SG-L-12: The Foreign Policy Essays — Singapore's Leaders on the World Stage

Document Code: SG-L-12 Full Title: The Foreign Policy Essays: Speeches, Articles, and Intellectual Contributions by Singapore's Leaders on International Order, Great-Power Relations, and Small-State Survival Coverage Period: 1972–2026 Level Designation: Level 4 Anthology Status: [COMPLETE] Version Date: 2026-03-31

Primary Sources Consulted:

1. S. Rajaratnam, "Singapore: Global City," speech at the Singapore Press Club, 6 February 1972, reprinted in Chan Heng Chee and Obaid ul Haq, eds., The Prophetic and the Political: Selected Speeches and Writings of S. Rajaratnam (Singapore: Graham Brash, 1987; reprinted ISEAS, 2007)
2. S. Rajaratnam, selected speeches and writings in Kwa Chong Guan, ed., S Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality (Singapore: World Scientific, 2006)
3. Lee Kuan Yew, "Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew," interview by Fareed Zakaria, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 2 (March/April 1994), pp. 109–126
4. Kim Dae-jung, "Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia's Anti-Democratic Values," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 6 (November/December 1994), pp. 189–194
5. Lee Kuan Yew, Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going, interviews by Han Fook Kwang et al. (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2011)
6. Lee Kuan Yew, One Man's View of the World (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2013)
7. Graham Allison, Robert D. Blackwill, and Ali Wyne, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013)
8. Lee Hsien Loong, "The Endangered Asian Century," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 99, No. 4 (July/August 2020), pp. 52–64
9. Lee Hsien Loong, speech and dialogue at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, moderated by Evan Osnos, 25 October 2017
10. Goh Chok Tong, "The Asian Economic Crisis: Challenges for the US," speech to the US Chamber of Commerce, Washington, DC, 22 September 1998
11. Goh Chok Tong, speech at the Asia Society, New York, 22 November 2001
12. Lawrence Wong, "A Safe Harbour in a Turbulent World," S. Rajaratnam Lecture, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Singapore, 16 April 2025
13. Lawrence Wong, speech at the Bo'ao Forum for Asia Annual Conference, 26 March 2026
14. Bilahari Kausikan, Singapore Is Not an Island: Views on Singapore Foreign Policy (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2017)
15. Irene Ng, The Singapore Lion: A Biography of S. Rajaratnam (Singapore: ISEAS, 2010)
16. Kishore Mahbubani, Can Asians Think? (Singapore: Times Books International, 1998; expanded edition, Marshall Cavendish, 2009)
17. Tommy Koh, The Tommy Koh Reader: Favourite Essays and Lectures (Singapore: World Scientific, 2013)
18. Chan Heng Chee, A Sensation of Independence: David Marshall, A Political Biography (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984)
19. Amitav Acharya, Singapore's Foreign Policy: The Search for Regional Order (Singapore: World Scientific, 2008)
20. Ang Cheng Guan, Singapore, ASEAN and the Cambodian Conflict 1978–1991 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013)

Related Documents:

• SG-F-01: Foundations of Foreign Policy
• SG-F-02: Singapore and the United States
• SG-F-03: Singapore and China
• SG-F-07: ASEAN
• SG-F-12: US-China Rivalry
• SG-F-15: Bilahari Kausikan
• SG-F-18: Kishore Mahbubani
• SG-L-01: National Day Rally Speeches
• SG-L-03: Crisis Speeches
• SG-L-06: The Case for Pragmatism
• SG-L-11: The Practitioner's Pen — Economic Essays by Singapore's Leaders
• SG-H-PM-01: Lee Kuan Yew — Founding Prime Minister
• SG-H-PM-03: Lee Hsien Loong — Third Prime Minister
• SG-H-PM-04: Lawrence Wong — Fourth Prime Minister
• SG-H-DPM-02: S. Rajaratnam — Ideologist and Foreign Minister
• SG-M-03: Vulnerability as Governance Philosophy
• SG-N-01: International Perceptions of Singapore

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1. Key Takeaways

• Singapore's foreign policy essay tradition constitutes a distinct intellectual genre in international affairs. From S. Rajaratnam's "Singapore: Global City" (1972) to Lawrence Wong's "A Safe Harbour in a Turbulent World" (2025), successive prime ministers and foreign ministers have used speeches, journal articles, and books not merely to announce policy but to construct an analytical framework for small-state survival. These texts are notable for their directness, their willingness to name structural constraints, and their repeated insistence that Singapore's existence is contingent rather than guaranteed. No comparable tradition exists among peer small states.

• Rajaratnam's 1972 "Global City" speech was the founding document of Singapore's foreign policy imagination. Delivered just seven years after independence, it rejected the conventional wisdom that a city-state needed a territorial hinterland and argued instead that "the world is our hinterland." Drawing on Arnold Toynbee's concept of the Ecumenopolis — a global city linked by technology and trade — Rajaratnam proposed that Singapore's survival lay in plugging into worldwide networks of commerce, information, and culture. The speech was prescient: its logic anticipated globalisation theory by two decades and remains the conceptual foundation of Singapore's open-economy strategy.

• Lee Kuan Yew's 1994 Foreign Affairs interview, "Culture Is Destiny," was the single most influential articulation of the "Asian values" thesis. In conversation with Fareed Zakaria, Lee argued that East Asian societies prioritised communal order over individual rights and that Western-style liberal democracy was culturally specific rather than universal. The interview provoked a direct rebuttal from Kim Dae-jung in Foreign Affairs later that year, arguing that democratic values were not Western but universal. The exchange became the defining text of the Asian values debate and shaped Western perceptions of Singapore — and of Lee himself — for a generation.

• Lee Kuan Yew's late-career books — Hard Truths (2011), One Man's View of the World (2013), and The Grand Master's Insights (2013) — functioned as strategic assessments by a statesman without portfolio. These works offered frank evaluations of China's rise, America's relative decline, India's democratic inefficiencies, and Europe's welfare-state rigidities. They were read avidly by policymakers in Washington, Beijing, and New Delhi precisely because Lee was seen as the last practitioner of classical realist statecraft: unsentimental, data-driven, and unburdened by electoral pressures. Collectively, they codified the "Lee Kuan Yew school" of geopolitical analysis.

• Lee Hsien Loong's 2020 Foreign Affairs essay, "The Endangered Asian Century," was the most significant foreign policy article by a sitting Singapore prime minister. Published as US-China tensions escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic, the 4,200-word piece argued that the Asian century was not inevitable and could be derailed by great-power confrontation. Lee warned that Southeast Asian nations would not accept being forced to choose between Washington and Beijing, and that China could not replace the United States as the region's security guarantor. The article was the most-read piece on the Foreign Affairs website on the day of its publication.

• Goh Chok Tong's foreign policy speeches, though less celebrated, performed critical diplomatic work during the Asian Financial Crisis and the post-9/11 period. His September 1998 address to the US Chamber of Commerce reframed the crisis as a governance failure rather than a repudiation of the "Asian model," defending market-oriented development while acknowledging the need for regulatory reform. His post-September 11 speeches articulated Singapore's position as a Muslim-minority state combating terrorism while maintaining interfaith harmony — a message directed simultaneously at Washington, the Islamic world, and domestic audiences.

• Lawrence Wong's 2025 S. Rajaratnam Lecture marked the fourth generation's entry into the foreign policy essay tradition. "A Safe Harbour in a Turbulent World" diagnosed the international rules-based order as being under unprecedented strain from great-power rivalry, economic fragmentation, and technological disruption. Wong argued that Singapore must actively work to preserve the multilateral system rather than passively benefiting from it — a subtle shift from the founding generation's emphasis on adaptation to a new emphasis on institutional stewardship. His 2026 Bo'ao Forum speech extended this theme to Asian multilateralism.

• A persistent theme across all four prime ministers' foreign policy writings is the structural vulnerability of a small state in an anarchic international system. Rajaratnam's "Global City" was premised on vulnerability; Lee Kuan Yew's realism was shaped by the trauma of separation and confrontation; Lee Hsien Loong's "Endangered Asian Century" explicitly warned against complacency; Wong's "Safe Harbour" argued that the rules-based order that protected small states was fraying. The vulnerability thesis — that Singapore's survival is never assured and must be constantly earned through strategic positioning — is the through-line connecting 1972 to 2026.

• These essays collectively reveal a distinctive Singaporean theory of international relations: small-state realism tempered by institutional multilateralism. Singapore's leaders have consistently argued that power politics is the fundamental reality of the international system, that great powers will pursue their interests regardless of norms, and that small states survive only by being useful to larger powers while maintaining a credible defence. Yet they have also argued, with increasing urgency from the 2010s onward, that rules-based institutions and multilateral trade regimes serve as force-multipliers for small states. This synthesis — realism about power, activism about institutions — defines the Singaporean foreign policy tradition.

• The audience for these essays has been as significant as their content. Rajaratnam spoke to a domestic audience needing a post-independence vision. Lee Kuan Yew spoke to the Western intellectual establishment through Foreign Affairs and elite publishers. Lee Hsien Loong spoke to both Washington and Beijing simultaneously. Wong spoke to the post-liberal-order world. In each case, the choice of venue, language, and publication platform was itself a diplomatic act — a small state projecting intellectual authority far beyond its territorial weight.

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2. The Record in Brief — A Tradition of Strategic Argument

Singapore's foreign policy essay tradition is unusual for a state of 734 square kilometres. Most small countries do not produce a substantial body of original strategic writing by their leaders. They react to the international environment; they do not theorise about it. Singapore is different. From the founding generation onward, the republic's prime ministers and foreign ministers have treated the written and spoken word as an instrument of statecraft — not as decoration for policy but as the medium through which policy is articulated, defended, and projected to external audiences whose goodwill and engagement Singapore requires for survival.

The tradition begins with S. Rajaratnam, Singapore's first foreign minister (1965–1980) and the intellectual architect of the country's external orientation. Rajaratnam was a journalist before he was a politician, and his instinct for the essay-as-argument shaped the early years of Singapore's diplomatic communication. His speeches were not bureaucratic recitations of policy positions but sustained analytical performances — attempts to convince his listeners, whether domestic or foreign, that Singapore's approach to the world was grounded in a coherent philosophy rather than mere expedience. "Singapore: Global City," delivered in February 1972, was the exemplary instance: a speech that functioned as a manifesto, a theoretical proposition, and a strategic signpost simultaneously (see SG-H-DPM-02).

Lee Kuan Yew brought a different but complementary register. Where Rajaratnam was the visionary essayist, Lee was the polemicist and the debater. His preferred format was the interview, the dialogue, and the frank assessment — modes in which his combative intelligence was most effectively displayed. The 1994 Foreign Affairs interview with Fareed Zakaria was Lee in his element: provocation leavened with evidence, sweeping claims about civilisation backed by specific policy outcomes. In his later years, Lee shifted to the book-length assessment — One Man's View of the World (2013) and the Graham Allison-edited Grand Master's Insights (2013) — which allowed him to range across the entire global strategic landscape with the authority of five decades in power (see SG-H-PM-01).

Goh Chok Tong, the second prime minister (1990–2004), is the least remembered contributor to this tradition, but his foreign policy speeches during the Asian Financial Crisis and the post-September 11 period performed diplomatic work of considerable sophistication. Goh's style was less intellectually flamboyant than Lee's or Rajaratnam's — he was the diplomat-manager rather than the philosopher-king — but his ability to speak simultaneously to American, Asian, and domestic audiences during moments of acute crisis made his speeches essential texts of Singapore's diplomatic repertoire (see SG-H-PM-02).

Lee Hsien Loong elevated the tradition to a new level of international visibility. His 2020 Foreign Affairs essay, "The Endangered Asian Century," was published in one of the world's most influential policy journals at a moment when the US-China relationship was at its most fraught since normalisation. The essay's impact was amplified by its timing — mid-pandemic, mid-trade war — and by Lee's unique credibility as the leader of a country positioned precisely at the intersection of American and Chinese strategic interests. The piece was not merely commentary; it was an act of diplomatic positioning, a public argument directed at both great powers simultaneously (see SG-H-PM-03).

Lawrence Wong, who assumed the premiership in May 2024, entered the tradition with his S. Rajaratnam Lecture of April 2025. "A Safe Harbour in a Turbulent World" signalled continuity with the founding generation's strategic realism while introducing new emphases — institutional stewardship, active multilateralism, the defence of rules-based order not as an inherited benefit but as a project requiring sustained effort. His 2026 Bo'ao Forum speech extended these themes to the Asian context, addressing Chinese and regional audiences directly (see SG-H-PM-04).

Alongside these principal voices, a supporting cast of diplomat-intellectuals has enriched the tradition. Bilahari Kausikan, permanent secretary at MFA (2010–2013), has produced a body of essays and speeches — collected in Singapore Is Not an Island (2017) — that articulate the realist underpinnings of Singapore's foreign policy with a bluntness that serving politicians cannot always afford (see SG-F-15). Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (2004–2017), has written prolifically on Asian-Western relations, ASEAN's role, and the limits of Western universalism — most notably in Can Asians Think? (1998) and Has the West Lost It? (2018) (see SG-F-18). Tommy Koh, ambassador-at-large and Singapore's chief negotiator at the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, has contributed essays on international law, multilateral diplomacy, and the rights of small states. These figures extend the essay tradition beyond the prime ministerial office, creating a broader intellectual infrastructure for Singapore's engagement with the world.

What follows is a chronological examination of the major texts in this tradition, assessed not merely as statements of policy but as intellectual contributions to the theory and practice of small-state foreign policy.

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3. S. Rajaratnam — "Singapore: Global City" (1972)

On 6 February 1972, S. Rajaratnam stood before the Singapore Press Club and delivered a speech that would define his country's external orientation for the next half-century. "Singapore: Global City" was not a policy address in the conventional sense. It was a philosophical proposition: that Singapore, a city-state without natural resources or a territorial hinterland, could survive and prosper by becoming a new kind of entity in the international system — what Rajaratnam called a "Global City."

The intellectual scaffolding of the speech drew on Arnold Toynbee's concept of the Ecumenopolis — the idea, advanced in Toynbee's later work, that urbanisation and technological change were creating a single, interconnected global city. Rajaratnam adapted this concept to Singapore's specific circumstances. Where Toynbee was describing a macro-historical trend, Rajaratnam was prescribing a survival strategy. If the world was becoming a single interconnected city, then Singapore — already a city, already a node in global trade networks — was better positioned than most to thrive in this new environment. The speech's most quoted line captured this logic with characteristic economy: "The world is our hinterland."

The phrase was more than a rhetorical flourish. It was a direct rebuttal of the conventional wisdom — held by many economists and political scientists in the early 1970s — that city-states were anachronisms, that sovereign entities of Singapore's size could not survive without integration into larger political units or dependence on a proximate territorial hinterland. Albert Winsemius, the Dutch economist who served as Singapore's chief economic adviser, had warned that the entrepot model was insufficient for long-term survival. Rajaratnam's response was not to deny the problem but to redefine the solution: Singapore would not seek a regional hinterland; it would create a global one.

The speech was delivered at a specific historical moment. Singapore was seven years into independence, the British military withdrawal east of Suez was underway, and the Vietnam War was reshaping the regional security environment. ASEAN, founded in 1967, was still a fragile institution. Indonesia under Suharto had ended Konfrontasi but remained an uncertain neighbour. In this context, Rajaratnam's vision of a Global City was both aspirational and defensive — an attempt to imagine a future for Singapore that did not depend on the goodwill of any single regional power.

The speech also contained a prescient analysis of the emerging knowledge economy. Rajaratnam argued that in the Global City, "the most important natural resource is trained and skilled manpower" — an argument that anticipated human capital theory's dominance in development economics by at least a decade. He proposed that Singapore should become a centre for "brain services" — finance, logistics, information processing — rather than manufacturing alone. This was not yet government policy in 1972; Goh Keng Swee's industrialisation drive was still emphasising labour-intensive manufacturing. But Rajaratnam's speech laid the conceptual groundwork for the shift to high-value services that would define Singapore's economy from the 1980s onward (see SG-L-11).

The "Global City" speech was not widely noticed outside Singapore at the time. It was a domestic address to a domestic audience. But its influence within the Singapore policy establishment was profound. Chan Heng Chee and Obaid ul Haq included it as a centrepiece of their 1987 edited collection The Prophetic and the Political, and Kwa Chong Guan gave it similar prominence in S Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality (2006). By the 2000s, "the world is our hinterland" had become one of the most frequently cited phrases in Singaporean political discourse — a shorthand for the entire open-economy strategy that had, by then, made Singapore one of the wealthiest countries in the world per capita.

Rajaratnam's broader body of foreign policy writing extended well beyond this single speech. As foreign minister from 1965 to 1980, he articulated Singapore's positions on non-alignment, ASEAN cooperation, and the Cold War balance of power in dozens of speeches at the United Nations, at ASEAN ministerial meetings, and at international forums. His 1967 speech at the signing of the Bangkok Declaration — the founding document of ASEAN — emphasised that regional cooperation must be based on mutual respect for sovereignty and non-interference, principles that would become the normative foundation of ASEAN's diplomatic culture (see SG-F-07). His writings on communalism, nationalism, and the challenges of multiracial governance connected foreign policy to domestic nation-building in ways that anticipated the "comprehensive security" concept later adopted by ASEAN.

What distinguished Rajaratnam from his contemporaries in the Non-Aligned Movement and the post-colonial world was his refusal of sentimentality. He did not romanticise Third World solidarity or anti-colonial struggle. He was clear-eyed about power, about the limits of small-state influence, and about the necessity of engaging with the great powers on terms that served Singapore's interests rather than satisfying ideological commitments. In this, he anticipated the pragmatic realism that would become the hallmark of Singaporean foreign policy under all four prime ministers (see SG-M-03).

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4. Lee Kuan Yew — "Culture Is Destiny" and the Asian Values Debate (1994)

In March 1994, Foreign Affairs published an interview that would become one of the most debated texts in post-Cold War international relations. "Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew," conducted by Fareed Zakaria, ran in volume 73, number 2, of the journal and presented Lee's views on democracy, culture, and the future of Asia with a frankness that was unusual even by his standards.

The interview took place against a backdrop of mounting Western triumphalism. The Cold War had ended; Francis Fukuyama had declared "the end of history"; democratisation was sweeping Eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia. In this context, the question of whether East Asian societies — many of which had achieved spectacular economic growth under authoritarian or semi-authoritarian governments — would or should converge on Western liberal democracy was among the most contested issues in political science and international relations.

Lee's answer was unequivocal: they would not, and they should not be expected to. The interview's key passages advanced several interconnected arguments. First, Lee contended that cultural differences between East Asia and the West were deep, historically rooted, and consequential for political organisation. East Asian societies, shaped by Confucian values, placed greater emphasis on communal well-being, social order, and respect for authority than Western societies shaped by the Enlightenment tradition of individual rights. Second, Lee argued that "the expansion of the rights of the individual" in the West had "come at the expense of orderly society" — pointing to rising crime rates, family breakdown, drug abuse, and homelessness in American cities as evidence that unfettered individualism produced social pathology. Third, he insisted that economic development, not political liberalisation, was the priority for Asian societies, and that authoritarian governance — if competent and corruption-free — could deliver development more effectively than democratic contestation.

Zakaria's questions were probing, and the interview's power derived in part from the tension between interviewer and subject. Zakaria pressed Lee on whether cultural arguments were merely a rationalisation for authoritarian rule. Lee responded with characteristic directness: "I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe that what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy." He acknowledged that Singapore's model was not replicable everywhere, but he was unapologetic about its results: high growth, low crime, excellent public services, and social stability.

The interview also addressed the United States' role in Asia. Lee supported the American security presence in the region — "the US is not a hegemon in the way that a China or a Japan would be" — while being sharply critical of American domestic social trends. This dual stance — welcome American power, reject American social norms — captured a tension that would define Singapore's relationship with the United States for the next three decades (see SG-F-02).

The reaction was immediate and intense. In the November/December 1994 issue of Foreign Affairs, Kim Dae-jung — then South Korea's leading opposition figure and future president — published a direct rebuttal titled "Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia's Anti-Democratic Values." Kim argued that Asian history contained robust democratic traditions, that Confucianism was not inherently anti-democratic, and that Lee's cultural arguments served the interests of authoritarian elites rather than reflecting any authentic Asian consensus. The Kim-Lee exchange became the canonical text of the Asian values debate, assigned in university courses on comparative politics and international relations worldwide.

The scholarly assessment of "Culture Is Destiny" has evolved over time. In the 1990s, during the high tide of the Asian values argument, the interview was taken seriously as a challenge to Western universalism. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–1998 damaged the credibility of the "Asian model" and, by extension, the Asian values thesis, as governments that had championed authoritarian development — Indonesia's Suharto most dramatically — collapsed under the weight of economic mismanagement and corruption. By the 2000s, many scholars dismissed Asian values as a self-serving ideology of illiberal elites.

But the debate did not end. The rise of China in the 2010s — achieving sustained high growth under one-party rule while Western democracies struggled with financial crises, populism, and political dysfunction — gave new life to Lee's core proposition that cultural context matters for governance outcomes. Scholars such as Daniel Bell (The China Model, 2015) and Kishore Mahbubani (Has the West Lost It?, 2018) revisited the terrain that Lee had mapped in 1994, arguing that the Western democratic model was neither universal nor self-evidently superior. Lee himself, in his late-career interviews and books, returned repeatedly to the themes of the 1994 interview, noting with evident satisfaction that the trajectory of events had vindicated his scepticism about Western democratic triumphalism.

The "Culture Is Destiny" interview also established a model for how Singapore's leaders would engage with the American foreign policy establishment. By publishing in Foreign Affairs — the house journal of the Council on Foreign Relations and arguably the most influential policy journal in the English-speaking world — Lee ensured that his arguments reached the audience that mattered most: the American policymaking elite. This was not accidental. Singapore's survival depended on American engagement in Asia, and the ability to speak directly to American decision-makers through their own intellectual channels was a strategic asset. Lee Hsien Loong would follow the same playbook twenty-six years later with "The Endangered Asian Century."

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5. Lee Kuan Yew — The Grand Strategist's Late Writings (2011–2013)

In the final years of his active intellectual life — between stepping down as Minister Mentor in May 2011 and his declining health from 2014 onward — Lee Kuan Yew produced or contributed to three major works that functioned as his strategic testament. These were not memoirs in the conventional sense, though they contained autobiographical elements. They were assessments of the world as Lee saw it from the vantage point of nearly six decades in power, and they were consumed avidly by policymakers, academics, and strategists worldwide precisely because Lee was perceived as one of the last practitioners of classical realist statecraft.

Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going (2011), produced through extended interviews with a team of Straits Times journalists led by Han Fook Kwang, was the most domestically focused of the three. But it contained significant foreign policy content. Lee offered assessments of China's trajectory — he predicted that China's rise would be the defining fact of the twenty-first century but cautioned that internal governance challenges, including corruption and regional inequality, could derail the process. He discussed the US-China relationship with a frankness that reflected his personal relationships with every American president from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama. He was characteristically blunt about India: "a nation of unfulfilled greatness," whose democratic system, in his view, made decisive economic reform nearly impossible. These assessments were quoted extensively in policy circles in Washington, Beijing, and New Delhi.

One Man's View of the World (2013), published by Straits Times Press, was the most comprehensive of Lee's late works. Organised by country and region, it offered chapter-length assessments of China, the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, India, and Southeast Asia. The book's tone was that of the veteran strategist surveying the global landscape without diplomatic constraint — Lee was no longer in government and felt free to say what serving leaders could not. On China, he argued that Beijing's leaders understood that they could not challenge American hegemony directly and would instead pursue a strategy of gradual displacement, building economic influence while avoiding military confrontation. On the United States, he warned that partisan gridlock, fiscal profligacy, and immigration politics were eroding America's competitive advantages. On Europe, he was dismissive of the welfare state's sustainability and sceptical of the European Union's capacity for strategic coherence.

The book's most notable feature was its treatment of China. Lee argued that China's rise was historically unprecedented — "the biggest player in the history of the world" — and that the Western expectation that economic growth would inevitably produce political liberalisation was mistaken. He believed that the Chinese Communist Party would adapt rather than reform, maintaining one-party rule while allowing sufficient economic freedom to sustain growth. This assessment, which seemed contrarian in 2013, proved prescient under Xi Jinping's consolidation of power from 2012 onward.

Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World (2013), edited by Graham Allison, Robert D. Blackwill, and Ali Wyne of Harvard's Belfer Center, was a different kind of work — a curated compilation of Lee's statements on geopolitical topics, drawn from speeches, interviews, and writings across several decades and organised thematically. Its publication by MIT Press gave it academic credibility and ensured wide distribution in university and policy research settings. The book's format — pithy quotes organised under topical headings such as "The Future of China," "The Future of the United States," "The Future of India," and "War and Peace" — made it highly accessible and endlessly quotable. Henry Kissinger's foreword described Lee as "one of the asymmetries of the world" — a leader of a small country who was consulted by the leaders of great powers.

The Grand Master's Insights volume was particularly influential in Washington. Allison and Blackwill were senior figures in the American foreign policy establishment — Allison as the author of Essence of Decision and director of the Belfer Center, Blackwill as a former ambassador to India and deputy national security adviser. Their imprimatur on the volume signalled to the American policy community that Lee's views were worth serious attention, and the book became a standard reference in courses on Asian security at Harvard, Georgetown, and the National War College.

Taken together, these three works constituted Lee Kuan Yew's final contribution to the foreign policy essay tradition he had helped create. They were read not as the reflections of a retired politician but as the strategic assessments of a practitioner whose track record lent his analysis unique authority. The fact that a leader of a country with a population smaller than many American metropolitan areas could command this level of attention from the global strategic community was itself a testament to the power of the Singaporean foreign policy essay tradition — and to the extraordinary personal brand that Lee had built over half a century of statecraft (see SG-H-PM-01).

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6. Lee Hsien Loong — "The Endangered Asian Century" (2020)

The July/August 2020 issue of Foreign Affairs carried a 4,200-word essay by Lee Hsien Loong that would become the most widely read article on the journal's website on the day of its publication. "The Endangered Asian Century" appeared at a moment of acute geopolitical tension: the COVID-19 pandemic was raging, US-China relations had deteriorated to their worst point since the normalisation of relations in 1979, and the international rules-based order that had underwritten Asia's decades of growth appeared to be fraying. Lee's essay was an attempt to articulate the perspective of Southeast Asian states caught in the crossfire of great-power competition — and to warn both Washington and Beijing that their confrontation endangered the entire region.

The essay's central argument was that the "Asian century" — the prospect of sustained economic growth, rising prosperity, and regional integration across the Asia-Pacific — was not inevitable. It depended on a stable US-China relationship, and that relationship was deteriorating rapidly. Lee traced the arc of China's rise within what he called "the Pax Americana" — the American-led security and economic order that had provided the stability within which Asian economies, including China's, had prospered. He noted that Deng Xiaoping's dictum — "hide your strength, bide your time" — was "no longer cited by Chinese leaders," signalling a shift toward a more assertive posture that was generating anxiety across Southeast Asia.

The essay's treatment of Southeast Asian perspectives was its most distinctive contribution. Lee argued that countries in the region did not want to choose between the United States and China and would resist being forced into such a choice. He noted the particular sensitivity of ethnic Chinese minorities in Southeast Asian countries — a factor often overlooked by American and Chinese strategists alike. "Countries with significant Chinese-minority populations are acutely conscious of their multiracial identity," Lee wrote, observing that overt alignment with Beijing could trigger domestic ethnic tensions in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. This passage reflected a depth of regional knowledge that no American or Chinese analyst could have articulated with equal authority (see SG-F-03).

Lee was equally direct about China's limitations as a regional security provider. "Countries in the region will always see China's naval presence as an attempt to advance [maritime] claims," he wrote, referring to Beijing's extensive territorial assertions in the South China Sea. This sentence — blunt, unhedged, and published under the name of a sitting prime minister — carried weight precisely because it was not the opinion of an academic commentator but the assessment of a practitioner whose country maintained close relations with both Washington and Beijing. It was a statement that no American analyst could have made with equal credibility, and no Chinese interlocutor would have accepted from an American source (see SG-F-12).

The essay also addressed the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case for international cooperation. Lee argued that the pandemic demonstrated both the necessity and the fragility of multilateral coordination, and he warned that the politicisation of the pandemic response — with Washington and Beijing trading accusations about the virus's origins — was undermining the institutions and norms needed to address future global challenges. This section of the essay resonated particularly strongly with European and Asian readers who feared that the US-China rivalry was crowding out attention to shared threats.

The choice of Foreign Affairs as the publication venue was deliberate and strategic, following the precedent set by his father's 1994 interview. Foreign Affairs reaches the decision-makers and opinion-formers who shape American foreign policy — congressional staffers, think-tank analysts, State Department and National Security Council officials, and the broader community of international relations scholars. By publishing in the journal, Lee ensured that his arguments entered the American policy debate at the highest level. The essay was discussed in Congressional hearings, cited in think-tank reports, and assigned in university courses on Asian security.

The timing was equally calculated. The essay appeared in July 2020, as the US presidential campaign was intensifying and China policy was becoming a bipartisan issue in American politics. Lee's argument — that confrontation with China would damage American interests as much as Chinese ones, and that Southeast Asian allies would not support a policy of containment — was directed at both the Trump administration and its potential successor. In this sense, "The Endangered Asian Century" was not merely an analytical essay but a diplomatic intervention: a small state's leader using the prestige of an elite publication to influence the domestic policy debate of a great power.

Lee Hsien Loong had also engaged the American foreign policy establishment through other channels. His October 2017 appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, in dialogue with Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, addressed similar themes — US-China dynamics, Singapore's balancing act, the importance of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (from which the Trump administration had recently withdrawn) — but in a more conversational register. The CFR appearance allowed for the kind of nuanced, real-time exchange that a journal article cannot provide, and Lee used the format effectively to convey the complexity of Southeast Asian perspectives to an American audience. The combination of the 2017 CFR dialogue and the 2020 Foreign Affairs essay constituted a sustained campaign of public diplomacy aimed at the American policy elite — an effort to ensure that Singapore's perspective was heard at a moment when the US-China relationship was being reshaped.

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7. Goh Chok Tong and the Crisis Speeches (1997–2003)

Goh Chok Tong's contributions to Singapore's foreign policy essay tradition are less celebrated than those of his predecessor or successors, but they deserve closer examination. Goh served as prime minister from November 1990 to August 2004 — a period that encompassed the Asian Financial Crisis, the September 11 attacks, the Bali bombings, the SARS epidemic, and the Iraq War. Each of these crises demanded diplomatic positioning of considerable delicacy, and Goh's speeches during this period reveal a leader who understood that foreign policy communication was as important as foreign policy substance.

The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–1998 was the defining challenge of Goh's premiership in the foreign policy domain. The crisis began with the collapse of the Thai baht in July 1997 and spread rapidly across Southeast Asia, devastating economies that had been held up as models of successful development. Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand required International Monetary Fund bailouts; Indonesia's Suharto was forced from power in May 1998; the Philippines and Malaysia suffered severe economic contractions. Singapore, though not immune to the downturn, weathered the crisis better than most — its foreign reserves, fiscal surpluses, and conservative banking regulation provided a buffer that most of its neighbours lacked.

Goh's speech to the US Chamber of Commerce on 22 September 1998 — "The Asian Economic Crisis: Challenges for the US" — was his most significant foreign policy address during this period. The speech performed several diplomatic functions simultaneously. First, it defended the Asian development model against the charge, increasingly common in Western commentary, that the crisis demonstrated the fundamental failure of state-led, export-oriented development. Goh argued that the crisis was caused not by the Asian model per se but by specific governance failures: inadequate financial regulation, crony capitalism, and the absence of transparent corporate governance. This distinction was important because it preserved the intellectual legitimacy of the development approach that Singapore itself had followed — while acknowledging the need for reform.

Second, the speech addressed the American audience directly, arguing that the crisis had implications for US interests. Goh pointed out that Asia was America's largest export market, that a prolonged Asian recession would reduce American exports and corporate earnings, and that the political instability generated by economic collapse — most visibly in Indonesia — threatened American security interests in the region. This was not an appeal for sympathy; it was a hardheaded argument that American self-interest required engagement with Asia's recovery. Goh urged the United States to support IMF rescue packages, resist protectionist pressures, and maintain its security commitments in the region.

Third, Goh used the speech to position Singapore as a responsible voice within the region — a country that had avoided the worst of the crisis through sound policy and could therefore speak with authority about what needed to change. This was a delicate balancing act: Goh had to criticise the governance failures of neighbouring states without appearing to lecture them, and he had to appeal to the United States without appearing to side with Washington against his ASEAN partners. The speech navigated these tensions with skill, acknowledging Asian shortcomings while insisting that the crisis was not a reason to abandon the region's development trajectory (see SG-L-03).

The post-September 11 period posed a different set of challenges. Singapore was among the first countries in Southeast Asia to declare support for the United States after the attacks, and it provided intelligence cooperation, port access, and logistical support for American military operations. But Singapore was also a multiracial, multi-religious country with a significant Muslim minority — approximately 15 per cent of the population — and the global "war on terror" risked inflaming communal tensions domestically and damaging Singapore's relationships with Muslim-majority neighbours, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia.

Goh's speeches during this period — including his November 2001 address to the Asia Society in New York — articulated a position of considerable nuance. He supported the American response to the September 11 attacks while insisting that the struggle against terrorism must not be framed as a war between civilisations or religions. He highlighted Singapore's success in maintaining interfaith harmony in a multi-religious society as evidence that Islam and modernity were not incompatible. And he warned that heavy-handed American military action in the Muslim world would fuel radicalisation and undermine the moderate Muslim voices that were the most effective counterforce to extremism.

The arrest of Jemaah Islamiyah operatives in Singapore in December 2001 — members of a cell that had planned attacks on Western diplomatic missions and commercial targets — gave Goh's arguments concrete urgency. Singapore had discovered, through its own intelligence work, that the transnational terror threat was not hypothetical but operational. Goh used this revelation to reinforce his message to American audiences: that terrorism required a coordinated, intelligence-led response rather than a purely military one, and that Southeast Asian partners like Singapore were essential to the effort.

Goh Chok Tong's foreign policy speeches do not have the intellectual ambition of Rajaratnam's "Global City" or the geopolitical sweep of Lee Kuan Yew's late writings. They are the work of a practitioner dealing with immediate crises rather than theorising about the international system. But they demonstrate a quality that is central to the Singaporean foreign policy tradition: the ability to speak to multiple audiences simultaneously — to reassure domestic constituencies, engage great-power interlocutors, and maintain solidarity with regional partners — through carefully calibrated public communication. In this, Goh's crisis speeches belong to the same tradition as Rajaratnam's visionary essays and the younger Lee's analytical interventions, even if they operate in a different register (see SG-H-PM-02).

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8. Lawrence Wong — "A Safe Harbour in a Turbulent World" (2025)

Lawrence Wong's entry into the foreign policy essay tradition came on 16 April 2025, less than a year after he assumed the premiership, when he delivered the S. Rajaratnam Lecture at Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The lecture series, named after the founding foreign minister, is one of the most prestigious platforms for foreign policy address in Singapore's diplomatic calendar, and Wong's choice of it as the venue for his first major foreign policy statement was itself a signal — a declaration of continuity with the intellectual tradition that Rajaratnam had inaugurated.

"A Safe Harbour in a Turbulent World" was both a diagnosis and a prescription. The diagnosis was stark: the international system of rules and norms that had created space for small nations to thrive — the system within which Singapore had grown from a newly independent port city to one of the wealthiest countries in the world — was under unprecedented strain. Wong identified three sources of this strain. First, great-power rivalry — above all the US-China competition — was fracturing the multilateral institutions and trade regimes that small states depended upon. Second, economic fragmentation — the trend toward reshoring, friend-shoring, and industrial policy in the United States and Europe — was undermining the open global economy that Singapore's prosperity required. Third, technological disruption — particularly in artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and digital infrastructure — was creating new arenas of great-power competition and new risks of technological decoupling.

The prescription was equally direct. Wong argued that Singapore could not afford to be a passive beneficiary of the international order; it must be an active defender. This formulation represented a subtle but significant evolution from the founding generation's approach. Rajaratnam and Lee Kuan Yew had emphasised adaptation — the small state's imperative to read the international environment accurately and position itself accordingly. Wong, without repudiating this approach, added a new element: stewardship. Singapore must not only adapt to the rules-based order but work actively to preserve it, through multilateral diplomacy, institutional reform, and coalition-building with like-minded small and medium-sized states.

The lecture's substantive arguments drew on Singapore's experience as a trading nation. Wong cited the country's extensive network of free trade agreements — including the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and bilateral agreements with the European Union, the United States, China, India, and Japan — as evidence of Singapore's investment in the multilateral trading system. He argued that these agreements were not merely commercial instruments but strategic assets: they embedded Singapore in a web of institutional relationships that provided a measure of protection against the vagaries of great-power politics.

Wong also addressed the question of values in foreign policy — a topic that his predecessors had generally approached with caution. He argued that Singapore's foreign policy was grounded not in ideological alignment with any great power but in a commitment to principles: sovereignty, non-interference, the peaceful resolution of disputes, and the rule of law in international relations. These principles, Wong maintained, were not Western or Asian but universal — the minimum conditions for a world in which small states could survive. This was a more explicitly normative stance than Lee Kuan Yew's unsentimental realism or Lee Hsien Loong's strategic pragmatism, and it reflected Wong's recognition that in an era of competing ideological narratives, Singapore needed to articulate what it stood for, not merely what it stood against.

The lecture received extensive coverage in the Singaporean and regional media, and it was noted by the diplomatic community in Washington, Beijing, and Brussels. Its significance lay not only in its content but in its positioning of the fourth-generation leadership. Wong was signalling that Singapore under his premiership would continue to punch above its weight in international affairs — that the foreign policy essay tradition was not a legacy of the founding generation alone but an ongoing practice that each new leader was expected to sustain and renew.

Wong's subsequent appearance at the Bo'ao Forum for Asia Annual Conference on 26 March 2026 extended the themes of the Rajaratnam Lecture to a specifically Asian audience. The Bo'ao Forum, often described as Asia's Davos, is hosted annually on Hainan Island in China and draws senior political, business, and intellectual leaders from across the Asia-Pacific. Wong's speech addressed the challenges of maintaining open economic cooperation in an era of geopolitical competition, and it was directed in part at the Chinese leadership — a message that Singapore valued its economic relationship with China but remained committed to an open, rules-based regional order that was not dominated by any single power. The choice of the Bo'ao Forum as a venue was itself a diplomatic act: it demonstrated Singapore's engagement with Chinese-led multilateral initiatives while implicitly asserting Singapore's independence of judgement (see SG-F-03).

Together, the Rajaratnam Lecture and the Bo'ao speech constituted Wong's opening statement on foreign policy — his attempt to define a distinctive fourth-generation approach that was continuous with the founding vision while responsive to a radically changed international environment. Whether Wong will follow his predecessors into the pages of Foreign Affairs or other elite international publications remains to be seen. But the trajectory is clear: he understands, as his predecessors understood, that for a small state, the ability to articulate a coherent worldview in public is not a luxury but a necessity (see SG-H-PM-04).

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9. Themes Across the Tradition

Across five decades and four prime ministers, Singapore's foreign policy essays reveal a set of recurring themes that amount to a distinctive school of thought in international relations — what might be called Singaporean strategic realism. These themes are not static; they have evolved in emphasis and expression as the international environment has changed. But their core logic has remained remarkably consistent.

The vulnerability premise. The foundational assumption of every major foreign policy text in the Singaporean tradition is that Singapore's survival as an independent state is not guaranteed. Rajaratnam's "Global City" was premised on the recognition that a city-state without natural resources or a territorial hinterland was an anomaly in the international system. Lee Kuan Yew's entire career was shaped by the trauma of separation from Malaysia in 1965 and the Konfrontasi confrontation with Indonesia — experiences that instilled a conviction that small states survive only through constant vigilance, credible defence, and shrewd diplomacy. Lee Hsien Loong's "Endangered Asian Century" explicitly warned against complacency about the regional order. Lawrence Wong's "Safe Harbour" argued that the institutional framework protecting small states was eroding. The vulnerability thesis — that nothing about Singapore's existence can be taken for granted — is the through-line that connects 1972 to 2026 (see SG-M-03).

The balance-of-power imperative. Singapore's leaders have consistently argued that the most dangerous situation for a small state is a unipolar region dominated by a single great power. Rajaratnam sought to ensure that Singapore was not dependent on any single patron. Lee Kuan Yew actively encouraged American engagement in Asia as a counterbalance to Chinese and Japanese influence. Lee Hsien Loong's 2020 essay warned that a US withdrawal from the region would leave Southeast Asian states exposed to Chinese dominance, while a full American confrontation with China would force them into impossible choices. Wong's speeches have emphasised the importance of multiple overlapping regional institutions — ASEAN, APEC, the East Asia Summit — as mechanisms for preventing any single power from dominating the regional order. The consistent message is that Singapore thrives in a multipolar or balanced environment and is endangered by unchecked hegemony from any direction (see SG-F-01).

The utility doctrine. A distinctive feature of Singapore's foreign policy thinking is the proposition that a small state survives by being useful to larger powers. Lee Kuan Yew articulated this most explicitly: Singapore's value to the United States lay in its strategic location, its intelligence capabilities, its role as a financial and logistics hub, and its willingness to provide port access and military cooperation. Singapore's value to China lay in its economic dynamism, its expertise in urban governance, and its role as a bridge between China and Southeast Asia. This doctrine of utility — making yourself indispensable to the powers whose goodwill you need — is a recurring theme in Singapore's foreign policy essays and speeches. It implies a form of strategic agency that is available even to very small states: the ability to shape your relationships with great powers by offering something they cannot easily obtain elsewhere (see SG-F-02).

The rules-based order as force-multiplier. All four prime ministers have argued, with increasing urgency, that international rules, norms, and institutions serve the interests of small states disproportionately. In a world governed purely by power, small states are at the mercy of larger ones. In a world governed by rules — even imperfectly — small states have recourse to principles, treaties, and multilateral mechanisms that constrain great-power behaviour. Rajaratnam was an early champion of ASEAN as a normative framework for regional relations (see SG-F-07). Lee Kuan Yew, despite his realist scepticism about international institutions, supported the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the World Trade Organization as mechanisms that served Singapore's interests. Lee Hsien Loong's 2020 essay explicitly warned that the erosion of the rules-based order would damage small states most. Wong's Rajaratnam Lecture elevated institutional stewardship to a central principle of Singapore's foreign policy.

Pragmatic non-alignment. Singapore's foreign policy essays consistently reject ideological alignment with any great power while maintaining close practical relationships with several. This is not non-alignment in the Cold War sense — Singapore was never part of the Non-Aligned Movement and was critical of its pretensions. It is a more pragmatic stance: Singapore maintains a security relationship with the United States, an economic relationship with China, a diplomatic relationship with the broader ASEAN community, and a web of bilateral agreements with countries around the world. The foreign policy essays articulate the logic of this approach: that a small state cannot afford the luxury of ideological commitment, that it must maintain maximum flexibility, and that its relationships should be determined by interests rather than sentiments. Lee Kuan Yew put this most bluntly: "We are friends of America, but we are not America's running dog."

The intellectual authority of the practitioner. Finally, the essays are united by an epistemological claim: that practitioners know things that theorists do not. Lee Kuan Yew's authority in the "Culture Is Destiny" interview derived not from academic credentials but from his record as a successful leader. Lee Hsien Loong's Foreign Affairs essay carried weight because he was the prime minister of a country positioned at the fulcrum of the US-China relationship. Wong's Rajaratnam Lecture drew on Singapore's sixty years of experience as a small state navigating great-power politics. This claim to practitioner authority is not unique to Singapore, but it is particularly pronounced in the Singaporean tradition — reflecting a political culture in which intellectual credibility is inseparable from governing competence, and in which the ability to write and speak persuasively about the world is considered a core leadership skill.

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10. Conclusion — The Canon and Its Significance

Singapore's foreign policy essay tradition constitutes one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of any small state in the modern international system. Over fifty-four years — from Rajaratnam's "Global City" in 1972 to Wong's Bo'ao address in 2026 — Singapore's leaders have produced a body of work that is coherent, cumulative, and consequential. It is coherent because the core arguments — vulnerability, balance of power, utility, rules-based order, pragmatic non-alignment — have remained consistent across four prime ministers, even as the international environment has changed beyond recognition. It is cumulative because each generation has built upon the work of its predecessors: Wong's "Safe Harbour" is unintelligible without Rajaratnam's "Global City," and Lee Hsien Loong's "Endangered Asian Century" is unintelligible without Lee Kuan Yew's "Culture Is Destiny." And it is consequential because these texts have shaped how the world understands Singapore and, through Singapore, how it thinks about small-state foreign policy more broadly.

The following table summarises the principal works in the tradition:

The tradition is remarkable for what it reveals about the nature of Singapore's power. Singapore is not a great power; it cannot project military force beyond its borders or coerce other states into compliance with its wishes. But it has developed a form of influence that is uniquely suited to a small state: the ability to shape international discourse through the quality and persuasiveness of its leaders' analysis. When Lee Hsien Loong publishes in Foreign Affairs, when Lawrence Wong delivers the Rajaratnam Lecture, when Bilahari Kausikan writes in The Straits Times or lectures at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, they are exercising a form of soft power that derives not from military or economic weight but from intellectual credibility — the accumulated capital of six decades of successful governance.

This tradition also serves a domestic function. The foreign policy essays remind Singaporeans that their country's prosperity and security depend on a stable international order that cannot be taken for granted. They reinforce the vulnerability narrative that is central to Singapore's political culture — the idea that a small state surrounded by larger neighbours must be perpetually alert to changes in the external environment. And they demonstrate to domestic audiences that Singapore's leaders are not merely administrators but strategists, capable of engaging with the most powerful countries in the world on terms of intellectual equality.

Whether the tradition will be sustained in the decades ahead depends on factors that cannot be predicted: the quality of future leaders, the trajectory of the US-China relationship, the resilience of the multilateral order, and the willingness of international audiences to listen to the voice of a city-state of six million people. But the record of the past half-century suggests that Singapore's leaders will continue to write and speak about the world — not because they can afford to, but because they cannot afford not to. For a small state, silence is not an option. The foreign policy essay, in Singapore's hands, is not a literary exercise but an instrument of survival.