Document Code: SG-M-19 Full Title: Small-State Realism: Singapore's Foreign Policy Philosophy as Political Theory — From Rajaratnam's Founding Doctrine to Lawrence Wong's Continuations (1965–2026) Coverage Period: 1965–2026 Level Designation: Level 1 Anchor Status: [COMPLETE] Primary Sources Consulted:

S. Rajaratnam, "Statement on the Admission of Singapore to the United Nations," UN General Assembly, 20th Session, 1347th Plenary Meeting, 21 September 1965 (UN verbatim record A/PV.1347; reprinted in Chan Heng Chee and Obaid ul Haq, eds., The Prophetic and the Political, 1987/2007)
S. Rajaratnam, "Singapore: Global City," address to the Singapore Press Club, 6 February 1972 (NAS transcript; reprinted in The Prophetic and the Political, 1987 ed., pp. 223–232)
Chan Heng Chee and Obaid ul Haq, eds., The Prophetic and the Political: Selected Speeches and Writings of S. Rajaratnam (Singapore: Graham Brash, 1987; expanded edition, ISEAS, 2007)
Kwa Chong Guan, ed., S Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality (Singapore: World Scientific and RSIS, 2006)
Bilahari Kausikan, Singapore Is Not an Island: Views on Singapore Foreign Policy (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2017)
Bilahari Kausikan, "Singapore's Evolving Foreign Policy," SAIS Review of International Affairs 36, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 2016): 3–12
Bilahari Kausikan, various Straits Times op-eds and RSIS commentaries, 2012–2026 (archived at RSIS website and NAS speeches database)
Tommy Koh, The Tommy Koh Reader: Favourite Essays and Lectures (Singapore: World Scientific, 2013)
Tommy Koh, Tommy Koh: Favourite Essays (Singapore: World Scientific, 2nd ed., 2021)
Kishore Mahbubani, Can Asians Think? (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998; 4th ed., 2009)
Kishore Mahbubani, The Asian 21st Century (Singapore: Springer, 2022)
Kishore Mahbubani, Has the West Lost It? A Provocation (London: Allen Lane, 2018)
George Yeo, Musings: Series One (Singapore: World Scientific, 2021)
Vivian Balakrishnan, MFA ministerial statements and Shangri-La Dialogue addresses, 2015–2026 (Singapore MFA website and Hansard)
Lawrence Wong, address at the Institute of Policy Studies Singapore Perspectives, 30 January 2024; remarks at the International Institute for Strategic Studies Shangri-La Dialogue, May 2024 (MFA press releases)
Michael Leifer, Singapore's Foreign Policy: Coping with Vulnerability (London: Routledge, 2000)
Amitav Acharya, The Making of Southeast Asia: International Relations of a Region (Singapore: ISEAS, 2012)
Iver Neumann and Sieglinde Gstöhl, eds., Small States in International Relations (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006)
Miriam Fendius Elman, "The Foreign Policies of Small States: Challenging Neorealism in Its Own Backyard," British Journal of Political Science 25, no. 2 (April 1995): 171–217
Irene Ng, The Singapore Lion: A Biography of S. Rajaratnam, 2 vols. (Singapore: ISEAS, 2010, 2022)
S. Jayakumar, Diplomacy: A Singapore Experience (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2011)
Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Related Documents:

SG-M-01: The Singapore Model — Ideology, Pragmatism, or Something Else?
SG-M-03: Vulnerability as Governance Philosophy
SG-M-08: Pragmatism as Governing Philosophy
SG-F-01: The Foundations of Singapore's Foreign Policy (1965–2026)
SG-F-13: Middle Power Diplomacy — Forum of Small States and Multilateralism
SG-F-15: Bilahari Kausikan — The Diplomat as Public Intellectual
SG-F-17: Tommy Koh: Fifty Years of Diplomacy
SG-F-18: Kishore Mahbubani — The Asian Voice
SG-F-28: Lawrence Wong's Foreign Policy Doctrine
SG-L-18: PMO Speech Anthology — Foreign Policy and Small-State Doctrine
SG-L-29: S. Rajaratnam — Speeches, Essays, and the Architecture of Singapore's Foreign Policy and Civic Nationalism
SG-H-CS-01: Bilahari Kausikan (civil-service profile)
SG-A-10: International Recognition

Version Date: 2026-05-15

1. Key Takeaways

Singapore's foreign policy is not merely a set of tactical decisions adapted to shifting circumstances — it is a coherent political theory. Over six decades, five successive generations of diplomat-intellectuals have developed, tested, refined, and transmitted an internally consistent doctrine about how a small state survives and prospers in an anarchic international system. This doctrine can be called Small-State Realism: it accepts the realist premise that power asymmetries are permanent, but it rejects the fatalist conclusion that small states are therefore permanently subordinate. Instead, it argues that small states can convert structural disadvantage into strategic advantage through institutional multiplication, norm entrepreneurship, elite network cultivation, and the construction of reputational assets that large states find useful.
The founding articulation belongs to S. Rajaratnam. His speech to the United Nations on 21 September 1965 — six weeks after Singapore's traumatic ejection from Malaysia — established the conceptual scaffolding that every successor diplomat would build upon: sovereign equality before the law, non-subordination to any great power, the rules-based international order as the only viable shield for the small state, and a globalising economy as the substitute for the hinterland Singapore did not possess. Rajaratnam's "poisonous shrimp" formulation — that Singapore should be so costly to swallow that no predator would attempt it — fused foreign policy with defence policy in a single memorable image that remains operative in 2026.
Bilahari Kausikan represents the realist pole of Singapore's foreign policy tradition. His essays, speeches, and book Singapore Is Not an Island (2017) articulate a frank, unsentimental analysis of international relations that has no patience for liberal-internationalist optimism. For Kausikan, international law is useful because great powers sometimes find it useful to observe; multilateral institutions matter insofar as they reflect underlying balances of power; and small states that mistake the current rules-based order for a permanent, self-sustaining system rather than a contingent, power-dependent construction are dangerously naive. Kausikan's doctrine: be a friend of all, ally of none, but always know exactly who your friends are and what they want from you.
Tommy Koh represents the constructivist or normative pole: the belief that small states can actively shape international law and norms, and that the rules-based order is not merely a reflection of power but a structure that can acquire its own legitimacy and momentum. Koh's presidency of UNCLOS III (1981–1982), his leadership of the Earth Summit (1992), and his campaign for the Singapore Convention on Mediation (2019) demonstrate that individual diplomatic skill, deployed at key multilateral junctures, can produce binding international rules that protect small states for generations. For Koh, international law is both instrumentally useful and intrinsically valid.
Kishore Mahbubani occupies a distinctive position: the public intellectual who translates Singapore's small-state realism into a broader argument about Asia's rise and the coming restructuring of global governance. His books Can Asians Think? (1998) and The Asian 21st Century (2022) argue that the Western-dominated international order is transitional, not permanent, and that Asian states — including Singapore — must actively prepare for and shape the successor order. Mahbubani's provocation is that Singapore's stated commitment to the current rules-based order is simultaneously sincere and contingent: sincere because the order genuinely protects small states now; contingent because if the order changes, Singapore's loyalty to it will also change.
George Yeo brings a civilisational and geographical lens that complements the legal-institutional focus of Koh and the power-political realism of Kausikan. His arguments in Musings (2021) and various speeches frame Singapore's position through the prism of geographic determinism — a city-state at the junction of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea civilisational corridors — and its role as an entrepôt not just of goods but of ideas, cultures, and diplomatic signals. Yeo's distinctive contribution is to argue that Singapore's survival rests not only on law and power but on being genuinely useful to all the major civilisations whose ships and capital pass through the Strait of Malacca.
Vivian Balakrishnan, as Foreign Minister since 2015, has given Singapore's Small-State Realism a twenty-first century inflection through what might be called the "three Ps": principled, pragmatic, and proportionate. His management of the Russia-Ukraine sanctions decision (2022), the US-China rivalry, and the Hormuz Crisis (2025–2026) has demonstrated that principled-pragmatic-proportionate is not merely a rhetorical formula but an operational framework that guides how Singapore decides when to break from its traditional non-sanctioning posture, how to calibrate its language toward great powers, and how to maintain credibility with multiple constituencies simultaneously.
Lawrence Wong's foreign policy doctrine, developed in his first two years as Prime Minister (May 2024–2026), is best understood as consolidation rather than innovation. Wong's emphasis on "strategic autonomy," his framing of Singapore's position in the US-China rivalry as requiring "agency" rather than simple hedging, and his explicit warning that small states must resist being instrumentalised by large ones all represent continuations of the Rajaratnam-Kausikan-Koh tradition, updated for a more explicitly multipolar and transactional international environment.
Singapore's Small-State Realism stands in productive tension with three comparable small-state foreign policy traditions: the Israeli tradition of "security above all" and the willingness to take pre-emptive military action; the Norwegian tradition of principled-internationalism and the normative power of the committed multilateralist; and the Swiss tradition of armed neutrality and the strategic value of universal service to all parties. Singapore combines elements of all three — military self-reliance from Israel, normative institution-building from Norway, facilitation of all-parties from Switzerland — while rejecting the defining choices of each (Israel's unilateralism, Norway's welfare-state framing, Switzerland's constitutional neutrality).
Critics have argued that Singapore's Small-State Realism is self-serving rationalisation — a sophisticated justification for the permanent deferral of democratic reform at home and the accommodation of authoritarian partners abroad. Garry Rodan, Michael Barr, and Walden Bello have each noted that Singapore's insistence on sovereignty and non-interference in the internal affairs of states conveniently protects its own governance model from external scrutiny. The doctrine's critics argue that Singapore's international legal activism is selective: Singaporean diplomats champion the rules of the sea, mediation, and commercial arbitration, but are notably less vocal on the rules of human rights, press freedom, and democratic accountability.

2. The Record in Brief

Singapore's Small-State Realism did not arrive fully formed on 9 August 1965. It was assembled, under existential pressure, from the intellectual materials available to a small group of extraordinarily gifted men — Rajaratnam foremost among them — who understood that survival required a theory, not merely a strategy.

The theoretical problem was genuine. Classical realism, as theorised by Morgenthau, Waltz, and Mearsheimer, offered limited comfort to small states: if international relations were fundamentally about the struggle for power among states, and if power was a function of territory, population, and military capability, then a city-state of 1.9 million people was permanently vulnerable, permanently subordinate, and permanently subject to the whims of larger neighbours. Singapore could not escape this structural condition; it could only manage it.

The management strategy that emerged over Singapore's first decade of independence had three components. First, deterrence: make the cost of military coercion unacceptably high through the construction of a credible armed force, backed by the "poisonous shrimp" doctrine. Second, engagement: embed Singapore in as many overlapping multilateral frameworks as possible — the United Nations, ASEAN, the Commonwealth, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Five Power Defence Arrangements — so that any attack on Singapore would be an attack on a networked node, not merely a city-state. Third, utility: make Singapore so economically, logistically, and diplomatically useful to every major power that none would have an interest in destabilising it.

These three components — deterrence, engagement, utility — have remained the structural pillars of Singapore's foreign policy from 1965 to 2026. What has changed is the intellectual elaboration of each component, the particular emphases of successive generations of diplomat-intellectuals, and the specific challenges that each generation has had to navigate.

A key feature of Singapore's Small-State Realism is its explicit theorisation as a transmissible doctrine, not merely a set of ad hoc responses. From Rajaratnam's founding speeches through Kausikan's published book and Mahbubani's global readership, Singapore's diplomat-intellectuals have consciously written for posterity and for external audiences, not just for the files of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This externalisation of doctrine is itself a strategic choice: by articulating Singapore's approach in explicit, principled terms, successive generations of Singaporean diplomats have created a reputational architecture that constrains both Singapore and its interlocutors. Singapore cannot silently abandon its commitment to the rules-based order without paying the credibility cost that its own extensive public record would impose. The doctrine, once published, becomes part of the strategic environment in which Singapore operates.

This self-constraining quality of publicly articulated doctrine is distinctive among small-state foreign policy traditions. Many small states manage their international relationships through deliberate ambiguity — maintaining flexibility by never fully committing any position to paper. Singapore has chosen the opposite approach: explicit articulation, public commitment, and consistency over time as the primary mechanisms through which credibility is built and maintained. The result is a foreign policy record that is, by international standards, unusually well-documented and unusually coherent — a feature that both enables the analysis in this document and reflects the underlying philosophy of the tradition itself.

The elaboration has been cumulative. Rajaratnam established the vocabulary and the first-order principles. Tommy Koh demonstrated that individual Singaporean diplomats could play decisive roles in shaping international law. Kishore Mahbubani expanded the intellectual ambition, arguing that Singapore had insights about globalisation and Asian governance that were relevant to the entire world. Bilahari Kausikan provided the systematic theoretical articulation, separating what was genuinely novel in Singapore's approach from what was merely tactical adaptation. George Yeo introduced the civilisational and geographic dimensions. Vivian Balakrishnan has operationalised the doctrine in a period of unusual stress, navigating the simultaneous challenges of the US-China rivalry, the Ukraine war, and the Hormuz Crisis. Lawrence Wong is in the early stages of his own contribution.

The result is a body of foreign policy thought — distributed across speeches, books, essays, parliamentary debates, and diplomatic memoirs — that constitutes one of the most sustained attempts by a small state to theorise its own survival in the modern international system. This document collects and systematises that body of thought.

3. The Founding Articulation — Rajaratnam, the 1965 UN Speech, and the Poisonous Shrimp Doctrine

S. Rajaratnam took the rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly on 21 September 1965 — forty-three days after Singapore's involuntary independence — as both Foreign Minister and as the primary intellectual architect of the new state's international posture. He had no army, no established diplomatic service, no international recognition beyond the brief formalities of that morning's admission vote, and no certainty that Singapore would still exist in five years. What he had was a theory.

The theory had three elements, laid out in that founding speech and elaborated in the decade of writings and speeches that followed. The first element was the unconditional assertion of sovereign equality. Singapore was a small state, Rajaratnam acknowledged, but smallness did not mean subordination. The principle of sovereign equality — one state, one vote, one set of rights and obligations — was not a polite fiction but the foundational premise of the international order that Singapore needed to survive. Any erosion of this principle — any concession that large states had inherently greater rights than small ones — was existentially dangerous to Singapore. From this, Rajaratnam derived a corollary: Singapore would never voluntarily subordinate its foreign policy to any great power, would never allow itself to become a client state, and would resist any pressure — however subtle — to align its positions with those of larger patrons.

The second element was the rules-based international order as small-state shield. Rajaratnam's articulation of this argument was remarkably sophisticated for a state that was forty-three days old. He understood that international law was not self-enforcing — that it required great-power buy-in to be operative, and that great powers observed international law only when it served their interests. But he also understood that the law, once made, acquired its own authority and created its own constituency among the states that benefited from it. Singapore's strategy was to invest heavily in building and maintaining that constituency, to make the rules-based order as thick and as widely observed as possible, so that any erosion would require the large power to pay a political cost beyond the bilateral calculation.

The third element was what Rajaratnam called the "global city" concept, elaborated most fully in his 1972 Singapore Press Club address. Singapore's survival, he argued, depended on its becoming so economically integrated with the world that its destruction or absorption would impose costs on every major trading and maritime power. This was not merely an economic strategy — it was a security strategy. A global city was a networked node in the world economy; disrupting it would disrupt global commerce. This gave Singapore a form of deterrence that had nothing to do with military capability: the deterrence of mutual economic dependence.

The "poisonous shrimp" formulation — which appears in various versions across different speeches and is often attributed to Rajaratnam, though the precise original source is — captures the military dimension of this three-part doctrine. A poisonous shrimp would not make a satisfying meal for any predator; the cost of swallowing it would exceed any conceivable benefit. Singapore therefore invested, from the earliest years of independence, in building an armed force — the Singapore Armed Forces — whose capability, backed by defence partnerships, would make the cost of military coercion unacceptably high. The SAF was not intended to defeat a large-state army in open conventional warfare; it was intended to impose costs sufficient to deter any rational adversary from attempting the exercise.

This three-part founding doctrine — sovereign equality as non-negotiable premise, rules-based order as structural protection, and global-city economic integration as the ultimate deterrence — has been the intellectual bedrock of every subsequent elaboration. It was established under conditions of maximum vulnerability, by a thinker who was simultaneously managing a fragile new government, building a diplomatic service from scratch, and writing the foundational documents of a national identity. That it has proven so durable is testimony to both the quality of the original thinking and the structural continuity of Singapore's condition.

4. The Bilahari Kausikan Articulation — Realist, Hard-Headed, Friend of All

Bilahari Kausikan joined the Singapore Foreign Service in 1981 and rose to become Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2010–2013) before his retirement from service and subsequent career as a public intellectual at the National University of Singapore's Middle East Institute and through the RSIS platform. His book Singapore Is Not an Island: Views on Singapore Foreign Policy (Straits Times Press, 2017) is the most systematic theoretical articulation of Singapore's foreign policy philosophy produced by a practitioner insider.

Kausikan's starting point is a frank acknowledgement of the realist condition. International relations are fundamentally shaped by power differentials, and small states cannot escape this fact by wishing it away. The international order is not a naturally occurring system of rules that protects all states equally; it is a construction maintained by great powers that find it useful, and it will persist only as long as those great powers find it more useful than alternatives. Singapore's investment in international law and multilateral institutions is rational precisely because it reflects this understanding: legal rules and multilateral frameworks constrain great-power behaviour at the margins, increase the costs of norm-violation, and give small states diplomatic tools they would otherwise lack. But they are instruments, not ends in themselves.

The "friend of all, enemy of none" formulation — which has become something of a slogan for Singapore's great-power strategy — Kausikan has taken pains to elaborate and qualify. It does not mean equidistance or neutrality. Singapore has genuine strategic interests that align more closely with some states than others: its security partnership with the United States, rooted in the 1990 MOU and elaborated through the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement, is not equivalent to its relationship with China. Singapore is not neutral in the Ukraine war: its decision to impose sanctions on Russia in March 2022 — the first time Singapore had imposed autonomous sanctions outside the UN framework — was a deliberate signal that sovereignty and territorial integrity were principles Singapore would pay a cost to defend. What "friend of all" means, in Kausikan's articulation, is that Singapore maintains productive working relationships with all major powers simultaneously, does not take sides in great-power disputes in ways that require burning one relationship to preserve another, and preserves maximum freedom of manoeuvre.

The "hard-headed" qualifier is equally important. Kausikan has been consistently sceptical of normative international relations theory — the liberal-internationalist tradition that argues the international order is gradually becoming more rule-governed, more democratic, more rights-protective. His essays on Asian values and human rights in the 1990s, which engaged directly with Western critics of Singapore's governance model, articulated a position that was realist at its core: that the values embedded in international human rights law reflected the specific historical experience and political interests of Western states, and that their universalisation was not a neutral act of moral progress but an exercise of cultural and political power. This position was controversial — and deliberately so — but it reflected a consistent theoretical orientation that has also shaped Kausikan's analysis of the US-China rivalry, which he analyses as a structural conflict between two great powers rather than as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism.

The practical implications of Kausikan's articulation for Singapore's foreign policy are significant. They counsel resistance to ideological framing in great-power relations; a preference for concrete interests over abstract principles in bilateral negotiations; a consistent assertion of Singapore's own interests even when this discomforts partners; and a clear-eyed recognition that Singapore's security ultimately depends on maintaining multiple, simultaneously productive relationships with states whose interests are in tension. "We have no permanent friends or permanent enemies," Kausikan has written, echoing Palmerston while updating the formulation for the twenty-first century, "only permanent interests." [TBD-VERIFY: exact Kausikan formulation of this; the sentiment is consistent with his published work but the precise quote requires verification against Singapore Is Not an Island pp. 12–30]

5. The Tommy Koh Articulation — Norms, Multilateralism, and the Lawyer's Diplomat

Tommy Koh's contribution to Singapore's foreign policy philosophy represents a different theoretical tradition from Kausikan's realism — not opposing it, but complementing it. Where Kausikan begins from the distribution of power and works toward a pragmatic accommodation of it, Koh begins from the possibility of binding international rules and works toward demonstrating, through sustained personal engagement, that those rules can be made and observed.

Koh's intellectual formation was as an international lawyer. He served as Singapore's Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1968 to 1971 and again from 1974 to 1984, accumulating a record of multilateral engagement that remains without parallel in Singapore's diplomatic history. His presidency of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III), from 1981 to the Convention's adoption in December 1982, was the defining achievement: a decade-long negotiation among 160 states, covering every aspect of the world's oceans, concluded through Koh's combination of procedural mastery, relentless personal diplomacy, and a principled commitment to producing a universal convention rather than a great-power instrument. UNCLOS remains, as of 2026, the most comprehensive and widely observed multilateral treaty in the law of the sea, and Singapore's freedom of navigation depends on it directly.

The theoretical proposition underlying Koh's multilateralism is that international law has a reality and momentum of its own that transcends the power calculations of any individual state. This is not naive idealism — Koh has never denied that great powers shape international law in their own image and that the current rules-based order reflects Western and particularly American preferences in significant ways. His argument is that once rules are made and institutions established, they acquire legitimacy that is partially independent of the power of their original authors. States that would not observe a rule imposed by force may observe the same rule when it has been adopted through transparent multilateral negotiation with genuine small-state participation. The process, in other words, matters: legitimacy is not merely a function of content but of procedure.

This theoretical proposition has practical consequences. It means that Singapore should invest not just in observing international law but in actively making it — participating in negotiations, providing technical expertise, fielding skilled negotiators, and seeking leadership positions in multilateral bodies. The investment pays off not merely because specific rules benefit Singapore, but because Singapore's reputation as a skilled, principled, effective multilateral actor gives it influence and access that its material power cannot purchase. When Tommy Koh negotiated the Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), he was not representing Singapore's narrow national interest in global environmental law; he was investing in Singapore's reputation as a state whose participation in multilateral processes improved those processes, and whose engagement therefore gave it access and influence disproportionate to its size.

The "lawyer's diplomat" style — preference for text over ambiguity, for binding commitments over political declarations, for adjudication over negotiation in disputes where one's legal position is strong — has shaped Singapore's approach to its own territorial disputes. Singapore's decision to submit the Pedra Branca dispute with Malaysia to the International Court of Justice, rather than continuing bilateral negotiation, reflected a Koh-style calculation: Singapore's legal position was strong, the ICJ process would produce a binding judgment that Malaysia could not unilaterally revise, and the precedent of Singapore submitting its own interests to international adjudication would strengthen Singapore's credibility in advocating international law for others. The ICJ decided in Singapore's favour on Pedra Branca in 2008.

6. The Kishore Mahbubani Articulation — Asian Voice, Western Wisdom, and the Public Intellectual

Kishore Mahbubani served Singapore as Ambassador to the United Nations and then as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1993–1998) before becoming founding Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (2004–2017). His subsequent career as a public intellectual — producing Can Asians Think? (1998), The New Asian Hemisphere (2008), Has the West Lost It? (2018), Has China Won? (2020), and The Asian 21st Century (2022) — has made him one of the most widely read commentators on Asian international relations globally.

Mahbubani's foreign policy philosophy begins from a sociological observation that goes beyond the state-centric framework of Kausikan and even the multilateral-institutionalism of Koh: the world is undergoing the largest rebalancing of power in centuries, as Asian states — above all China and India — reclaim the central position in global affairs they occupied for most of recorded history. Can Asians Think?, Mahbubani's breakthrough essay collection, posed the question not as a provocation about Asian intellectual capacity but as a challenge to Asian political culture: can Asian states produce genuinely original political thought, or will they forever operate within frameworks set by the West? Singapore's role, in Mahbubani's vision, is to model what Asian governance excellence looks like — pragmatic, meritocratic, competent, and capable of delivering human development outcomes that Western liberal democracy has increasingly failed to match.

This is a significant departure from the Kausikan framework in its implications, if not always in its conclusions. Where Kausikan's realism is essentially conservative — accept the world as it is, manage power differentials pragmatically, do not bet on normative change — Mahbubani's framework is historically dynamic: the world is changing, the distribution of power is shifting, and Singapore must position itself for a world in which Western power is relatively declining and Asian power is relatively rising. This does not mean Singapore should abandon the rules-based order; the rules-based order remains the best available framework for small-state protection. But it does mean Singapore should advocate for the reform of that order to reflect new power realities — a larger role for Asian states in multilateral institutions, a more genuinely universal (as opposed to Atlanticist) set of norms, and a replacement of the double standards that characterise Western human rights advocacy with genuinely universal standards.

Mahbubani's most controversial practical argument is about the US-China rivalry. In Has China Won? (2020), he argues that the rivalry is fundamentally misframed by the American side as a contest between freedom and authoritarianism, when it is actually a structural transition from a unipolar to a multipolar international order. Singapore, he argues, should resist the American framing not because it prefers Chinese governance but because the framing is analytically inaccurate and strategically counterproductive — it forecloses the possibility of the managed great-power accommodation that is the only alternative to catastrophic conflict. [TBD-VERIFY: specific argumentation in Has China Won?, 2020, chapters 4–6, on the US-China rivalry framing]

The Mahbubani position has been criticised within Singapore's foreign policy establishment — not least by Kausikan, who in various public exchanges has argued that Mahbubani's optimism about China's intentions is insufficiently hard-headed. This internal Singapore debate between the realist and the constructivist-historical-sociological positions is itself theoretically significant: it demonstrates that Singapore's small-state realism is not monolithic but a contested tradition with genuine intellectual tensions.

7. The George Yeo Articulation — Geographic Determinism and Civilisational Trade

George Yeo served as Singapore's Foreign Minister from 2004 to 2011 — the longest tenure since Rajaratnam — and brought to the role an intellectual framework that differed markedly from both the legal-institutionalism of Koh and the power-political realism of Kausikan. His post-ministerial Musings: Series One (World Scientific, 2021) and associated lectures at Yale-NUS, CSIS, and various Asian policy forums have elaborated a philosophy of Singapore's international position grounded in historical geography and civilisational analysis.

Yeo's starting proposition is geographic: Singapore sits at the junction of four great civilisational zones — the Chinese, the Indian, the Islamic, and the Western — whose commerce, culture, and political influences have been flowing through the Strait of Malacca for two millennia. This is not merely a historical fact but a structural condition that defines what Singapore is and what it can be. Singapore's "competitive advantage" in international affairs is not its legal skills, its military capability, or its economic heft — though all of these matter. It is its unique capacity to be simultaneously legible to, and trusted by, all four civilisational zones. Singapore has a substantial Chinese population that maintains cultural connections to China; a significant Indian community that provides links to South Asia; a Malay-Muslim majority in the immediate region; and a governance model, legal system, and business culture that make it familiar to Western investors and institutions.

This analysis produces what might be called Yeo's "civilisational entrepôt" doctrine: Singapore's security rests not just on military deterrence and international law but on being so embedded in the civilisational metabolism of the wider region that its disruption would be felt simultaneously in Beijing, New Delhi, Riyadh, and Washington. Any state that sought to coerce or absorb Singapore would have to reckon not just with the SAF and the UN but with the disruption to the civilisational flows — of capital, trade, ideas, pilgrims, students, and diplomatic signals — that pass through Singapore daily.

Yeo extended this geographic-civilisational analysis to specific foreign policy challenges. His management of the relationship with China during the 2004–2011 period reflected a conviction that Singapore's value to China was not as a military partner or ideological ally but as a bridge between Chinese capitalism and the broader international economic order — a role that required Singapore to maintain its trustworthiness with Western partners at the same time. His early advocacy for engagement with Myanmar and his nuanced handling of the India relationship reflected a similar logic: Singapore's value was in being the node through which otherwise-difficult bilateral relationships could be managed by proxy.

The implications for Singapore's foreign policy theory are distinctive. Yeo's framework suggests that Singapore should invest not just in military capability and legal activism but in what might be called "civilisational fluency" — in sustaining its multilingual, multiracial, multi-religiously connected character as a strategic asset. Any domestic policy that eroded Singapore's civilisational diversity would be strategically counterproductive, not just socially undesirable. The maintenance of Singapore's multiracial compact — the subject of SG-M-07 and SG-M-10 in this corpus — is, on this analysis, simultaneously a domestic social policy and a foreign policy instrument.

8. The Vivian Balakrishnan Articulation — Twitter-Era Diplomacy and Principled-Pragmatic-Proportionate

Vivian Balakrishnan has been Singapore's Foreign Minister since 2015, making him the longest-serving Foreign Minister since Rajaratnam. His stewardship spans the Trump I administration, the COVID-19 pandemic, the return of great-power competition with sharp edges, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the US-China trade and technology wars, and the Hormuz Crisis of 2025–2026. It is a period in which the assumptions underlying Singapore's Small-State Realism — that the rules-based order is durable, that great powers are self-interested but rational, that multilateral institutions provide reliable frameworks for dispute resolution — have been tested more severely than at any point since 1965.

Balakrishnan's theoretical contribution is the operationalisation of the inherited doctrine under stress. He has not rewritten the foundational principles — sovereign equality, rules-based order, multilateral engagement, balance-of-power management — but he has developed a more explicit framework for deciding when and how to act when those principles are under pressure. The three-P formula — principled, pragmatic, proportionate — functions as a decision procedure: what does principle require? what does pragmatic calculation suggest? and what response is proportionate to the provocation, neither under-reacting (which damages credibility) nor over-reacting (which damages relationships)?

The Russia-Ukraine sanctions decision is the paradigmatic application of this framework. Singapore's decision in March 2022 to impose autonomous sanctions on Russia — freezing assets, restricting financial transactions, prohibiting exports of items that could be used for military purposes — was the first time Singapore had imposed sanctions outside the UN Security Council framework. The principled argument was clear: Russia had violated the UN Charter's prohibition on the use of force against a sovereign state and the principle of territorial integrity that Singapore had always cited as the core of the rules-based order it depended on. If Singapore stayed silent, it would be conceding that the principle it most relied on was negotiable when a great power violated it. The pragmatic argument was that the sanctions would impose real economic costs on Singapore (Russia was not a negligible trading partner) and would irritate China, which opposed sanctions. The proportionate calculation was that Singapore should act, but within a framework coordinated with like-minded states (the EU, US, UK, Japan) and with clear public articulation of the legal basis, so the decision was read as principled rather than merely political.

Balakrishnan's Twitter-era diplomacy — his notably active presence on social media platforms, his real-time commentary on international events, and his direct exchanges with foreign counterparts online — represents a tactical adaptation of the traditional Singapore diplomatic style to twenty-first century communication environments. The underlying substantive positions remain recognisably continuous with the Rajaratnam-Kausikan-Koh tradition; what has changed is the speed, the directness, and the public visibility of the articulation. This adaptation is itself theoretically significant: in an environment where diplomatic signals are processed not just by professional interlocutors but by domestic and international publics in real time, the rhetorical discipline of Singapore's foreign policy has become more demanding, not less.

Singapore's handling of the Hormuz Crisis of 2025–2026 — which saw Iran close the Strait of Hormuz for a period of weeks in the context of the Iran-Israel-US military confrontation — demonstrated the doctrine under maximum stress. Singapore was simultaneously dependent on Gulf energy flows through the Strait, maintaining its traditional balance between Iran and the Western coalition, attempting to sustain ASEAN unity on a crisis that threatened regional economies, and navigating the risk of being instrumentalised by one or more of the major parties. Balakrishnan's public articulation of Singapore's position — condemning the closure of an international waterway as a violation of UNCLOS while declining to assign political responsibility for the escalation — was a textbook application of the principled-pragmatic-proportionate framework. [For extended analysis see SG-F-27: Singapore and the Iran-Israel-US War — Hormuz Crisis and Governance Response (2025–2026)]

9. The Lawrence Wong Doctrinal Continuation — 2024–2026

Lawrence Wong became Prime Minister of Singapore on 15 May 2024, inheriting a foreign policy situation of unusual complexity: a US-China rivalry that had sharpened into trade wars, technology decoupling, and competing regional security architectures; a post-Ukraine rules-based order under stress; a post-Hormuz Middle East whose energy logistics had been disrupted; and a domestic political environment in which the PAP was navigating its first leadership transition in twenty years following Lee Hsien Loong's retirement.

Wong's foreign policy positioning in his first two years has been characterised by a deliberate emphasis on the word "agency." In his address at the IPS Singapore Perspectives conference in January 2024 (before assuming the Prime Ministership but speaking as incoming PM designate), and in his first Shangri-La Dialogue speech in May 2024, Wong framed Singapore's strategic challenge not merely as managing great-power competition but as actively preserving the ability to make its own choices — refusing to be structurally locked into either the American or the Chinese orbit, resisting the pressure to choose sides that both Washington and Beijing applied with increasing intensity.

The language of "agency" is theoretically significant. It goes beyond the traditional Singaporean framing of "hedging" or "balance," which implies a reactive posture — responding to power distributions as they exist. Wong's framing of "agency" implies a more active stance: Singapore as a state that chooses its own path, invests in the relationships and capabilities that underpin the ability to choose, and resists the institutional drift toward alignment that great-power competition tends to produce. This is continuous with the Kausikan doctrine of "friend of all, ally of none," but it frames the position as an affirmative strategy rather than a limitation.

Wong's explicit warning against small states being "instrumentalised" by large ones — a formulation he has used in multiple speeches — reflects the specific pressures of the 2024–2026 moment, when both the United States and China were building coalitions and applying pressure on Southeast Asian states to demonstrate alignment. Singapore's response has been to deepen its economic and security relationships with both major powers (including the AUKUS-adjacent technology cooperation arrangements, the IPCEF framework with the US, and the ongoing BRI participation in selected Belt and Road logistics projects) while maintaining public positions on key disputes — Taiwan, Ukraine, the South China Sea — that do not endorse either power's framing.

Wong has also continued Singapore's strong investment in multilateral institutions, including a hard-fought campaign to secure a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council for the 2025–2026 term. Singapore's Security Council membership in that term has provided a platform for articulating small-state perspectives on the crises of those years — the Hormuz Crisis above all — in a forum where the major powers are directly present and where Singapore's positions carry institutional weight.

The doctrinal continuity from Rajaratnam to Wong across six decades is striking. The core logic — sovereign equality, rules-based order, global economic integration as deterrence, military credibility, multilateral embedding, balance among major powers — has been maintained through dramatic changes in the international environment. What has evolved is the sophistication of the theoretical articulation, the complexity of the institutional networks Singapore has built and sustains, and the confidence — visible in Wong's "agency" framing — with which Singapore presents its strategic position not as a defensive response to weakness but as a deliberate and chosen posture.

10. Comparative Lens — Singapore Small-State Realism vs Israeli, Norwegian, and Swiss Variants

Singapore's Small-State Realism is not unique in the history of small-state foreign policy theory. Three comparable cases illuminate what is distinctive about Singapore's approach through contrast: Israel, Norway, and Switzerland.

The Israeli Variant. Israel shares with Singapore the characteristic of a small state in a hostile neighbourhood whose survival was doubted at independence. Both countries built military forces out of proportion to their size, institutionalised conscription as a civic obligation, and developed the "poisonous shrimp" logic of deterrence through disproportionate capability. But the Israeli and Singaporean traditions diverge sharply on the role of international law and multilateral institutions. Israel has been willing to take pre-emptive military action, to operate outside UN frameworks, and to disregard ICJ judgments it disagrees with — most prominently on the advisory opinion concerning the separation barrier. Singapore's approach has been the inverse: an almost absolutist insistence on international law as binding, a record of submitting its own territorial disputes to international adjudication, and a consistent opposition to unilateral use of force outside the UN framework (including Russia's invasion of Ukraine). The Israeli variant suggests that small-state survival can be secured through military capability and great-power patronage alone, without the investment in international law that Singapore has made. Singapore's implicit counter-argument is that this approach is not available to a state without a permanent patron, and that even if it were available, it is more expensive in the long run than building a rules-based order.

The Norwegian Variant. Norway represents the normative-internationalist pole of small-state foreign policy: a commitment to multilateral institutions, human rights, international law, and the use of Norway's wealth and diplomatic capital to advance global public goods (conflict mediation, development assistance, climate finance). Norway is the principal champion of a liberal-internationalist vision of world order in which the rules-based system is progressively deepened and extended. Singapore shares Norway's commitment to multilateral institutions and international law, and Tommy Koh is in important respects a Norwegian-style normative diplomat. But Singapore diverges from the Norwegian tradition in its explicit rejection of the liberal democracy and human rights dimensions of the Norwegian normative agenda. Singapore will not leverage its foreign policy for democracy promotion abroad (just as it resists democracy-promotion in its own case), and it has consistently argued that the normative content of the international order reflects Western preferences rather than universal values. The Norwegian variant suggests that small-state influence can be maximised through principled, values-based multilateralism. Singapore's implicit counter-argument is that this approach depends on a degree of normative homogeneity — a shared set of values among the rule-making community — that does not exist in a multipolar, multi-civilisational world.

The Swiss Variant. Switzerland offers the paradigm of armed neutrality: a small state that has secured its independence through constitutional neutrality, military deterrence, and the provision of universal services to all parties (hosting international organisations, facilitating negotiations, providing banking and financial services to all comers). Singapore shares significant features with the Swiss model — the facilitation role, the provision of infrastructure and services to all major powers, the strong military deterrent — but differs in its explicit rejection of constitutional neutrality. Singapore is not neutral: it has a security relationship with the United States that is qualitatively different from its relationship with China, it has imposed sanctions on Russia, and it has taken public positions on territorial disputes that are inconsistent with strict neutrality. The Swiss variant suggests that neutrality can itself be a strategic asset. Singapore's implicit counter-argument is that neutrality is only available to a state that is not directly threatened by the disputes it declines to take sides on, and that Singapore's geographic position in Southeast Asia — where great-power competition is directly present — makes genuine neutrality strategically incoherent.

What Singapore has done, in effect, is synthesise elements of all three variants while accepting none of their defining commitments. From Israel, it has taken military credibility and the "poisonous shrimp" logic. From Norway, it has taken multilateral institution-building and normative diplomacy (selectively, on legal and economic norms rather than political norms). From Switzerland, it has taken the facilitation and universal-service model. The synthesis is distinctive precisely because none of the three templates applies directly to Singapore's structural situation, and Singapore's Small-State Realism represents an original theoretical response to that situation.

11. The Critics — Are These Just Rationalisations?

The most persistent critique of Singapore's Small-State Realism is that it is not a coherent political theory at all, but a sophisticated post-hoc rationalisation of a set of pragmatic decisions made under conditions of vulnerability — a theoretical language invented to justify whatever the government decided to do anyway.

This critique has several distinct forms. The first is the selectivity argument: Singapore champions international law when it benefits Singapore (UNCLOS, the Pedra Branca ICJ case, the prohibition on using force against sovereign states) and declines to champion it when it constrains Singapore or its partners (human rights law, press freedom norms, democratic governance standards). Garry Rodan's work on Singapore's political economy and Walden Bello's critiques of the ASEAN framework have both noted this selectivity. The theoretical response — that international law is not self-enforcing and that a small state must be strategic about where it invests its credibility — is coherent, but it does imply that Singapore's commitment to the rules-based order is instrumental rather than principled. Bilahari Kausikan, to his credit, largely accepts this characterisation: his realism does not pretend to be something other than it is.

The second form of the critique is the domestic-governance nexus argument. Singapore's doctrine of non-interference in the internal affairs of states — its consistent opposition to external commentary on domestic governance, press freedom, judicial independence, or political rights — is inseparable from its need to protect its own governance model from the same commentary. Michael Barr's analysis of Singapore's "ruling elite" has consistently noted that the principles of sovereignty and non-interference that Singapore defends in international forums are the same principles that shield the PAP government from external scrutiny at home. This is not hypocrisy, exactly — Singapore applies the same rules to itself as to others — but it does mean that Singapore's international legal advocacy is structurally conservative: it defends the existing distribution of state authority both domestically and internationally.

The third form of the critique is the realism-about-realism argument: that Singapore's embrace of Small-State Realism as a theory may actually be counterproductive for its long-term survival. The liberal-internationalist alternative — investing heavily in democratic norms, human rights, and the progressive deepening of the rules-based order — might, over the long run, produce a more durable international environment for small states than the power-political approach that Kausikan advocates. Small states, on this view, have the most to gain from a genuinely rule-governed international order, not merely a rules-based one that great powers can discard when inconvenient. Mahbubani's work, interestingly, partially converges with this critique — his argument that Singapore should advocate for the reform of multilateral institutions to make them genuinely universal rather than Western-dominated is, in a sense, an argument for a more deeply normative approach than Kausikan's realism allows.

The honest assessment is that Singapore's Small-State Realism is both a genuine intellectual contribution and an interested one. It is a genuine contribution because it has identified, with unusual clarity, the structural challenges facing small states in an anarchic international system and developed a set of responses that have proven effective over six decades. It is an interested one because the specific choices embedded in the doctrine — the emphasis on sovereignty over human rights, on economic integration over democratic solidarity, on military deterrence over normative persuasion — all happen to serve the interests of the PAP government as well as the Singaporean state. These two facts are not mutually exclusive, and acknowledging both is more theoretically honest than pretending the doctrine is purely disinterested.

12. Conclusion — A Political Theory Under Pressure

Singapore's Small-State Realism is, by any reasonable measure, a successful political theory. It has produced, and been produced by, a foreign policy record that has kept a city-state sovereign, prosperous, and influential for over sixty years in one of the world's most strategically contested regions. It has generated an intellectual tradition — distributed across the work of Rajaratnam, Koh, Mahbubani, Kausikan, Yeo, Balakrishnan, and Wong — that is cumulative, internally debated, and genuinely original.

The doctrine is currently under its most severe stress since independence. The international environment of 2026 — a sharpened US-China rivalry, an eroded UN Security Council, a post-Ukraine rules-based order of uncertain durability, a multipolar system in which transactional bilateralism is replacing multilateral institutionalism — directly challenges each of the three pillars Rajaratnam erected in 1965. The rules-based order that Singapore has invested in building and maintaining is under attack from the major powers that built it. The multilateral institutions that embedded Singapore in networks of mutual interest are weakened by great-power competition. The global economic integration that provided deterrence through mutual dependence is being fragmented by technology decoupling, supply chain nationalism, and geopolitical bloc formation.

Singapore's response — to defend the rules-based order vocally, to invest in alternative and complementary frameworks (ASEAN, the Global Governance Group, bilateral economic partnerships), to strengthen military deterrence, and to maintain maximum flexibility in great-power relations — is recognisably continuous with the foundational doctrine. But the margin of error is narrowing. The question that Rajaratnam could not answer in 1965, and that his successors cannot fully answer in 2026, is whether Small-State Realism is a theory that generates its own conditions of success — a self-fulfilling prophecy of resilience — or a theory that has been successful because the international conditions of the past sixty years happened to be hospitable to it, and that may lose its effectiveness as those conditions change.

The intellectual honesty of Singapore's best foreign policy thinkers — evident in Kausikan's frank acknowledgement that the rules-based order is contingent, in Mahbubani's insistence that the Western-dominated order is historically transitional, in Yeo's argument that civilisational fluency rather than any single alignment is Singapore's deepest strategic asset — suggests that the tradition is capable of self-revision. Whether that capacity for revision will be sufficient to navigate the turbulence ahead is the open question on which the next chapter of Singapore's Small-State Realism turns.

What the doctrine cannot afford, and what its architects have consistently recognised, is the luxury of ideological rigidity. The parallel with Singapore's domestic governing philosophy of pragmatism — documented in SG-M-08 — is not accidental. The same intellectual disposition that produced the "does it work?" standard for domestic policy produced the "what does our position require in this specific configuration of power?" standard for foreign policy. Both are anti-ideological in the sense that they refuse to apply a fixed template regardless of circumstances; both are deeply principled in the sense that the refusal to apply fixed templates is itself a consistent, carefully reasoned, deliberately maintained position. Singapore's Small-State Realism and Singapore's domestic pragmatism are, at the deepest level, the same governing philosophy applied to different domains.

That continuity — between the state's internal theory of itself and its external theory of its place in the world — is the most distinctive feature of the Singapore model as a whole. It explains why Lee Kuan Yew's assessment of the international system and his assessment of domestic governance were products of the same mind, drawing on the same intellectual sources, and arriving at the same fundamental conclusion: that survival requires clear-eyed recognition of the world as it is, not as any ideology insists it should be. It also explains why the transition from Lee to Goh Chok Tong to Lee Hsien Loong to Lawrence Wong, and from Rajaratnam to Koh to Kausikan to Balakrishnan, have been continuations rather than ruptures. The individuals change; the underlying theory — tested, refined, and publicly committed to across sixty years — endures.

Spiral Index

Antecedents: SG-A-10 (International Recognition, 1965) → SG-L-29 (Rajaratnam's speeches and essays) → SG-F-01 (Foundations of Foreign Policy)

Institutional elaboration: SG-F-13 (Middle Power Diplomacy and FOSS) → SG-F-15 (Bilahari Kausikan) → SG-F-17 (Tommy Koh) → SG-F-18 (Kishore Mahbubani)

Crisis applications: SG-F-19 (Russia-Ukraine 2022) → SG-F-27 (Hormuz Crisis 2025–2026) → SG-F-28 (Lawrence Wong Foreign Policy Doctrine)

Theoretical context: SG-M-01 (Singapore Model) → SG-M-03 (Vulnerability as Philosophy) → SG-M-08 (Pragmatism as Governing Philosophy)

Primary-source companions: SG-L-18 (PMO Speech Anthology — Foreign Policy) → SG-L-29 (Rajaratnam Anthology) → SG-L-36 (Foreign Minister Speech Anthology) → SG-L-37 (Lawrence Wong Speech Anthology)

Critique and contest: SG-M-15 (Singapore Conservatism as Political Theory) → SG-M-16 (Singapore Liberalism — the Minor Tradition) → SG-J-01 (Contested Legacies)

SG-M-19: Small-State Realism — Singapore's Foreign Policy Philosophy as Political Theory (1965–2026)