SG-L-14: The Diplomat-Intellectuals — Singapore's Essayists on World Order

Document Code: SG-L-14 Full Title: The Diplomat-Intellectuals: Essays and Books by Singapore's Senior Diplomats on International Order, Small-State Agency, and the Asian Century Coverage Period: 1968–2026 Level Designation: Level 4 Anthology Status: [COMPLETE] Primary Sources Consulted:

1. Tommy Koh, The Tommy Koh Reader: Favourite Essays and Lectures (Singapore: World Scientific, 2013)
2. Tommy Koh, Serving Singapore: Leading with Conviction (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2024)
3. Tommy Koh, "Peace at Sea," address to the UN General Assembly, 40th Anniversary of UNCLOS, December 2022
4. Bilahari Kausikan, Singapore Is Not An Island: Views on Singapore Foreign Policy (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2017)
5. Bilahari Kausikan, Singapore Is Still Not An Island: Views on Singapore Foreign Policy (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2023)
6. Bilahari Kausikan, "The Randomness of ASEAN," in The Geopolitics of Southeast Asia (Brookings Institution Press, 2019)
7. Kishore Mahbubani, Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West (Singapore: Times Books International, 1998; expanded edition, 2001)
8. Kishore Mahbubani, The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013)
9. Kishore Mahbubani, Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020)
10. Kishore Mahbubani, Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2024)
11. George Yeo, Musings: George Yeo (3 vols.) (Singapore: World Scientific, 2023)
12. George Yeo, remarks at IOP Forum, Harvard Kennedy School, "Asia's Future: Cooperation or Competition?" (2022)
13. Foreign Affairs review of Kishore Mahbubani, various issues (1998–2020)
14. Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine, joint list of "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" (2005, 2008)
15. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), opened for signature 10 December 1982, 1833 UNTS 3
16. Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Diplomatic and Consular List (various years, 1968–2024)
17. Richard Armitage and Shivshankar Menon, foreword to Singapore Is Not An Island (2017)
18. Wang Gungwu, China and Southeast Asia: Myths, Threats, and Culture (Singapore: World Scientific, 1999)
19. Chan Heng Chee, Singapore: The Politics of Survival, 1965–1967 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1971)
20. S. Rajaratnam, "Global City," in S. Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality, ed. Goh Keng Swee et al. (Singapore: World Scientific, 2006)

Related Documents:

• SG-L-12: The Foreign Policy Essays — Singapore's Leaders on the World Stage
• SG-L-11: The Practitioner's Pen — Economic Essays by Singapore's Leaders
• SG-F-01: Foreign Policy — Balancing Between Giants
• SG-F-02: Singapore and the United States
• SG-F-03: Singapore and China
• SG-N-01: International Perceptions of Singapore
• SG-N-03: City-State Analogues and Peer Benchmarks
• SG-H-DPM-02: S. Rajaratnam
• SG-H-PM-01: Lee Kuan Yew
• SG-M-03: Vulnerability as Governance Philosophy
• SG-M-06: Technocratic Governance
• SG-L-06: The Case for Pragmatism
• SG-L-15: The IPS-Nathan Lectures — Singapore's Premier Public Intellectual Forum

Version Date: 2026-03-31

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1. Key Takeaways

• Singapore has produced, relative to its size, an extraordinary concentration of diplomat-intellectuals — senior foreign service officers and ministers who have written extensively and influentially on international order, great-power competition, and the strategic predicament of small states. Four figures stand out: Tommy Koh, Bilahari Kausikan, Kishore Mahbubani, and George Yeo. Between them, they have published more than thirty books, hundreds of essays, and decades of speeches that collectively constitute a distinctive Singaporean school of strategic thought. No other small state has generated a comparable body of work by serving or former practitioners.

• The diplomat-intellectual tradition in Singapore is not accidental. It is a direct product of the country's existential condition: a city-state of under six million people situated between far larger neighbours, with no natural resources, no strategic depth, and no margin for foreign policy error. Writing — in journals, op-ed pages, and books aimed at international audiences — became an instrument of statecraft, a way of amplifying Singapore's voice beyond what its material power alone could command. S. Rajaratnam, the republic's first foreign minister, set the template in the 1960s and 1970s with essays on non-alignment, regional order, and the "Global City" concept. The four figures examined here are his intellectual heirs.

• Tommy Koh (b. 1937) is the jurist-diplomat whose crowning achievement was presiding over the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (1973–1982), which produced UNCLOS — what Koh himself called "a constitution for the world's oceans." His intellectual contribution lies in the proposition that international law, properly constructed, can bind even the most powerful states, and that small states have a disproportionate stake in building and defending rules-based frameworks. His career — spanning postings as Singapore's Permanent Representative to the United Nations (1968–1971, 1974–1984), ambassador to the United States (1984–1990), and chief negotiator of the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement (2000–2003) — gave him the authority to write on these themes from direct experience.

• Bilahari Kausikan (b. 1954) is the strategic realist who served the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for thirty-two years, rising to Permanent Secretary (2001–2013) before becoming Ambassador-at-Large. His two essay collections, Singapore Is Not An Island (2017) and Singapore Is Still Not An Island (2023), lay out a theory of small-state survival rooted in unsentimental assessment of power, the primacy of national interest, and the rejection of what he considers naive multilateral idealism. His characteristic dictum — "small states are always vulnerable" — distils the Singaporean foreign policy establishment's foundational anxiety into five words.

• Kishore Mahbubani (b. 1948) is the most internationally visible of the four, named among the world's top 100 public intellectuals by both Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. His nine books — from Can Asians Think? (1998) to The Asian 21st Century (2022) — develop a sustained argument that the post-1945 Western-dominated international order is giving way to an Asian century, and that the West's failure to adapt to this shift is the central geopolitical danger of the era. Foreign Affairs described him as "Singapore's point man in the 'Asian values' debate" and "an exceptionally lively and provocative polemicist."

• George Yeo (b. 1954) brings a different register: civilisational rather than strategic, historical rather than polemical. A government minister for twenty-three years who held portfolios in arts, trade, health, and foreign affairs, Yeo draws on his reading of Chinese, Indian, and Western history to argue that Asia's future depends on maintaining what he calls "heterogeneity" — a pluralism of civilisational traditions that no single power can or should dominate. His three-volume Musings (2023), a bestseller for seven months in Singapore, develops the metaphor — borrowed from historian Wang Gungwu — of Southeast Asia as a space "where the mandalas of China, India, and the West overlap."

• The most revealing episode in Singapore's diplomat-intellectual tradition was the public debate of 2017 between Mahbubani and Kausikan over how Singapore should navigate the South China Sea disputes and, more broadly, whether small states should accommodate or resist great-power pressure from China. The exchange — conducted through essays and public lectures — exposed a genuine fault line in Singaporean strategic thought between accommodationist pragmatism and principled resistance, and demonstrated that the city-state's foreign policy consensus, while real, is not monolithic.

• Across their differences, the four diplomat-intellectuals share several foundational assumptions: that Singapore's survival depends on a rules-based international order; that small states must be active, not passive, participants in building that order; that ASEAN, for all its limitations, remains indispensable to Southeast Asian stability; and that the United States and China will be the dominant forces in Asia for the foreseeable future. Where they diverge — sharply — is on the question of how Singapore should position itself between those two powers, and on whether the Western liberal order is worth preserving or has become a source of instability.

• The collective output of these four figures has had measurable influence beyond Singapore. Mahbubani's books have been translated into more than twenty languages and are assigned at universities worldwide. Koh's work on UNCLOS shaped the treaty that governs seventy percent of the earth's surface. Kausikan's essays are read in foreign ministries across Asia. Yeo's civilisational framing has informed ASEAN's self-understanding. Together, they have made Singapore a disproportionate contributor to the global conversation about international order — a remarkable achievement for a country that did not exist as a sovereign state until 1965.

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2. The Record in Brief — A Small State's Intellectual Arsenal

Singapore's diplomat-intellectual tradition is, at root, a compensatory mechanism. States with large populations, powerful militaries, and abundant natural resources can afford to conduct foreign policy through material leverage alone — the deployment of economic sanctions, the projection of naval power, the granting or withholding of aid. Singapore, a city-state of 733 square kilometres with no natural hinterland, cannot. What it can do — and has done with striking effectiveness since the 1960s — is produce ideas, articulate frameworks, and place its diplomats at the centre of multilateral negotiations where intellectual acuity matters more than raw power.

The roots of this tradition lie in the founding generation. S. Rajaratnam, Singapore's first Foreign Minister (1965–1980), was himself a journalist and essayist before entering politics. His 1972 essay "Singapore: Global City" laid out the intellectual framework for Singapore's outward-oriented economic and diplomatic strategy — the proposition that a small island with no resources could thrive by making itself indispensable to global flows of trade, capital, and information. Rajaratnam wrote not as an academic but as a practitioner constructing a rationale for survival. His successors have followed the same model: writing not from the ivory tower but from the operations room, the negotiating table, and the ambassadorial residence (see SG-H-DPM-02).

The institutional conditions that produce diplomat-intellectuals are specific and replicable. Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) has, since its founding, recruited from the top tier of each cohort — President's Scholars, first-class honours graduates from the National University of Singapore, and returned graduates from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and other elite universities. The foreign service is small — far smaller than those of the major powers — which means that individual officers are given extraordinary responsibility early in their careers. A thirty-year-old Singaporean diplomat might find herself drafting speeches for the Prime Minister, negotiating bilateral agreements, or representing the country at United Nations committees. This compression of responsibility produces generalists who think strategically rather than specialists who think narrowly.

The MFA also cultivated a culture of writing. Rajaratnam encouraged his officers to produce policy papers that went beyond mere briefing notes — papers that analysed trends, anticipated shifts, and proposed frameworks. This culture persisted under his successors. By the 1990s, Singapore's senior diplomats were publishing regularly in Foreign Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, Survival, and other journals of international relations. They were also delivering named lectures at think tanks and universities worldwide — the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue (hosted in Singapore from 2002), the Lee Kuan Yew School's public lecture series, and invitations from the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, and the Brookings Institution.

The result is a body of work that is distinctive in both quantity and character. Other small states — Norway, Switzerland, Ireland, New Zealand — have produced individual diplomats of distinction. But none has produced a cohort of four or more serving or recently retired practitioners who have simultaneously maintained active publishing careers, engaged in public debates with each other, and achieved international recognition as public intellectuals. This is Singapore's peculiar contribution to the genre of diplomatic writing: not memoirs of retired statesmen (though those exist too — see SG-L-12), but real-time strategic analysis by practitioners who are still shaping the policies they write about.

The four figures examined in this document — Tommy Koh, Bilahari Kausikan, Kishore Mahbubani, and George Yeo — span three generations of Singapore's post-independence diplomacy. Koh's career began in 1968, when Singapore was three years old. Yeo's ministerial career ended in 2011, but his writing career accelerated thereafter. Between them, they have served as Singapore's representatives to the United Nations, negotiated treaties and trade agreements, managed bilateral relationships with the United States and China, and held cabinet portfolios. Their writing is grounded in this experience. It is not academic international relations theory — none of them holds a PhD in political science — but practitioner wisdom rendered in prose that is, at its best, as rigorous as any academic work and considerably more readable.

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3. Tommy Koh — The Jurist-Diplomat (1968–2026)

The Career

Tommy Koh Thong Bee was born on 12 November 1937, educated at the University of Malaya (now the National University of Singapore) — graduating with First Class Honours in Law in 1961 — and at Harvard Law School, where he earned his LL.M. in 1964 on a Fulbright fellowship. He became Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Singapore in 1971 at the age of thirty-three — among the youngest deans in the university's history — and held the position until 1974. His transition from academia to diplomacy was seamless and, in the Singapore context, natural: the government identified him as a talent and deployed him where he was needed.

Koh served as Singapore's Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1968 to 1971, returned to the law faculty, and was reappointed to the UN post from 1974 to 1984. It was during this second stint that he took on the role that would define his career: President of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, from 1981 to 1982, succeeding Hamilton Shirley Amerasinghe of Sri Lanka. The conference had been in session since 1973 and had become the largest and most complex multilateral negotiation in history, involving more than 160 states and touching on issues from deep-sea mining to territorial waters to the rights of landlocked nations.

UNCLOS — "A Constitution for the World's Oceans"

Koh's achievement in bringing the conference to a successful conclusion is widely regarded as one of the most significant accomplishments in the history of international law. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, opened for signature on 10 December 1982 in Montego Bay, Jamaica, established a comprehensive legal framework for the world's oceans — covering navigation rights, territorial sea limits, exclusive economic zones, continental shelf jurisdiction, deep-sea mining, and the settlement of disputes. Koh himself described UNCLOS as "a constitution for the world's oceans," a phrase that has become standard in international legal discourse.

The significance of Koh's role was not merely ceremonial. As conference president, he employed a distinctive negotiating methodology — what he called the "package deal" approach — in which no single issue was settled until all issues were settled, preventing powerful states from cherry-picking favourable provisions while rejecting unfavourable ones. This approach was particularly important for small states and developing countries, which lacked the leverage to negotiate bilateral deals with maritime powers. Koh's insistence on compulsory dispute settlement — the requirement that parties to UNCLOS submit to binding arbitration — was, in the view of international law scholars, the convention's most revolutionary feature, and one that the United States ultimately cited as a reason for not ratifying the treaty (though it observes UNCLOS as customary international law).

In December 2022, Koh delivered the keynote address at the UN General Assembly's commemoration of the 40th anniversary of UNCLOS's opening for signature. His speech, titled "Peace at Sea," reiterated his core argument that the rules-based maritime order is under threat from states — he did not name them, but the reference to China's expansive claims in the South China Sea was unmistakable — that "incorrectly believe that history and power are more important than the rule of law." This willingness to criticise great powers, including Singapore's largest trading partner, from the podium of international law is characteristic of Koh's approach and distinguishes him from more accommodationist voices.

Beyond the Law of the Sea

Koh's diplomatic career extended well beyond UNCLOS. After completing his UN posting, he served as Singapore's ambassador to the United States from 1984 to 1990, a period that included the normalisation of diplomatic relations between Singapore and China in 1990 — a process in which Koh played a key facilitative role. He subsequently chaired the preparatory committee for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and chaired the ASEAN drafting committee that produced the organisation's charter framework.

From 2000 to 2003, Koh served as Singapore's chief negotiator for the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement — the first bilateral FTA between the United States and an Asian country. The agreement, signed on 6 May 2003, was significant not only for its economic provisions but for its strategic symbolism: it cemented the US-Singapore relationship at a time when American engagement in Southeast Asia was uncertain (see SG-F-02).

The Intellectual Legacy

Koh's written output is collected primarily in The Tommy Koh Reader: Favourite Essays and Lectures (2013) and Serving Singapore: Leading with Conviction (2024). His essays cover international law, diplomacy, the colonial legacy, and Singapore's domestic governance. The intellectual thread that runs through all of them is the conviction that law — international law, specifically — is not merely a constraint on state behaviour but a constitutive framework that creates the conditions for small-state survival. For Koh, the alternative to a rules-based order is not a balance-of-power order (which might also provide stability) but a might-makes-right order in which small states have no voice, no rights, and no recourse.

This position places Koh at the liberal-institutionalist end of Singapore's diplomatic spectrum — a position that, as we shall see, puts him closer to Mahbubani's multilateral optimism than to Kausikan's strategic realism, though Koh is far more disciplined and less provocative in his public rhetoric. At eighty-nine, Koh remains active as Ambassador-at-Large at the MFA, Professor of Law at NUS, and Chairman of the Centre for International Law. His career, spanning nearly six decades of active diplomacy, is without parallel in Singapore's history and arguably in the history of small-state diplomacy globally.

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4. Bilahari Kausikan — The Strategic Realist (1981–2026)

The Career

Bilahari Kausikan joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1981 and served for thirty-two years, rising through the ranks to become Second Permanent Secretary (1998–2001) and then Permanent Secretary (2001–2013) — the highest civil service position in the ministry. Since 2013, he has held the title of Ambassador-at-Large and serves as Chairman of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore. Unlike Koh, who moved between academia and diplomacy, Kausikan is a pure product of the MFA — a career diplomat whose intellectual formation occurred within the ministry's walls and whose writing reflects the institutional perspective of Singapore's foreign policy establishment.

The Essay Collections

Kausikan's intellectual reputation rests primarily on two collections of essays and speeches: Singapore Is Not An Island: Views on Singapore Foreign Policy (2017) and Singapore Is Still Not An Island: Views on Singapore Foreign Policy (2023). The titles are programmatic: Singapore, despite its physical insularity, cannot afford psychological insularity. The island metaphor is a warning against complacency — against the illusion that Singapore's prosperity and stability are self-sustaining rather than the product of constant vigilance and strategic positioning.

The essays span twenty-five years and cover the full range of Singapore's foreign policy concerns: ASEAN, the US-China relationship, the South China Sea, the Middle East, the management of small-state diplomacy, and the domestic politics of foreign policy. They are written in a distinctive prose style — direct, pugnacious, occasionally sardonic — that reflects Kausikan's personality and his conviction that diplomatic niceties should not obscure strategic realities.

Core Intellectual Themes

Kausikan's thought is organised around several interlocking propositions. The first and most fundamental is the irreducible vulnerability of small states. "Small states are always vulnerable," he writes — a sentence that recurs, in various formulations, throughout his work. This is not a lament but an analytical starting point. For Kausikan, the recognition of vulnerability is the precondition for effective foreign policy, because it prevents the small state from indulging in the illusions — moral superiority, permanent neutrality, the sufficiency of international law — that can lead to strategic miscalculation.

The second proposition is the primacy of national interest, defined in hard, material terms. Kausikan is sceptical of multilateral idealism, and his essays frequently argue that ASEAN's value lies not in its aspirational declarations but in its practical function as a platform for managing great-power competition in Southeast Asia. He describes the region's geopolitics as "dynamic multipolarity" rather than a "new Cold War" — a distinction he considers important because the Cold War metaphor implies a binary choice between the United States and China that Singapore cannot and should not make.

The third proposition is the necessity of agency. Kausikan rejects the notion that small states are merely objects of great-power politics — pieces on a chessboard moved by larger hands. His essays argue repeatedly that Singapore has more room for manoeuvre than fatalists assume, provided it exercises that room with discipline, consistency, and a clear-eyed understanding of its own interests. This emphasis on agency distinguishes Kausikan from both the accommodation school (which he considers dangerously passive) and the defiance school (which he considers recklessly provocative).

International Reception

Kausikan's work has attracted significant international attention. Richard Armitage, the former US Deputy Secretary of State, and Shivshankar Menon, India's former National Security Advisor, both contributed forewords to Singapore Is Not An Island — an unusual mark of recognition from practitioners at the highest levels of two major powers. His essays have been published in Foreign Affairs and other leading journals, and he is a frequent speaker at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, the Aspen Strategy Group, and similar forums. Within the community of Asian foreign policy practitioners, Kausikan is widely regarded as one of the sharpest analytical minds of his generation — a reputation that rests not on academic credentials (he does not hold a PhD) but on the quality and consistency of his writing over three decades.

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5. Kishore Mahbubani — The Provocateur (1984–2026)

The Career

Kishore Mahbubani was born in 1948, the son of Sindhi Hindu immigrants from what is now Pakistan — a biographical detail that he has cited as formative, arguing that growing up as a minority within a minority in Singapore gave him an outsider's perspective on dominant narratives. He joined the Singapore Foreign Service and served as Singapore's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in two stints: 1984–1989 and 1998–2004. During his second posting, he served as President of the United Nations Security Council in January 2001 and May 2002 — a role that placed him at the centre of global diplomacy during the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the prelude to the Iraq War.

After leaving the diplomatic service, Mahbubani became the founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, a position he held from 2004 to 2017. Under his leadership, the school grew into one of Asia's most prominent public policy institutions, attracting students and faculty from across the region. The deanship gave Mahbubani a platform — and the time — to develop his writing career into what became the most prolific and internationally visible output of any Singapore diplomat.

The Oeuvre

Mahbubani has published nine major books, beginning with Can Asians Think? Understanding the Divide Between East and West (1998, expanded edition 2001). The title — deliberately provocative — was drawn from a 1998 essay that asked why Asian societies, despite their ancient civilisations, had contributed so little to modern science, philosophy, and institution-building. The essay's answer was that Asians could indeed think, but had been inhibited by colonialism, cultural deference, and the intellectual hegemony of Western frameworks. The book became an international sensation, translated into multiple languages and widely assigned in university courses on Asian politics.

Subsequent books developed and extended the argument. Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World (2005) argued that the United States, in the aftermath of the Iraq War, was squandering the global goodwill it had accumulated during the Cold War. The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (2008) made the case that economic power was moving inexorably from West to East and that Western institutions — the UN Security Council, the IMF, the World Bank — needed to be reformed to reflect this shift. The Great Convergence: Asia, the West, and the Logic of One World (2013) argued that the world was converging toward shared norms of governance, economics, and social organisation, and that this convergence was driven by Asian, not Western, dynamism.

Can Singapore Survive? (2015) turned the lens inward, asking whether the city-state's remarkable success since 1965 was sustainable in an era of geopolitical volatility, technological disruption, and social change. The ASEAN Miracle: A Catalyst for Peace (2017, co-authored with Jeffery Sng) argued that ASEAN had achieved something extraordinary — maintaining peace among diverse and historically antagonistic states — and that this achievement was undervalued by Western commentators fixated on the organisation's limitations. Has the West Lost It? A Provocation (2018) was a short, polemical volume arguing that the West — defined as the United States and Western Europe — was in irreversible relative decline and needed to adjust its expectations and behaviour accordingly. Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (2020) examined the US-China rivalry and argued that both sides were making strategic errors — the US by overreacting to China's rise, and China by underestimating the resilience of the American system.

His most recent major publication, Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir (2024), is a personal account that weaves together autobiography and geopolitical analysis, tracing Mahbubani's journey from a modest background in Singapore to the world stage.

Intellectual Positioning

Foreign Affairs described Mahbubani as "Singapore's point man in the 'Asian values' debate" and "an exceptionally lively and provocative polemicist." Both characterisations are accurate. Mahbubani occupies a position in the intellectual landscape that is deliberately transgressive: he challenges Western audiences with arguments they find uncomfortable (that their civilisation is in decline, that their institutions are outdated, that their moral claims are hypocritical) while simultaneously challenging Asian audiences to take responsibility for their own governance failures.

His central intellectual proposition is that "good government" — defined as effective, honest, meritocratic administration that delivers prosperity and security — matters more than democratic procedure. This argument aligns with the broader "Asian values" thesis associated with Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad, but Mahbubani has articulated it with greater sophistication and nuance than most of its proponents. He does not argue that democracy is inherently bad, but that it is not inherently good — that its value depends on whether it produces competent governance, and that in many developing countries, it manifestly does not.

Mahbubani's international standing is attested by his inclusion in the joint Foreign Policy/Prospect magazine list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals in both 2005 and 2008 — the only Singaporean to appear on the list. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He is a regular contributor to Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, Project Syndicate, and other global platforms, and is among the most frequently invited Asian speakers at Western policy forums.

Critics and Controversies

Mahbubani's provocations have not been universally welcomed. Western critics have accused him of being an apologist for authoritarian governance, of overstating the "Asian century" thesis, and of indulging in the same kind of civilisational generalisation that he criticises in Western commentators. Within Singapore, his positions have generated discomfort when they appear to diverge from official government policy — most notably during the 2017 debate with Bilahari Kausikan over the South China Sea (discussed in Section 7 below). His willingness to question the direction of Singapore's foreign policy from a public platform placed him at odds with a political culture that values consensus and discretion, and his departure from the LKY School deanship in 2017 was widely interpreted — though never officially confirmed — as connected to this controversy.

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6. George Yeo — The Civilisational Thinker

The Career

George Yong-Boon Yeo was born in 1954, read Engineering at the University of Cambridge, and later earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. He served as a government minister for twenty-three years, holding portfolios in Information and the Arts (1990–1999), Trade and Industry (1999–2004), and Foreign Affairs (2004–2011). His career in elected politics ended abruptly in the 2011 general election, when he lost his Aljunied GRC seat to the Workers' Party — a watershed moment in Singapore's political history that demonstrated the vulnerability of even the most senior PAP ministers to electoral backlash (see SG-K-10).

After leaving politics, Yeo became a Visiting Scholar at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and a founding patron of the Asia Competitiveness Institute. He also served as chairman of Kerry Logistics Network in Hong Kong. But his most significant post-political contribution has been his writing — specifically, the three-volume Musings (2023), which became a bestseller in Singapore, remaining on the charts for seven months. The work is an extended meditation on history, civilisation, geopolitics, and Singapore's place in the Asian order, drawing on Yeo's reading in Chinese, Indian, Southeast Asian, and Western history.

Intellectual Themes

Yeo's intellectual contribution is distinctive in that it operates at the civilisational rather than the strategic level. Where Kausikan analyses the balance of power and Mahbubani tracks the shift of economic gravity, Yeo asks deeper questions about the cultural and historical patterns that shape international relations. His central metaphor — borrowed from the historian Wang Gungwu — is that "Southeast Asia is where the mandalas of China, India, and the West overlap." The mandala concept, drawn from classical Southeast Asian political theory, describes overlapping spheres of cultural and political influence with no fixed borders — a model that Yeo contrasts with the Westphalian system of exclusive territorial sovereignty.

For Yeo, the implications of this metaphor are practical as well as theoretical. If Southeast Asia is a space of overlapping civilisational influences, then any attempt by a single power to impose exclusive dominance — whether by China, the United States, or any other actor — will be resisted not merely by opposing states but by the inherent pluralism of the region. This leads to Yeo's second major proposition: that Asia's future depends on maintaining "heterogeneity" — a diversity of political systems, cultural traditions, and economic models that prevents any single hegemonic order from taking hold.

At an IOP Forum at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2022, Yeo argued that "Asia's future depends on cooperation, not competition" — but he defined cooperation not as convergence toward a single model but as the mutual accommodation of different civilisational traditions. This position places him closer to the ASEAN tradition of "unity in diversity" than to either the liberal-internationalist vision (which assumes convergence toward democratic norms) or the realist vision (which assumes competition for dominance).

The ASEAN Equilibrium

Yeo's writings on ASEAN develop the argument that the organisation's apparent weakness — its consensus-based decision-making, its reluctance to intervene in member states' affairs, its preference for process over outcome — is in fact a source of strength. ASEAN works, Yeo contends, precisely because it does not try to be a European Union or a NATO. It provides a framework for managing diversity rather than overcoming it. In a region where China, India, Japan, and the United States all have vital interests, ASEAN's role is to maintain the equilibrium among these powers by ensuring that no single actor can dominate the regional agenda.

This analysis echoes and extends the arguments made by Kausikan about ASEAN's practical value, but Yeo gives it a philosophical depth that Kausikan — a self-described realist — deliberately avoids. For Yeo, ASEAN is not merely a useful diplomatic mechanism but an expression of a Southeast Asian civilisational tradition that predates the modern state system. This is a romantic reading, and critics have noted that it risks romanticising ASEAN's dysfunction. But it has resonated with audiences in Southeast Asia and beyond who are looking for an alternative to the Western-centric frameworks that have dominated international relations theory.

Writing Style and Influence

Yeo's Musings is unusual among the works discussed in this document in that it is not a collection of policy essays or speeches but a sustained work of personal reflection. It is discursive, allusive, and wide-ranging — touching on topics from the history of the Catholic Church (Yeo is Catholic) to the philosophy of Confucius to the economics of supply chains. This breadth reflects Yeo's intellectual personality — he is, by temperament, a synthesiser rather than a specialist — but it also means that his work is less easily summarised into policy prescriptions than the writings of Koh, Kausikan, or Mahbubani. His influence is more diffuse: he shapes the way people think about Asia rather than prescribing what they should do about it.

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7. The Small-State Debate of 2017

Context

The most revealing episode in the history of Singapore's diplomat-intellectuals was not a book launch or a UN speech but a public quarrel. In 2017, Kishore Mahbubani and Bilahari Kausikan engaged in an extended exchange — through essays, public lectures, and social media — over the fundamental question of how Singapore should conduct its foreign policy in an era of rising Chinese power and relative American disengagement. The debate was triggered by specific events — the South China Sea arbitration ruling of July 2016 and its aftermath — but it exposed deeper fault lines in Singaporean strategic thought that had been papered over by decades of pragmatic consensus.

The Trigger

In July 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague issued its ruling in the case brought by the Philippines against China under UNCLOS. The tribunal ruled overwhelmingly in the Philippines' favour, rejecting China's "nine-dash line" claims to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea. China rejected the ruling and refused to comply. Singapore, while not a claimant state, had publicly supported the applicability of international law to the disputes and the binding nature of the arbitral process — a position consistent with its long-standing commitment to the rules-based international order and, specifically, with Tommy Koh's legacy as the architect of UNCLOS.

China reacted angrily to what it perceived as Singapore's alignment with the United States and the Philippines on the South China Sea issue. Relations between Singapore and China deteriorated markedly in late 2016 and early 2017 — a deterioration symbolised by the detention of nine Singapore Armed Forces Terrex armoured vehicles in Hong Kong in November 2016, widely interpreted as a signal of Chinese displeasure (see SG-F-03).

Mahbubani's Intervention

Against this backdrop, Mahbubani published a series of essays and delivered public lectures arguing that Singapore needed to recalibrate its foreign policy posture. His core argument was that small states should not take sides in great-power disputes — that Singapore's insistence on the rule of law in the South China Sea, while principled, was strategically unwise because it placed Singapore in opposition to China without any prospect of changing Chinese behaviour. He invoked the ancient Greek historian Thucydides and the fate of the island of Melos — destroyed by Athens for refusing to abandon its neutrality — as a cautionary tale for small states that overestimate their ability to influence great-power contests.

Mahbubani's most controversial proposition was that Singapore should practise a more accommodationist foreign policy — one that acknowledged the reality of Chinese power in the region and avoided gratuitous provocation. He argued that ASEAN states should focus on managing their relationships with China through quiet diplomacy rather than public confrontation, and that Singapore's visibility on the South China Sea issue was doing more harm than good.

Kausikan's Rebuttal

Kausikan's response was swift and withering. In a series of essays and public remarks, he argued that Mahbubani's position was not merely wrong but dangerous — that it represented precisely the kind of pre-emptive capitulation that had historically led to the destruction of small states. Kausikan rejected the Melos analogy, arguing that Singapore in 2017 was not an isolated island facing a single hegemon but a member of a complex regional system with multiple overlapping security relationships. The correct lesson from Thucydides, Kausikan argued, was not that small states should submit but that they should avoid isolation — and Singapore's network of relationships with the United States, Japan, India, Australia, and its ASEAN partners provided exactly the kind of strategic depth that Melos lacked.

Kausikan further argued that the distinction between "principled" and "pragmatic" foreign policy was false. For Singapore, the rules-based international order was not an abstract ideal but a practical necessity: a world in which great powers could ignore international law at will was a world in which small states had no protection. To accommodate China's rejection of the arbitral ruling was not pragmatism but capitulation — and once Singapore began capitulating on one issue, the pressure to capitulate on others would be unrelenting.

Significance

The Mahbubani-Kausikan debate was significant for several reasons. First, it was conducted in public — a rarity in a political culture that prizes consensus and discretion. That two of Singapore's most senior former diplomats were willing to disagree openly, and sharply, on a matter of fundamental national strategy suggested that the stakes were high enough to override the normal impulse toward unity.

Second, the debate exposed a genuine intellectual fault line that runs through Singapore's foreign policy establishment. The "Mahbubani position" — accommodation with rising Chinese power, scepticism about the sustainability of American commitment to the region, emphasis on economic interests over legal principles — has adherents within the MFA and the business community, even if they are reluctant to express these views publicly. The "Kausikan position" — principled resistance to great-power pressure, insistence on the rules-based order, strategic diversification of Singapore's partnerships — represents the mainstream institutional view but is under increasing strain as Chinese power grows and American reliability is questioned.

Third, the debate illustrated the distinctive role that diplomat-intellectuals play in Singapore's governance system. In most countries, debates about foreign policy strategy take place within government — in cabinet committees, interagency meetings, and classified memoranda. In Singapore, the smallness of the system and the dual identities of figures like Mahbubani and Kausikan mean that these debates spill into the public domain, conducted through books and essays that are simultaneously exercises in advocacy and instruments of policy deliberation. The 2017 debate was, in effect, an argument about Singapore's future conducted in the pages of the Straits Times and the lecture halls of the National University — a form of public reasoning that is rare in the city-state's governance culture and all the more striking for its rarity (see SG-M-03).

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8. Intellectual Architecture — Themes Across Four Voices

The Rules-Based International Order

All four diplomat-intellectuals share a foundational commitment to the proposition that Singapore's survival depends on a rules-based international order. But they define this concept differently and draw different conclusions from it. For Koh, the rules-based order is synonymous with international law — specifically, with the treaties, conventions, and institutions (UNCLOS, the WTO, the ICJ) that codify state obligations and provide mechanisms for dispute resolution. For Kausikan, the rules-based order is less about specific legal instruments than about the general principle that power should be constrained by norms — a principle that he believes requires active enforcement, not mere declaration. For Mahbubani, the rules-based order is a Western construction that must be reformed to reflect the shift in global power toward Asia — a position that sometimes leads him to question whether specific rules (such as the South China Sea arbitration) serve the interests of order or disorder. For Yeo, the rules-based order is one of several civilisational traditions that coexist in Asia, and its utility depends on its capacity to accommodate non-Western approaches to governance and conflict resolution.

These differences are not trivial. They reflect fundamentally different assessments of whether the existing international order is worth defending as it stands, reforming to accommodate rising powers, or supplementing with alternative frameworks rooted in Asian experience. The debate among the four is, in microcosm, the debate that the entire international community is having about the future of global governance.

Small-State Agency

A second common theme is the insistence that small states have agency — that they are not merely passive objects of great-power politics. But again, the four diverge on what agency means in practice. Koh's career embodies one model: the small-state diplomat who shapes multilateral outcomes through intellectual leadership, procedural innovation, and sheer persistence. Kausikan's model is different: agency through strategic positioning, the cultivation of multiple partnerships, and the willingness to say "no" to powerful states when national interests require it. Mahbubani emphasises a third form of agency: intellectual influence, the ability to shape global debates through books and ideas that reach audiences far beyond what Singapore's material power would predict. Yeo offers a fourth: civilisational agency, the capacity to draw on deep historical and cultural resources to reimagine the terms of international order.

ASEAN

The four share a commitment to ASEAN but hold strikingly different views of its significance. Koh, who chaired the ASEAN drafting committee, sees the organisation through an institutional-legal lens — as a framework that can be strengthened through better rules, clearer procedures, and more effective dispute resolution. Kausikan values ASEAN primarily as a strategic mechanism — a platform that gives Southeast Asian states collective leverage in dealing with external powers that they would not possess individually. His essay "The Randomness of ASEAN" captures his unsentimental assessment: ASEAN works not because of grand design but because of the practical convergence of interests among states that would otherwise be rivals. Mahbubani's The ASEAN Miracle (2017) takes the most enthusiastic view, arguing that ASEAN's achievement in maintaining peace among diverse states is historically unprecedented and insufficiently recognised. Yeo's mandala framework provides yet another lens: ASEAN as the institutional expression of Southeast Asia's civilisational pluralism, a natural product of a region that has always been a meeting place rather than a monolith.

The United States and China

The sharpest divergences among the four concern the US-China relationship and Singapore's position within it. Koh, consistent with his legalist orientation, judges both powers by their compliance with international law — and has been willing to criticise both Washington (for not ratifying UNCLOS) and Beijing (for ignoring the South China Sea arbitration). Kausikan insists that Singapore must avoid being drawn into an exclusive alignment with either power, but his writing suggests greater anxiety about Chinese pressure than American unreliability — a reflection of his assessment that geography makes China the more proximate threat to Singapore's autonomy. Mahbubani's trajectory has been more complex: his earlier books were critical of American unilateralism, while his later work (Has China Won?) attempts to hold both powers to account, though critics argue that his framing tilts toward accommodation with Beijing. Yeo's civilisational approach leads him to see the US-China relationship not as a binary rivalry but as one node in a complex web of relationships that includes India, Japan, Europe, and the Muslim world — a perspective that reduces the urgency of choosing sides but may underestimate the structural tensions between the two powers.

The Domestic-Foreign Policy Nexus

All four writers, despite being identified primarily as foreign policy thinkers, recognise that Singapore's international position is inseparable from its domestic governance. Koh has written extensively on the rule of law within Singapore, arguing that a country that advocates international legal norms must embody those norms domestically. Kausikan's essays frequently return to the theme that Singapore's foreign policy credibility rests on its domestic performance — on the continued ability of the government to deliver prosperity, security, and social order. Mahbubani's Can Singapore Survive? is explicitly focused on domestic challenges — demographic decline, social inequality, political complacency — that could undermine the city-state's international standing. Yeo's reflections on Singapore's future are embedded in a broader analysis of how small societies maintain cohesion and purpose in a globalised world (see SG-M-03).

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9. Conclusion — A Canon of Strategic Thought

The four diplomat-intellectuals examined in this document have, over nearly six decades, produced a body of work that constitutes something close to a canon of Singaporean strategic thought. It is a canon marked by intellectual seriousness, practical grounding, and a distinctive blend of anxiety and confidence — anxiety about the vulnerability of a small state in a dangerous world, confidence in the capacity of intelligence, discipline, and good governance to overcome the disadvantages of size and geography.

The canon is not unified. Koh's liberal institutionalism sits uneasily alongside Kausikan's strategic realism. Mahbubani's provocations often clash with the measured consensus of the foreign policy establishment. Yeo's civilisational musings operate at a level of abstraction that practitioners sometimes find frustrating. But these tensions are productive. They prevent Singapore's strategic thinking from hardening into orthodoxy, and they ensure that the city-state's foreign policy is debated, tested, and refined in ways that are unusual for a country often characterised — incorrectly — as a place where dissent is suppressed.

What is perhaps most remarkable about this intellectual tradition is its influence beyond Singapore. Tommy Koh's work on UNCLOS shaped a treaty that governs seventy percent of the earth's surface — an achievement that would be extraordinary for a diplomat from any country and is astonishing for one from a city-state that did not exist when the first Law of the Sea conference convened in 1958. Kishore Mahbubani's books have been translated into more than twenty languages, assigned at universities on every continent, and reviewed (often critically, which is itself a mark of influence) in every major journal of international affairs. Bilahari Kausikan's essays circulate in foreign ministries across Asia and are read by policymakers who may never visit Singapore but who recognise the acuity of his analysis. George Yeo's civilisational framing has contributed to the way ASEAN understands and presents itself to the world.

Together, these four figures have made Singapore a disproportionate contributor to the global conversation about international order — an intellectual arsenal that compensates, at least in part, for the material limitations of a country with no army that can project power, no nuclear deterrent, and no natural resources. Their books and essays are instruments of statecraft as surely as the SAF's F-35 fighters or the MAS's monetary policy. They amplify Singapore's voice, establish its credibility, and ensure that when the future of Asia is debated — in Washington, Beijing, New Delhi, Brussels, or Jakarta — Singapore has a seat at the intellectual table, even when it has no seat at the great-power table.

The tradition continues. A younger generation of Singaporean diplomats and scholars — trained at the institutions that Koh, Mahbubani, and their contemporaries helped build — is beginning to produce its own body of work on artificial intelligence governance, climate diplomacy, digital trade, and the evolving Asian security architecture. Whether this generation will produce figures of comparable stature remains to be seen. But the template has been established: in Singapore, diplomacy is not merely a practice but a literature, and the diplomat who does not write is only half a diplomat.

Table: Key Works of Singapore's Diplomat-Intellectuals