America the Indispensable: Singapore's View of the United States’ Engagement in the Asia-Pacific

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Notes

1. Amitav Acharya and See Seng Tan, “Betwixt Balance and Community: America, ASEAN, and the Security of Southeast Asia,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 6, no. 1 (2006): 37–38.

2. “Interview with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong,” Washington Times Global, December 27, 2010 http://www.washingtontimesglobal.com/content/countries/singapore/interview-prime-minister-lee-hsien-loong-0 (accessed December 2010).

3. David Fromkin, “Entangling Alliances,” Foreign Affairs (July 1970), http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/24183/david-fromkin/entangling-alliances (accessed December 2010).

4. John Gerard Ruggie, “Doctrinal Unilateralism and Its Limits: America and Global Governance in the New Century,” Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative Working Paper No. 16 (Cambridge, MA: John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2006), 2–3.

5. Greg Russell, “Theodore Roosevelt, Geopolitics, and Cosmopolitan Ideals,” Review of International Studies 32 (2006): 550.

6. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3–18; Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990/91): 23–33.

7. Steward Patrick, “America's Retreat from Multilateral Engagement,” Current History, no. 99 (2000): 437.

8. Robert Kagan, “The Benevolent Empire,” Foreign Policy (Summer 1989): 24–35.

9. Benjamin R. Barber, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” The Atlantic Monthly (March 1992): 53–65.

10. Christopher Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion Revisited: The Coming End of the United States’ Unipolar Moment,” International Security 31, no. 2 (2005): 7–41.

11. Francois Heisbourg, “American Hegemony? Perceptions of the U.S. Abroad,” Survival 41, no. 4 (1999/2000): 5–19.

12. Kagan, “The Benevolent Empire.”

13. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Transformational Leadership and U.S. Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2006): 139–148.

14. Rahm Emanuel, cited in Robert Kagan et al., “George H. W. Obama?” Foreign Policy, April 14, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/14/george_hw_obama?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full (accessed January 2011).

15. Henry A. Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?: Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 25.

16. Robert J. Samuelson, “Farewell to Pax Americana,” The Washington Post, December 14, 2006.

17. Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

18. Coral Bell, “American Ascendency and the Pretense of Power,” The National Interest, no. 57 (1999): 55–63.

19. Amitav Acharya, “A Concert of Asia?” Survival 41, no. 3 (1999): 84–101.

20. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

21. G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: Essays on American Power and World Politics (Oxford: Polity, 2006).

22. Evelyn Goh, “Great Powers and Hierarchical Order in Southeast Asia: Analyzing Regional Security Strategies,” International Security 32, no. 3 (2007/08): 113–57.

23. Ralf Emmers, “‘Security cooperation in the Asia-Pacific: evolution of concepts and practices,” in Asia-Pacific Security Cooperation: National Interests and Regional Order, ed. See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004), 3–18.

24. Chua Chin Hon and Tracy Quek, “MM calls on U.S. to retain key role in East Asia,” The Straits Times (Singapore English daily), October 29, 2009. From: http://www.pmo.gov.sg/content/pmosite/mediacentre/inthenews/ministermentor/2009/October/mm_calls_on_us_toretainkeyroleineastasia.html (accessed December 2010).

25. For a useful comparative look at U.S. policy toward Europe and Asia in the interwar years, see Philip Zelikow, “American Engagement in Asia,” in America's Asian Alliances, ed. Robert D. Blackwill and Paul Dibb (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

26. Acharya and Tan, “Betwixt Balance and Community.”

27. Joseph Chinyong Liow and See Seng Tan, “Southeast Asia,” in From Superpower to Besieged Global Power: Restoring World Order after the Failure of the Bush Doctrine, ed. Edward A. Kolodziej and Roger E. Kanet (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 115–33.

28. Stefan Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How China's Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

29. Evan S. Medieros, “Strategic Hedging and the Future of Asia-Pacific Stability,” The Washington Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2005/06): 145–67.

30. Shiping Tang, Mingjiang Li, and Amitav Acharya, eds., Living with China: Regional States and China through Crises and Turning Points (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).

31. Yali Chen, “Lee Hsien Loong Storm,” Washington Observer Weekly, no. 94, August 11, 2004.

32. David C. Kang, “Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytical Frameworks,” International Security 27, no. 4 (2003): 57–85.

33. Amitav Acharya, “Will Asia's Past Be Its Future?” International Security 28, no. 3 (2003/04): 149–64.

34. Robert G. Sutter, China's Rise in Asia—Promises, Prospects and Implications for the United States, Occasional Paper Series (Honolulu, HI: Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2005), 5.

35. Goh, “Great Powers and Hierarchical Order in Southeast Asia.”

36. Francois Godement et al., “No Rush into Marriage: China's Response to the G2,” China Analysis, no. 22, June (Paris: Asia Centre at SciencesPo, 2009).

37. Chua and Quek, “MM calls on U.S. to retain key role in East Asia.”

38. Kwa Chong Guan, “Writing Singapore's History: From City-State to Global City,” in S. Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality, ed. Kwa Chong Guan (Singapore: World Scientific, 2006), 172.

39. Bilahari Kausikan, “Some Fundamentals of Singapore's Foreign Policy,” in The Little Red Dot: Reflections by Singapore's Diplomats, ed. Tommy Koh and Chang Li Lin (Singapore: World Scientific, 2005), 105.

40. “S'pore pursues trade pacts as neighbors voice concerns,” Agence France Presse, February 21, 2001. Singapore's rationale for its pursuit of bilateral FTAs is as follows, in Lee Hsien Loong's words: “These agreements link us to our key trading partners in a strategic way. Our preference is to have a multi-lateral agreement under the WTO, and have a Doha round settlement. When you're down to the last mile, you've got to seal the deal. And encourage all the players, including America and Europe, and also the developing countries, to make that extra effort and seal the deal. Because if you don't close it now, and you put it aside, the world moves on, and in three or maybe five years time, the world will have changed and we'll have to come back and do it all over again. It may then take us another ten years. During which time you'll have protectionist pressures and many set-backs. So that's our first preference. It may still happen, but it looks increasingly unlikely. So complementing that, we believe that it's important to have free trade agreements with our key trading partners which buttress our position, and give us something extra over and above what you can negotiate with 190 countries in the WTO. In case things go wrong, we have this safety raft and some protection against arbitrary behavior by our trading partners. So we have America, we've got Japan, Australia, New Zealand, India. We're now negotiating with China. And within ASEAN, we have our own free trade agreement too.” See, “Interview with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.”

41. Kausikan, “Some Fundamentals of Singapore's Foreign Policy,” 106. On the other hand, the emphasis placed by Singapore's leaders on America's indispensability and preeminence implies that inasmuch as Singapore, like its Southeast Asian neighbors, engages in hedging vis-a-vis the major powers, its acceptance of the notion of a power hierarchy—with America at the apex—in the Asia-Pacific nonetheless underscores its preference for a regional power balance that relatively favors America. Goh, “Great Powers and Hierarchical Order in Southeast Asia.”

42. Taken from S. Rajaratnam, “Speech at University of Singapore Society,” July 30, 1966. Cited in Barry Desker and M. N. M. Osman, “S. Rajaratnam and the Making of Singapore Foreign Policy,” in S. Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality, ed., Kwa, 4.

43. Alan Chong, “Singapore's Foreign Policy Beliefs as ‘Abridged Realism’: Pragmatic and Liberal Prefixes in the Foreign Policy Thought of Rajaratnam, Lee, Koh, and Mahbubani,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 6, no. 2 (2006): 269–306.

44. Michael Leifer, Singapore's Foreign Policy: Coping with Vulnerability (London: Routledge, 2000).

45. Elgin Toh, “Grilling the Minister Mentor,” The Straits Times (Singapore English daily), January 14, 2011.

46. Derek Mitchell, a senior researcher at Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), cited in Chen, “Lee Hsien Loong Storm.”

47. “Interview with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.”

48. Cited in Chin Kin Wah, “Singapore's Perspective on Asia-Pacific Security,” Asia-Pacific Security Cooperation, eds., Tan & Archorya, 176–77.

49. “Interview with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong,” The Bangkok Post, February 27, 2009.

50. “Interview with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.”

51. Chong Guan Kwa and See Seng Tan, “The Keystone of World Order,” The Washington Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2001): 95–103.

52. Leifer, Singapore's Foreign Policy.

53. Cited in Chin, “Singapore's Perspective on Asia-Pacific Security.” Newly independent Singapore, cast adrift from its hinterland moorings following ejection from the Malaysian Federation in 1965, adopted the pugnacious image of a “poison shrimp”: small, not invulnerable, but certainly no pushover. P. S. Ng, From “Poison Shrimp” to “Porcupine”: An Analysis of Singapore's Defence Posture Change in the Early 1980s (Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, 2005). Since then, there has been robust emphasis on the building of a credible military deterrent as evidenced in the formation of the Singapore Armed Forces and, more recently, its transformation into an integrated, technologically sophisticated, third-generation force.

54. Acharya and Tan, “Betwixt Balance and Community,” 38.

55. D. M. Purdy, American Southeast Asian Foreign Policy: Perspectives from Asia (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1970), p. 333.

56. “Opening Address by His Excellency Mr. Lee Kuan Yew at the 15th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting,” Singapore, June 14–16, 1982. Significantly, other Southeast Asians shared this view. As Indonesia's Jusuf Wanandi wrote in 1977, many in the region now feared a lesser form of American engagement. Jusuf Wanandi, “Politico-Security Dimensions of Southeast Asia,” Asian Survey 17, no. 8 (1977): 771–92.

57. Acharya and Tan, “Betwixt Balance and Community,” 37.

58. “Memorandum from Secretary of State Rusk to President Johnson,” Document 284, October 13, 1967, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, 26 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001), 629.

59. “Public Papers of Jimmy Carter, June 23–December 31, 1979,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978), 1151.

60. Anthony L. Smith, Singapore and the United States 2004–2005: Steadfast Friends (Honolulu, HI: Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2005), 4.

61. Smith, Singapore and the United States 2004–2005: Steadfast Friends.

62. Chin, “Singapore's Perspective on Asia-Pacific Security.”

63. Richard Carney, Contested Capitalism: The Political Origins of Financial Institutions (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).

64. Ralf Emmers, Joseph Chinyong Liow, and See Seng Tan, The East Asia Summit and the Regional Security Architecture, Maryland Series in Contemporary Asian Studies No. 3-2010 (202) (College Park, MD: University of Maryland, 2011).

65. Singapore's preference was for an informal “ASEAN+8” arrangement, which could meet as and when necessary—or, for example, triennially—so as to avoid the prospect of a no-show by the U.S. president.

66. “If the U.S. and China fight…,” Todayonline, November 3, 2010, http://www.todayonline.com/Singapore/EDC101103-0000103/If-the-US-and-China-fight- (accessed November 2010).

67. “Interview with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.”

68. Liow and Tan, “Southeast Asia.”

69. Edwin Lee, Singapore: The Unexpected Nation (Singapore: ISEAS, 2008), 470.

70. Fareed Zakaria, “A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 1994), http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/49691/fareed-zakaria/a-conversation-with-lee-kuan-yew (accessed December 2010).

71. Heisbourg, “American Hegemony? Perceptions of the U.S. Abroad.”

72. Edward Wong, “China Military Seeks to Extend Its Naval Power,” The New York Times, April 23, 2010.

73. “Our stand on Iraq and whether we were/are too pro-U.S.,” Extract of Remarks in Parliament by Singapore Foreign Minister Professor S. Jayakumar, March 11, 2004, http://app.mfa.gov.sg/pr/read_script.asp? (accessed December 2010).