From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

30. America’s New Agenda
Singapore’s relationship with the United States falls neatly into two parts –
during and after the Cold War. When the Soviet Union posed a threat to America
and the world, we had good relations with both the Democrat and Republican
administrations from Johnson in the 1960s to Bush in the 1990s. Our strategic
interests coincided completely. The United States was against the Soviet Union
and communist China. So were we. Furthermore, we were strongly in support of
a US military presence in East Asia.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the beginning of the end of the
Cold War, but the effects of this geopolitical change were felt only in the Clinton
presidency from 1993. With the arrival of an anti-Vietnam War generation in the
White House, human rights and democracy, which had been subsidiary issues,
became all-important. The US government supported a Russian federation under
President Yeltsin that said it wanted to democratise. It spoke of Russia as its
friend and ally, and of China as its potential adversary. We were not at odds with
the United States over Russia, whatever our doubts about its democratic future.
But we distanced ourselves from its hostile rhetoric against China. We feared
that talking and acting as if China was an enemy would make it into one. We did
not want this to happen; no country in Southeast Asia wanted to go out of its
way to make China an enemy. This was a time when America wanted to scale
down its presence in Southeast Asia, and Singapore was no longer as useful as
before.
Many Americans thought that with the collapse of communism in the Soviet
Union, China’s communist system would not endure, and that it was America’s
moral duty to bring about its end. There were two approaches: one favoured by
President Bush, to encourage gradual change through a process of constructive
engagement; the other favoured by the US Congress, to impose sanctions and
apply political and economic pressure for human rights and political reform.
Bush imposed some sanctions on China after Tiananmen, but was soon under
pressure to deny MFN (Most Favoured Nation) status for Chinese goods

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imported into America. Congress passed resolutions to deny MFN to China until
it improved its human rights performance. Bush vetoed them, and this became an
annual ritual that has persisted.
The promotion of democracy and human rights has always been a part of US
foreign policy. But during the Cold War, a shared strategic interest in resisting
communist expansion in Southeast Asia set the tone in bilateral relations.
Singapore had its differences with the Carter administration over democracy and
human rights, and with the Reagan and Bush administrations on issues of press
freedom, but these differences were not pursued in a confrontational and
aggressive manner.
For example, Patricia Derian, assistant secretary of state for humanitarian
affairs and human rights in the Carter administration, met me in January 1978 to
urge the abolition of detention without trial. I told her the law had been
challenged by the opposition at every election and each time an overwhelming
majority of the electorate had voted for us and for the law. Singapore was a
Confucianist society which placed the interests of the community above those of
the individual. My primary responsibility was the wellbeing of the people. I had
to deal with communist subversives, against whom it was not possible to get
witnesses to testify in open court. If I followed her prescription, Singapore
would come to grief. What could the United States do to rescue Singapore more
than they were doing for the boat people of South Vietnam, who were then
sailing out into the perils of pirates and the weather in the South China Sea? If
the United States would give Singapore the status of a Puerto Rico and
underwrite Singapore’s future, I would follow her prescription. Then the United
States would have to pick up the pieces if Singapore failed. Derian was so
stressed that she asked if she could smoke, in spite of having been told by her
ambassador that I was allergic to it. As she could not bear her deprivation any
longer, I took pity on her and brought her upstairs to an open veranda where she
relieved her frustrations with long puffs on her cigarettes. It did not improve her
arguments. Twenty years later, Ambassador John Holdridge, who had been
present at our 1978 meeting, wrote in his memoirs,
“Lee Kuan Yew, whom I heard on several occasions describe himself as
‘the last Victorian’, certainly was and is a staunch Confucianist as well.
He and his followers have attempted to inculcate Singapore’s younger
generation with Confucian virtues. Derian, on the other hand, is a veteran
of the civil rights movement in the American South, with its frequent

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clashes between civil rights demonstrators and local authorities, a
struggle that epitomised the ‘rights of man’ beliefs inherent in the US
Constitution. She completely dismissed Lee’s view that the wellbeing of
society takes precedence over individual rights and that detainees in
Singapore only needed to forswear violence to be released. The two
talked past each other for the better part of two hours and never came to a
meeting of the minds.”
Because we shared overriding strategic concerns, this disagreement was not
brought into the open.
Another instance was in June 1988 when we asked for a US embassy
diplomat to be removed for interfering in Singapore’s domestic politics. He had
instigated a former solicitor-general to recruit disaffected lawyers to contest the
coming elections with him against the PAP, and had arranged for the lawyer to
meet his superior officer in the State Department in Washington, who gave him
an assurance that he would get asylum if he needed it. The State Department
denied these allegations and in retaliation asked for a newly arrived Singapore
diplomat to be withdrawn. In a debate in Parliament, I proposed that the matter
be resolved by a competent neutral international committee of three experts. If
this committee found that what the US diplomat had done was legitimate
diplomatic activity, the Singapore government would withdraw its protest and
apologise. The State Department spokesman welcomed my reaffirmation that
Singapore wanted to put an end to the dispute, but remained silent on my
proposal. No more was made of this.
The issues that Americans put at the top of their agenda in the 1990s were
human rights and democracy, and Western versus Eastern values. The Japanese
were being pressed by the Americans to link their aid programmes to recipient
countries’ democracy and human rights record. The