I have just read Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (Belfer Center Studies in International Security). In it, 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 eleven is discussed in somewhat greater detail in the book’s concluding chapter.
1. India has wasted decades in state planning and controls that have bogged it down in bureaucracy and corruption.
2. There are limitations in the Indian constitutional system and the Indian political system that prevent it from going at high speed.
3. Islam has not been a problem. However, contemporary radical Islamism is a very serious problem.
4. The day [Mikhail] Gorbachev said to the masses in Moscow: Do not be afraid of the KGB, I tool a deep breath. This man is a genius, I said…He had jumped into the deep end of the pool without learning how to swim.
5. The Russian population is declining. It is not clear why, but alcoholism plays a role; so do pessimism, a declining fertility rate, and declining li9fe expectancy.
6. There are no historical precedents on how to maintain peace and stability and to ensure cooperation in a world of 160 nation-states.
7. There is no viable alternative to global integration…Globalism is the only answer that is fair, acceptable, and will uphold world peace.
8. They [the BRICS, the emerging economies in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] are different countries on different continents that happen to be growing faster than other combinations of countries, so somebody said: why not bring them all together and make them into a global force?…The Chinese and Indians do not share the same dreams.
9. Westerners have abandoned an ethical base for society, believing that all problems are solvable by a good government.
10. In any given society, of the 1,000 babies born, there are so many people near-geniuses, so many percent average, so many percent morons…It is the near-geniuses and the above-average who ultimately decide the shape of things to come.
11. I do not want to be remembered as a statesman…Anybody who thinks he is a statesman needs to see a psychiatrist.
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To read Part 1, 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.