In Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (Belfer Center Studies in International Security), Graham Allison and Robert D. Blackwill, with Ali Wyne, examine the global perspectives of Lee Kuan Yew.
Never heard of him? Allow Henry Kissinger to introduce him: “I have had the privilege of meeting many world leaders over the past half century; none, however, has taught me more than Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first premier and its guiding spirit ever since.”
These are among the dozens of Lee Kuan Yew’s strategic observations. Each of the ten is discussed in somewhat greater detail in the book’s concluding chapter.
1. It is China’s intention to be the most powerful country in the world.
2. The ways in which China’s superiority will be expressed will undoubtedly be quite different than in an earlier era.
3. Straight-line extrapolations from such a remarkable record [i.e. a rapidly growing consumer market] are not realistic. China has more handicaps going forward and more obstacles to overcome than most observers recognize.
4. He [Xi Jinping, the most likely incoming president of China] is reserved — not in the sense that he will not talk to you, but in the sense that he will not betray his likes and dislikes.
5. China is not going to become a liberal democracy; if it did, it would collapse.
6. I understood Deng Xiaoping when he said: if 200,000 students have to be shot, shoot them, because the alternative is China in chaos for another 100 years.
7. The U.S. is going through a bumpy patch with its debt and deficits, but I have no doubt that America will not be reduced to second-rate status.
8. Presidents do not get reelected if they give a hard dose of medicine to their people.
9. The baiting of China by American human rights groups, and the threatening of loss of most-favored-nation status and other sanctions by the U.S. Congress and the administration for violations of human rights and missile technology transfers…ignore differences of culture, values, and history, and subordinate the strategic considerations of China-U.S. relations to an American agenda.
10. Americans seem to think that Asia is like a movie and that you can freeze developments out whenever the U.S. becomes intensely involved elsewhere in the world. It does not work like that…The U.S. cannot come and go as it pleases.
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To read Part 2, please click here.
Graham Allison is Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Robert D. Blackwill is Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ali Wyne is an Associate at the Belfer Center.