“From liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent”
Singapore’s choice words for America as a source of disorder and instability.
Virtually everyone in Washington loves Singapore, and that’s no accident. Singapore prides itself on being the mouse whispering in the dragon’s (or tiger’s or eagle’s) ear.
Its policy elites have made an art of flattering power, which is to say the Singaporean state has a reputation for operating a very shrewd statecraft. At both an elite and bureaucratic level, it watches global trends more closely and systematically than any government I’ve ever studied. As a small city-state surrounded by larger powers in a region where the world’s two grandest militaries keep maneuvering around each other, it could hardly be any other way.
Being smart yet self-interested is a matter of Singapore’s survival.
And so Singapore was a leading financial hub in the anti-worker era of neoliberal globalization; a quiet champion of US primacy during the unipolar moment; a voice of muted dissent yet close partnership during the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq; an early adapter to the rise of China; and a leading advocate of a “hedging” strategy that insisted on engaging China and the US in mutually cooperative and non-zero sum ways.
Some of these moves are cynical as hell, of course, and many people suffered within each of these paradigms while Singapore’s standard of living generally continued to rise. But that’s farsighted realpolitik. You can always count on Singapore for that.
Accordingly, it pays to pay attention to what Singapore has to say. And as recently as last year, Singapore’s prime minister was a vocal critic of great-power competition between the US and China. He was also one of the few Asian leaders with the fortitude to criticize Bidenomics and the logic of “de-risking” that was all the rage during the Biden years. Notably, he opposed these things because they represented economic nationalism—a sharp break from the Sino-centric economic interdependence that had helped keep Asia stable for more than 40 years.
One year later, so much has changed. Singapore’s counsel to the world retains the preferences from the year prior, but it is now bolder, perhaps more desperate, warning about the cataclysm unfolding before us.