cavalcade of man will go on …”⁸.

He was to reiterate this point in another speech in 1967 when he said, “one constant theme recurs again and again in the history of tribes and nations – the desire amongst the bigger to compete to become bigger, to extend their influence, their power and to win support”⁹ and especially ascendant powers – “those who are in ascendant want to see the world changed faster and further in their interests”.¹⁰ Developing countries like Singapore which had no “power” would need to “arrange their relationship with the developed countries in order to exercise some influence” in one of two ways: (a) pursue appropriate policies/strategies to tap power and/or (b) coming together to increase their capacity to influence events.¹¹ There was thus much that could be learned from the study of history. He did not believe history was bunk for it “has some relevance to tell us something about the natures of people and their cultures and their societies”¹² and “it should teach us, if we can learn from experience at all, what should be avoided and what more can be done for a better tomorrow”.¹³

His education might also have shaped his early ideas on this subject. An address he delivered in 1967 when he received an honorary doctorate of Law from the Royal University at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, sheds some light. In his speech, he recalled being taught international law by the late Hirsch Lauterpacht, Whewell Professor of International Law, in Cambridge and who later became a member of the International Court of Justice at The Hague. What stuck in his mind was the difference between municipal and international law: “The law of each individual country is binding on all its subjects except the sovereign. The law of the international community has one missing element: enforceable authority. In legal theory, every government of every independent nation is sovereign and supreme”. Recalling the 1962 World Court ruling in favour of Cambodia over the dispute of the Preah Vihear temple, Lee reminded his audience that the ruling was possible only because both the governments of Cambodia and Thailand had first agreed to submit to the jurisdiction of the World Court.

Lee also noted that treaties, “however solemnly entered into between sovereign and independent nations” could be “violated with impunity except where the United Nations intervenes”. He observed that the United Nations (UN), however, had only done so when disputes were between smaller nations. “The decisive sanction is the unpleasant consequence that the other party to the agreement might inflict in retaliation by the use of superior force”. In his assessment, the record of the UN charter established in 1945 in an attempt “to do what the League of Nations at Geneva had failed to achieve” and as “the first steps to covert international morality into international law”, was one of “varying degrees of success”. According to Lee, “we see clearly the realities of power behind the forms of protocol”. If any of the Permanent Five members of the Security Council were involved in a dispute, no resolution can be passed. Even when they are in agreement as in the case of Rhodesia, “sanctions have failed to bite”. And where big powers have a direct or even indirect interest in conflicts between smaller powers, such as the case of Vietnam, no settlement is possible.¹⁴

If the saying “all politics is local” is true, it includes international politics as well. As Lee reminded us on more than one occasion, “whatever the course of the world events, it is only natural that we should be more concerned with the events that will more directly affect our lives”.¹⁵ In a speech entitled, “The Role of Developing Countries in World Politics”, he said:

Inevitably we all see this [changes in the world] in the context of our own immediate position in Asia. When Japan talks of regional co-operation, she means Japan, East and Southeast Asia and Oceana, including Australia and New Zealand. For this is an area in which Japan can play a role. When America and the West talk of countervailing forces, they mean that larger crescent stretching from Pakistan, India, Indonesia, up eastwards on to Japan. When our Indonesian neighbours talk about regional co-operation, they mean Indonesia, and the smaller countries of South and Southeast Asia, not including India or Pakistan to the west, nor Japan to the north or Australia and New Zealand to the south.¹⁶

As a young lawyer, Lee assisted in defending the members of the University Socialist Club (USC)/Fajar editorial board who were charged with sedition for publishing an article entitled “Aggression in Asia” which condemned the formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO).¹⁷ Lee was personally critical of SEATO. “SEATO is nonsense”.¹⁸ When asked whether SEATO was an adequate framework for Southeast Asian security, Lee noted that SEATO was inferior to NATO,

… And until you convince Asia that you consider Asia as important to you, as Americans, as Europe is to America, you are going to find lots of Asians like me rather critical and really doubting because ninety per cent of you have come from Europe; you understand Europe better than you understand Asia.¹⁹

In a talk he gave in 1959, Lee observed that since the end of the Second World War, “the political face of Asia has undergone more change than during any other equivalent period in Asian history. Events have taken place which are likely in the next few decades to shift the centre of gravity from Europe and the West to Asia and the East”. He believed that “the massive potential greatness of India and China” would dominate the Asian scene” and “what happens to the rest of Asia” was bound to affect Malaya, including Singapore. In one of his earliest analyses of the development of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, Lee was of the view that if there were a free-for-all in Malaya, it might be possible that a movement of the Chinese urban proletariat could assume power and dictate the course of the revolution. But this was impossible as the British and the Americans “would never allow a free-for-all in Malaya”. If Communist China and the Soviet Union were prepared to intervene, as in Indo–China, and throw their weight on the communist side, then the position would be different and a small militant party might succeed in capturing power. But they are not “and will never be so stupid as to intervene”. Beijing wanted to win over 80 million Indonesians, and many more millions of the uncommitted people in Southeast Asia. “And nothing is more likely to make the Southeast Asian countries more anti-communist than the spectacle of China coming to the aid of Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia”.

Thus Lee believed that “the immediate danger to Malaya is not Communism but Communalism … There can be no Communist Malaya until there is a Malay-led Malayan Communist Party” because it was the Malay peasantry and not the Chinese urban proletariat who determined the pace. And there was no likelihood of any significant Malay-educated elite becoming disgruntled in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the communal tensions could easily increase. In his words, “there are bound to be groups who are prepared to exploit the dissatisfaction of the urban Chinese by making communal appeals. On the other hand, the Malay sector is equally opened to exploitation by communal and, this is more serious, by religious appeals …”. Answering the question of whether the existence of a left-wing government elected by a largely urban Chinese population in Singapore would aggravate or alleviate the situation, he suggested that the answer depended upon how the Government in Singapore conducted its affairs, whether it pandered to Chinese chauvinism_ “For there is no possible way of ensuring that the Singapore situation can be isolated from the Federation”.²⁰

On Singapore–Malaya–Indonesia relations

Singapore’s most important relationships are with the Federation of Malaya (later, Malaysia) and Indonesia which “geography ordains that we shall always be neighbours”.²¹ With regards to Singapore’s relations with Indonesia and the Federation of Malaya, Lee had this to say which is as true today as in 1959:

There is no doubt that with better relations with our neighbours, like Indonesia our trade may still increase. But we would be blind if we did not recognize the tremendous change in the pattern of trade and commerce in Southeast Asia. Both our two closest neighbours – the Federation of Malaya and Indonesia – have, not unnaturally, since they attained their independence, set themselves out to build their own industries. They want to establish their own trade lines with foreign countries without having to go through the merchants and brokers in Singapore.²² We must adjust our position before they begin to succeed in doing this. It is unlikely we shall be able to support our ever increasing population just by trade alone.

In sum, “cooperation and not competition is what is needed between Singapore and the Federation in the fields of commerce, industry and finance. When our relationship with the Federation has been settled and improved, as they already have been with the Republic of Indonesia, we shall be able to formulate our policy on trade with China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand”.²³

To Lee Kuan Yew, “but for the accidents of colonial history”, the relationships of Singapore–Federation of Malaya–Indonesia “might well have been much closer together … There is nothing that the people of Singapore would like more than to have friendly and closer relations in cultural and trade matters with our second closest neighbour – the Republic of Indonesia. We are a small island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula. To the north is the Federation of Malaya; to the south, east and west lie the myriads of islands of the Republic of Indonesia. And, on a clear day, from my office, I can see across the sea the islands which are part of Indonesia, just a few miles away”. He assured the Indonesians that “we will not allow anything detrimental to the security of Indonesia to be committed in any territory over which we have control”.²⁴

Unfortunately, relations with Indonesia took a dive as a consequence of Singapore (together with Sabah and Sarawak) merging with the Federation of Malaya to form Malaysia in 1963. Much has been written on various aspects of the Confrontation (1963–1966) as well as the roles of Sukarno, Subandrio, Tengku Abdul Rahman, President Macapagal of the Philippines and US President Kennedy. H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The Cold War years
• Part II The post-Cold War years
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index