CHAPTER 10: "Small State, Big Diplomacy"
Singapore's foreign policy was forged not in the study rooms of think tanks but in the existential crisis of August 1965. On the day of separation from Malaysia, the nation possessed neither an army nor a recognized place in the international system. The new government controlled a small island of 224 square miles with no hinterland, no natural resources, surrounded by two far larger neighbors—Indonesia and Malaysia—that had recently waged open warfare against each other. In the eyes of most international observers, Singapore was unlikely to survive. Lee Kuan Yew famously wept, not from sentiment but from the clarity of an impossible situation: a Chinese-majority city-state in a Malay-Muslim region, dependent entirely on trade for survival, with no capacity for military self-defense.
It was in this crucible that Singapore's foreign policy doctrine took shape, and it bore the unmistakable imprint of S. Rajaratnam, appointed as the nation's first Foreign Minister at age 50. Rajaratnam was not a career diplomat but a journalist, a man who had spent his career in newspapers and was radicalized by the Japanese occupation of Malaya during the Second World War. He brought to the Foreign Ministry a clarity of principle forged in wartime and a pragmatism honed in the rough-and-tumble of local politics. The doctrine he articulated would define Singapore's international posture for decades to come: absolute sovereignty, strict non-alignment, and an unwavering commitment to the rule of international law as the only framework within which small states could hope to survive and prosper.
Rajaratnam's strategic insight was crystalline and uncompromising. A small state, he understood, could not rely on military power or economic coercion. It could survive only if the international system was governed by rules rather than by might. This was not idealism dressed in pragmatic language; it was the clearest possible statement of rational self-interest. Singapore would build its foreign policy on the proposition that international law, treaties, and institutions mattered more than military alliances or regional hierarchies. The nation would be unaligned—neither with the Soviet bloc nor the Western bloc—precisely because alignment would subordinate its sovereignty to the interests of a patron. Non-alignment was not neutrality or passivity; it was active independence.
This doctrine found expression in what became known in regional circles as the "poisonous shrimp" strategy. Rajaratnam did not use this phrase himself, but it captured the logic perfectly. A shrimp cannot defeat a shark in direct combat, but a poisonous shrimp imposes costs on any predator that tries to eat it. Singapore would make itself economically valuable and strategically important enough that the cost of attacking it would exceed any benefit. The nation would be open to the world, attracting multinational corporations and international capital. It would become a major port and financial center. It would provide strategic value to larger powers—offering basing rights and logistical support—making it more useful as an ally than as a conquered territory. And it would remain alert, building up military capacity over time, moving from mere defenselessness to credible deterrence.
The first and most immediate test of this doctrine came with Singapore's bid for United Nations membership. Within 43 days of independence, on September 21, 1965, Singapore was admitted to the United Nations—an astonishing achievement given the Cold War rivalries, Third World alignments, and regional complications that typically delayed such admissions. The speed of admission was itself a diplomatic victory, a demonstration that Singapore's formula of sovereign independence, non-alignment, and commitment to international law could command respect in the international system. The nation took its seat in the General Assembly as a full participant in the global order, and that membership would prove foundational to everything that followed.
Over the next two decades, Singapore built the diplomatic infrastructure to make good on these principles. The Foreign Ministry recruited talented Singaporeans—many of them from the English-educated intelligentsia—and trained them in the skills of multilateral negotiation, bilateral diplomacy, and treaty-making. By the 1970s, Singapore was beginning to punch far above its weight in international forums. The nation became known for careful preparation, exhaustive research, and the willingness to engage with detail that larger countries could afford to ignore. Singaporean diplomats became a recognizable force in international negotiations—relatively young men, often with technical expertise, willing to spend weeks immersed in the particulars of a treaty or an agreement that major powers would delegate to junior officials.
The culmination of this diplomatic sophistication came in the Law of the Sea negotiations (1973-1982), which produced the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the most complex international treaty negotiation of the post-war era. This achievement is properly attributed to Tommy Koh, the Singapore diplomat who served as the President of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. In the history of Singapore's diplomatic achievement, nothing quite equals what Koh accomplished during these nine years of negotiation.
The challenge Koh faced was to find a common language among 160 nations with fundamentally divergent interests. The developed nations of the North Atlantic wanted to preserve open seas for navigation and resource extraction. The Soviet Union sought strategic advantage in ocean access. The developing nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America wanted to maximize economic benefit from ocean resources within their territories. Island nations and coastal nations had different interests. Landlocked nations had still different interests. Nations with advanced fishing industries clashed with nations trying to protect marine resources. It was a problem that seemed insoluble—each negotiating position appeared to preclude compromise.
Koh's contribution was to recognize that this was not a problem to be solved by finding a middle point on each individual issue. Rather, it required constructing what he called a "package deal"—an architecture within which every nation could advance its most vital interests in some domain, even if it had to compromise on others. The Law of the Sea convention ultimately established the concept of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), extending coastal state jurisdiction to 200 nautical miles offshore. For developing nations, this was a triumph—vast new oceanic territories were now under their control. For maritime trading states like Singapore, which depended on the freedom of navigation, there was the guarantee of maritime corridors free from interference. For fishing nations, there were provisions allowing them to regulate their waters but not to close them. For mining companies interested in deep-sea nodules, there were frameworks for exploitation. No nation got everything it wanted, but every nation got enough of what it wanted that they could sign.
The achievement was remarkable because Koh had to maintain absolute mastery of the technical details while keeping in view the political necessity of the entire package. He became fluent in the arguments of oceanographers, international lawyers, fishing economists, and military strategists. He could negotiate with the superpowers as an equal, not because Singapore had military force but because his command of the detail and his understanding of the architecture made him indispensable. When positions hardened, Koh could propose innovations that created new space for agreement. His diplomatic skill was made possible by Singapore's institutional commitment to excellence in the Foreign Service, but it was also a demonstration of what a small state could achieve through intelligence, preparation, and strategic vision.
The UNCLOS convention came into force in 1994, and by that point Koh had moved on to other negotiations. But the achievement established Singapore as a power in international law and multilateral diplomacy that was wholly disproportionate to its military or economic weight. The convention itself became foundational to modern ocean governance, shaping everything from shipping routes to fisheries management to offshore energy development. And the achievement demonstrated the underlying logic of Singapore's foreign policy: in a world where rules matter, a small state that understands those rules and can help shape them can exercise influence far beyond what its size would suggest.
This commitment to international law and multilateral institutions reflected a deeper philosophical conviction that animated Singapore's foreign policy elite. The shared intellectual formation of many senior officials—Lee Kuan Yew, Rajaratnam, Koh, and many others—included exposure to English-educated liberalism and socialist thought. Many had studied at the London School of Economics or read widely in the Fabian tradition. This was not a tradition that celebrated the raw exercise of power; rather, it emphasized the rule of law, rational administration, and the possibility of progress through institutional design. Transplanted to Singapore's entirely different context, these ideas took on a new meaning. The emphasis on law and institution became a strategy for small-state survival. The commitment to rational administration became the philosophy of technocratic governance. And the belief in the possibility of institutional progress became the foundation for attempting to build, through ASEAN and other mechanisms, a regional system based on something other than raw power.
The deeper philosophy was articulated most clearly in Rajaratnam's speeches and writings. Rajaratnam believed that Singapore must always protect its absolute sovereignty—it would never accept a position of dependence on any larger power, whether that power was Indonesia, Malaysia, or the United States. But within the framework of sovereign equality, Singapore would commit itself fully to multilateral institutions, international law, and peaceful settlement of disputes. This was not weakness disguised as principle; it was power deployed through different means. A small state that honors its commitments, that keeps its word, that deals scrupulously with international law, builds a reputation and a trust that becomes its own form of power. Over decades, such a state can influence outcomes far beyond what coercion alone could achieve.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the Foreign Ministry had become one of Asia's most effective diplomatic corps. Singaporean diplomats were known for their professionalism, their language skills, their detailed preparation, and their willingness to engage with the technical minutiae that many countries delegated to subordinates. The ministry also benefited from the stability that comes from having the same individuals in key positions for extended periods. Tommy Koh, for instance, served as ambassador to the United States, as permanent representative to the United Nations, and as a presidential advisor on international affairs over a career spanning decades. Kishore Mahbubani, who would later become dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, served as ambassador to the United States and the United Nations and as permanent secretary of the Foreign Ministry. These were not interchangeable generalists; they were intellectuals deeply committed to the craft of diplomacy.
The small-state philosophy that emerged from Singapore's experience can be stated simply but is difficult to achieve in practice. For a small state, the international system is not an arena in which to exercise power but a context within which to preserve survival and advance interests. The system works best when it is based on rules rather than hierarchy. When great powers can remake the rules at will or when intervention is determined by strategic interest rather than law, every small state is vulnerable. Therefore, from self-interest, Singapore has a permanent stake in maintaining and strengthening the rule of international law. This is why Singapore is meticulous about its treaty obligations, careful about the precedents it sets, and committed to international institutions even when those institutions constrain Singapore's own freedom of action.
This philosophy also explains Singapore's seemingly paradoxical commitment to multilateralism despite its intense focus on national sovereignty. The nation participates actively in international organizations and agrees to international standards—on trade, on human rights, on environmental protection, on many other domains—not because it is altruistic but because a rules-based system benefits small states more than any alternative. When disputes arise, Singapore can appeal to the system rather than relying on military power or economic coercion. This has proven decisive in numerous cases, from maritime boundary disputes to trade disagreements to environmental concerns.
The cultivation of a world-class diplomatic corps required more than just recruiting intelligent people. It required institutional investment in training, in the accumulation of expertise, in the maintenance of institutional memory. The Foreign Ministry became known for its extensive research divisions, its focus on detailed preparation for every negotiation, and its integration of economic, legal, and strategic expertise. A negotiation over maritime boundaries would involve oceanographers, lawyers, economists, and military strategists working together to develop Singapore's position. A negotiation over trade would involve customs experts, economists, and trade lawyers. This integrated approach reflected a conviction that complex international negotiations required mastery of multiple domains of expertise, not the ability to make broad political pronouncements.
By the early 1990s, Singapore had achieved something remarkable: international credibility and influence wholly disproportionate to its military or economic power. The nation was sought after as a mediator in regional disputes. Its diplomats were trusted by both developed and developing nations. International organizations recruited Singaporeans for senior positions. Multinational corporations were willing to base their Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore because they trusted the government's commitment to law and predictability. And smaller nations looked to Singapore as a model of how a vulnerable state could protect itself not through military alliance but through the careful construction of a rules-based system and through the skills to navigate that system more effectively than larger and more powerful nations.
The SAF and Credible Deterrence
Alongside diplomatic investment, Singapore built military capability with unusual thoroughness for a small city-state. The Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), established essentially from scratch in 1965 with Israeli assistance—Israeli advisers arrived quietly within months of independence, a fact not publicly acknowledged for decades—grew into one of the most capable military forces in Southeast Asia relative to the size of the country. National Service, compulsory military service of approximately two years for male citizens and permanent residents, was introduced in 1967 and became a cornerstone of Singapore's social compact: a shared experience that cut across racial and class lines and created a common identity among Singaporean men.
The SAF's doctrine emphasized deterrence through quality over quantity. Unable to field numerically large forces, Singapore invested in technological superiority, advanced training, and rapid mobilization capability. By the 1990s, Singapore operated F-16 fighter aircraft, Leopard 2 main battle tanks, and a range of naval and air assets that gave it capabilities far exceeding what neighboring countries might have expected. The Air Force in particular became a source of national pride—Singapore Air Force pilots trained at facilities in France, Australia, and the United States, and the service maintained readiness levels comparable to those of first-world militaries. This military investment was explicitly calibrated as a deterrent rather than an aggressive capability. The combination of capable armed forces and intense diplomatic activity constituted Singapore's comprehensive security strategy—addressing both the hard and soft dimensions of small-state vulnerability simultaneously.
The Diplomacy of Counter-Terrorism
The terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent Bali bombings in October 2002 that killed 202 people—including several Singaporeans—brought terrorism sharply into Singapore's security calculus. The Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) network, a pan-Southeast Asian jihadist organization linked to Al-Qaeda, had cells active in Singapore. In December 2001, Singaporean authorities arrested fifteen JI members who had been planning attacks on American and Israeli facilities in Singapore. A second wave of arrests followed in August 2002.
Singapore's response was multidimensional. At the intelligence level, the Internal Security Department worked closely with American, Australian, and regional intelligence services to map JI networks across Southeast Asia. At the community level, the government worked through Muslim community organizations, particularly the Religious Rehabilitation Group—a body of moderate Islamic scholars and teachers who engaged with detained jihadists to counter extremist interpretations of Islam—to address the ideological foundations of terrorist recruitment. At the diplomatic level, Singapore worked within ASEAN frameworks and bilaterally with Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines to coordinate counter-terrorism efforts across porous borders. Singapore became internationally recognized as a center of expertise in counter-terrorism and counter-extremism, sharing its techniques and experience with other nations facing similar challenges.
Singapore's International Convening Power
One of the more remarkable dimensions of Singapore's international presence has been its ability to serve as a venue for high-level diplomacy between parties who find neutral ground difficult to establish elsewhere. The Trump-Kim summit of June 2018, the historic meeting between American President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was held at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island. Singapore was chosen because it was acceptable to both sides: it had functional diplomatic relations with North Korea while maintaining its close partnership with the United States, and it had the logistical capability, the security apparatus, and the international reputation for neutrality that a summit of such sensitivity required.
The Trump-Kim summit was the most dramatic instance of Singapore's convening power, but not the only one. Singapore had previously hosted the 2015 meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou—the first meeting between leaders of the two sides since 1949—as well as numerous other summits navigating difficult bilateral relationships. The city-state's combination of neutrality, logistical capability, legal reliability, and geographic accessibility made it the preferred venue for sensitive negotiations throughout Asia. By providing the space where difficult conversations happen, Singapore maintains relevance and influence that transcends its size. Leaders who come to Singapore for a sensitive summit remember that Singapore made that summit possible. The summit becomes a node in Singapore's diplomatic network, reinforcing relationships that the Foreign Ministry can leverage in other contexts.
The Free Trade Agreement Strategy
Singapore's approach to international trade reflected the same small-state philosophy that animated its broader foreign policy: open yourself to the world because the world is your market, and use bilateral agreements to lock in the openness that larger countries might restrict in times of protectionist pressure. Singapore's trade-to-GDP ratio consistently exceeded 300 percent—among the highest in the world—meaning that trade was not a supplement to Singapore's economy but its fundamental engine. Any threat to that openness was existential.
The network of free trade agreements that Singapore built from the early 2000s onward served as insurance for this openness. The Singapore-US Free Trade Agreement, signed in 2003—the first FTA the United States had concluded with an Asian country—was both economically significant and strategically important. It locked in preferential access for Singapore to the American market and signalled the depth of the bilateral relationship to other regional actors. The negotiation of the FTA was itself a diplomatic achievement: American trade politics were contentious, and congressional approval was not guaranteed. Singapore's investment in the relationship—the military access provided to US forces, the consistent alignment on regional security questions, the personal relationships cultivated by Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew with successive American administrations—created the political context in which the FTA could be approved.
Singapore's free trade strategy extended across Asia, Europe, and beyond. The ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) provided regional preferences. A series of bilateral agreements with India, China, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand provided additional coverage. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which Singapore ratified in 2018, extended the network to eleven Pacific economies. Singapore's approach to each negotiation was meticulous: teams of trade lawyers, economists, and sector specialists would work through agreement texts paragraph by paragraph, ensuring that Singapore's specific economic interests—in services exports, in intellectual property protection, in financial services access—were secured before signature.
The FTA strategy had a defensive as well as offensive dimension. By locking trading partners into binding legal commitments, Singapore insured itself against the kind of arbitrary trade restrictions that larger countries could impose on smaller ones. A US that might be tempted to impose tariffs on Singaporean goods could not easily do so without violating a legally binding treaty—and the reputational cost of violating treaty obligations, for a country that professed commitment to the rules-based order, was substantial. Singapore's web of agreements was thus simultaneously a commercial strategy, a diplomatic tool, and a form of insurance against the economic coercion that larger states could otherwise impose.
Singapore's Global Financial Centre Ambitions
Alongside its manufacturing and logistics strategies, Singapore deliberately cultivated its position as a financial centre. The Monetary Authority of Singapore's regulatory reputation—rigorous, predictable, accessible—made Singapore an attractive domicile for banks, asset managers, private equity funds, and family offices seeking to deploy capital across Asia. By the 2020s, Singapore had become one of the world's major financial centres, rivalling—and in certain respects exceeding—Hong Kong as the preferred Asian base for international financial firms.
The financial centre's growth was not accidental but reflected decades of deliberate investment. The MAS positioned itself as a regulator that would move quickly to approve new financial products, that would engage with industry consultation rather than imposing regulations unilaterally, and that would maintain stability without sacrificing innovation. When global regulatory frameworks were being negotiated—on capital adequacy, on derivatives regulation, on anti-money laundering—Singapore sought to shape these frameworks to ensure they were compatible with its own regulatory approach and that they preserved the openness to international capital that was essential to the financial centre's function.
The 2022 money laundering scandal, in which over a billion Singapore dollars were seized from individuals connected to criminal networks in China, tested the financial centre's reputation severely. The scandal revealed that Singapore's sophisticated financial infrastructure had been used for illicit purposes by those who had established legitimate-appearing businesses and banking relationships. The MAS's response—working with other agencies to trace, seize, and prosecute those involved, and implementing enhanced due diligence requirements—was widely seen as appropriate, but the episode raised questions about whether Singapore's openness to foreign capital had come at the cost of adequate scrutiny.
The Changi Airport ecosystem was another dimension of Singapore's global ambitions. Changi, consistently rated the world's best airport by travellers, was not merely a transit hub but a destination in itself—with hotels, shopping, entertainment, and gardens that made a layover at Changi a positive experience rather than a tedious necessity. The airport handled over 68 million passenger movements per year before the COVID pandemic and was the gateway through which Singapore connected itself to the world. Its development—from a modest regional airport in 1981 to the jewel of international aviation—reflected the same logic that animated the financial centre: invest massively in quality infrastructure, attract the world's best providers and travellers, and build a virtuous cycle of excellence.
The 2003 Iraq War and the Limits of Non-Alignment
Singapore's response to the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 tested the limits of its professed non-alignment in ways that revealed the practical constraints on that principle. When the United States assembled a "coalition of the willing" to justify military action against Saddam Hussein's Iraq without UN Security Council authorisation—against the explicit opposition of France, Germany, and other NATO members—Singapore signed on as a supporter, one of the few Asian nations to do so.
This was a remarkable choice. Singapore had built its international legitimacy on the argument that international law and multilateral institutions had to be respected, that unilateral military action was dangerous, and that the UN system provided the framework through which disputes should be resolved. The invasion of Iraq was conducted in the absence of a UN Security Council resolution authorising it, and was justified by American and British governments on the basis of intelligence assessments that would subsequently prove inaccurate. To support this invasion was, by Singapore's own standards, to endorse precisely the kind of unilateral great-power action that small states should resist.
The explanation for Singapore's position lay in its strategic calculus about the American alliance. Lee Kuan Yew and his government understood that Singapore's security depended ultimately on the credibility of American power and commitment in the region. A United States that felt deserted by its allies in a moment of strategic decision—even if the decision was flawed—might withdraw from its commitments to regional security, leaving Singapore more exposed. The realpolitik calculation was that maintaining the alliance relationship required supporting American decisions even when Singapore might privately disagree with them. Singapore's support for the Iraq War was thus not an abandonment of principle but a demonstration of the limits that great-power dependence placed on small-state principle.
The ASEAN Chairmanship and Singapore as Regional Convener
Singapore has served as ASEAN chair three times — in 1992, 2002, and 2018 — and each chairmanship has illuminated a different dimension of Singapore's diplomatic capabilities. The 2018 chairmanship was the most consequential of the three. Singapore chaired the year that produced the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit in Sydney in March 2018, the first dedicated ASEAN-Australia leaders' summit and a signal of the importance both parties attached to the relationship at a moment of American strategic uncertainty. The Trump-Kim summit in June of the same year added an additional layer: Singapore's willingness and capability to host the most sensitive diplomatic encounter since the Cold War demonstrated that ASEAN's smallest member could function as an indispensable venue for global diplomacy. Singapore's chairmanship theme — "Resilient and Innovative" — was chosen deliberately to reflect its emphasis on digital economy cooperation, cybersecurity frameworks, and supply chain resilience, areas where Singapore had practical expertise to share rather than merely diplomatic goodwill to offer.
The chairmanship revealed a structural truth about ASEAN that Singapore's diplomats understood better than any of their counterparts: the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, chronically underfunded and limited in its analytical capacity, could not be the intellectual engine of regional integration. With an annual budget that barely exceeded $20 million and a professional staff numbering in the hundreds rather than thousands, the Secretariat depended on member states to draft, research, and elaborate the initiatives that appeared under ASEAN's institutional banner. Singapore had been playing this role — quietly, and without demanding formal credit — for decades. The ASEAN Connectivity Master Plan, the ASEAN Framework on Digital Data Governance, the ASEAN Smart Cities Network, the ASEAN Cybersecurity Cooperation Strategy: these and numerous other frameworks originated in Singapore's ministries, were drafted by Singapore's civil servants, and were brought to ASEAN tables as Singapore proposals that, with modification and consensus, became ASEAN products.
Singapore's approach to ASEAN chairmanship was to use the year's elevated visibility to advance an agenda that served the institution's long-term interests while addressing Singapore's specific diplomatic priorities. The 2018 Chair's Statement ran to dozens of pages of careful formulations, each paragraph the product of laborious negotiation among ten foreign ministries with different interests and different degrees of institutional capacity. Singapore's diplomats coordinated these negotiations with a meticulous efficiency that smaller and less well-resourced ASEAN members found invaluable — they arrived at meetings with draft texts already prepared, with compromise formulations already modelled, with legal analysis already completed. This approach transformed Singapore's relative smallness from a potential disadvantage (less political weight) into an operational advantage (more analytical preparation, more flexibility, less at stake in any particular formulation).
The deeper logic was always about Singapore's core foreign policy interest: maintaining a rules-based regional order in which no single power dominated and in which smaller states had institutional recourse. ASEAN, however imperfect, was the primary multilateral vehicle for this interest in Southeast Asia. Singapore's investment in ASEAN — intellectual, financial, diplomatic — was not altruistic but strategic. An effective ASEAN that could convene great powers, articulate regional positions, and provide a legitimate framework for dispute resolution was worth more to Singapore than any bilateral relationship. The chairmanship was simply the most visible expression of this consistent commitment.
Bilateral Diplomacy: The Australia, Japan, and India Relationships
Beyond its great-power triangulation with the United States and China, Singapore maintained strategically important relationships with several middle powers whose combined weight added considerably to Singapore's diplomatic flexibility. These relationships were cultivated with the same systematic attention that Singapore brought to its great-power partnerships, and they served both as insurance against great-power pressure and as sources of practical military, economic, and intelligence cooperation.
The Australia relationship was perhaps the most institutionally deep. Australian troops had trained in Singapore from the 1970s, when Singapore offered training facilities that Australia's own territory could not readily provide — jungle warfare training environments, naval exercise areas, and the shared experience of defence cooperation that built the personal relationships among officers that translated into operational trust. The Australia-Singapore Military Training Initiative (ASMTI), announced in 2016, expanded this cooperation to Queensland, where Singapore's air force and army established permanent training facilities on Australian territory. The reciprocal arrangement was unusual: a small Asian city-state maintaining a significant military presence in Australia, with Australian political support and public acceptance. The Comprehensive Strategic Partnership formalised in 2015 covered intelligence sharing arrangements that put both countries within the penumbra of the Five Eyes network without Singapore being a formal member. The economic dimension was substantial — Singapore was the largest ASEAN investor in Australia and a significant conduit for Australian companies entering Southeast Asian markets.
Japan's relationship with Singapore was shaped by the singular importance of Lee Kuan Yew's personal connections with successive Japanese prime ministers, connections cultivated across decades and maintained through regular visits and correspondence. Japan's strategic interest in Singapore reflected a broader Japanese concern about Southeast Asian stability as a counterweight to Chinese regional ambitions; Singapore's interest in Japan reflected the value of a wealthy, technologically sophisticated, US-aligned partner that could serve as both an economic partner and a strategic balance. The Japan-Singapore Economic Partnership Agreement, signed in January 2002, was Japan's first bilateral free trade agreement — a significant milestone that reflected the depth of the bilateral relationship and Singapore's role as Japan's preferred partner for regional economic integration. The war reparations issue that complicated Japan's relationships with China, South Korea, and the Philippines was handled differently in the Singapore context. The 1966 "blood debt" settlement — S$50 million in grants and loans to settle Japanese wartime obligations — was agreed upon and the relationship was moved forward, normalised, without the recurring historical grievances that continued to entangle Japan's other major regional relationships. This forward-looking pragmatism on both sides created the foundation for a relationship that deepened across every subsequent decade.
The India relationship underwent its most significant transformation after 2005, when the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement — Singapore's most important bilateral trade deal with a neighbouring country in a demographic sense — entered into force. The large Indian diaspora in Singapore, constituting approximately nine percent of the population and heavily represented in professional and managerial roles, created commercial and cultural ties that no government could fully manage. The relationship with successive Indian governments required navigation of different strategic priorities: the Congress-led governments of Manmohan Singh emphasised economic integration and were comfortable with Singapore's position as a gateway for Indian capital to Southeast Asia; the BJP governments of Narendra Modi added a strategic Hindu nationalist dimension that required careful management given Singapore's Muslim Malay minority and its multi-religious public culture. Singapore's diplomats managed these dynamics with considerable skill, emphasising economic opportunity and strategic alignment on maritime security — where India's interest in constraining Chinese influence in the Indian Ocean converged with Singapore's interest in freedom of navigation — while avoiding entanglement in Indian domestic political debates about religion and identity.
The United Nations and Singapore's Rule-Based International Order
Singapore has been among the most consistent and vocal advocates in the United Nations system for a rules-based international order — not from idealism but from the clearest possible expression of small-state self-interest. The UN provided the framework within which small states could resist great-power coercion, could bring disputes to neutral adjudication, and could build coalitions with other small and medium states to advance collective interests that no individual small state could advance alone. Singapore's UN membership from September 1965 onward — achieved within 43 days of independence — gave it access to these mechanisms, and Singapore used them systematically.
Tommy Koh's role in the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III, 1973-1982) was the most celebrated instance of Singapore's multilateral engagement, but it was part of a broader pattern. Koh also served as the President-Designate of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro), the largest gathering of world leaders to that point in history. Singapore's involvement in the Earth Summit — a country of five million with almost no natural hinterland — reflected the same logic as its UNCLOS engagement: the rules governing global commons mattered enormously to a trading state, and Singapore had both the institutional capability and the diplomatic standing to shape those rules rather than merely accept them.
The government invested systematically in international law capacity. The NUS Faculty of Law developed international law expertise that fed directly into Singapore's diplomatic positions — Singapore could draw on academic specialists whose knowledge was current with the latest developments in treaty law, international arbitration, and maritime law. The Singapore International Arbitration Centre, established in 1991, became one of the world's leading venues for commercial arbitration, reflecting Singapore's commitment to the peaceful resolution of disputes through legal processes. This was simultaneously a commercial venture and a diplomatic instrument: a country that hosted the world's arbitrations had leverage in the legal frameworks governing international commerce.
Singapore's multilateral commitment contained a revealing tension. The government enthusiastically championed rules-based international order when the rules protected small states and constrained great-power behaviour. It was notably more selective when international human rights norms pointed toward scrutiny of Singapore's own domestic governance. In UN Universal Periodic Review processes, Singapore engaged formally with the human rights scrutiny mechanism while defending its practices against criticism rather than treating the process as an opportunity for genuine accountability. The government's argument — that Singapore's approach to governance reflected its specific conditions and produced outcomes (low crime, communal harmony, poverty reduction) superior to those achieved under the liberal rights framework — was a consistent position rather than mere opportunism. But it revealed that Singapore's multilateralism was principled within a domain that served Singapore's interests and strategic in deflecting scrutiny where it did not.
Singapore's Defence Industry and Arms Exports
Singapore developed one of Southeast Asia's most sophisticated defence industries, anchored by ST Engineering (Singapore Technologies Engineering), listed on the SGX and employing more than 20,000 people globally. ST Engineering's divisions cover aerospace maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO), electronics, land systems, and marine systems. The aerospace division became one of the world's largest commercial aircraft MRO providers, maintaining and overhauling aircraft for more than 100 airlines across every major aviation market. The scale of the operation — with facilities in Singapore, the United States, and several Asian countries — represented a transformation of what had begun as a purely domestic capability to support the Republic of Singapore Air Force into a globally competitive commercial enterprise.
The land systems division produced the Bionix infantry fighting vehicle, a domestically designed and manufactured tracked armoured vehicle that entered SAF service in the 1990s and was subsequently exported to Thailand — a transaction that demonstrated Singapore's capacity to sell sophisticated defence equipment to neighbouring states rather than merely purchasing from established Western suppliers. Singapore Technologies Kinetics also produced a range of artillery systems, precision munitions, and armoured vehicle variants that gave the SAF a self-sufficient manufacturing base for key land warfare platforms. The marine division built patrol vessels and naval support craft for the Republic of Singapore Navy and for export to regional and other clients.
The defence industry served multiple strategic purposes simultaneously. Reducing dependence on foreign arms suppliers — and the political leverage those suppliers could exercise by threatening to withhold spare parts, ammunition, or upgrades — was an existential concern for a small state whose entire security posture depended on maintaining credible armed force. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War, in which the United States temporarily embargoed arms transfers to some regional actors, crystallised for Singapore's leadership the danger of strategic dependency on even close partners. The domestic defence industry was an insurance policy against such leverage. It also created high-skilled employment in sectors requiring advanced engineering, electronics, and systems integration capabilities; generated export revenue; and demonstrated to potential adversaries that Singapore's military capability was self-sustaining rather than dependent on supply chains that could be disrupted.
The Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), established in 2000 from the former Ministry of Defence's Science and Technology division, centralised defence procurement, systems integration, and research and development. DSTA became the institutional home for Singapore's most sensitive defence technology work: radar systems, communications security, electronic warfare, and from the 2010s, cyber capabilities. The DSO National Laboratories, separately established, conducted basic and applied research across a range of defence-relevant domains including materials science, autonomous systems, and directed energy.
Singapore's cyber defence posture received explicit institutional recognition with the establishment of the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore in 2015, following growing global awareness of state-sponsored cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. The CSA coordinated across government and critical infrastructure operators to establish security standards, respond to incidents, and build Singapore's cyber defence capabilities. The SAF simultaneously developed a Cyber Command, formally announced in 2017, reflecting the recognition that cyber operations had become a domain of military competition alongside land, sea, and air. Singapore's small size and total connectivity — a digitally integrated city-state in which virtually all critical infrastructure was networked — created both vulnerability and the impetus for concentrated investment in defensive capability.
Singapore exported defence equipment with deliberate care about destination and end-use. Jordan received armoured vehicles. Thailand purchased Bionix variants. The Philippines acquired naval patrol vessels. The common feature of Singapore's export clients was their status as recognised, non-belligerent states with legitimate defence needs, rather than parties to active armed conflicts or states subject to international arms embargoes. Singapore's defence export policy reflected the same principles it applied to its arms procurement: the international arms trade should be conducted within established rules, not simply as a commercial opportunity to maximise revenue. The overall picture, across sixty years of development, was of a small state that had converted the resource constraint of needing to defend itself — with no domestic arms industry, no strategic depth, and no great power patron — into an industrial capability that served economic as well as military purposes. The transformation required sustained political commitment and consistent investment across five decades, and it produced an outcome that few observers of the 1965 separation would have considered plausible.