We met on Thursday with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Much of the Council on Foreign Relations conversation focused on Russia’s bloody aggression in Ukraine, as it apparently did in Lee’s meeting earlier in the week with President Biden.
Prime Minister Lee said Putin’s war has at least three major implications for the Asia-Pacific region - and beyond:
- Deranged leaders using
historical grievances to justify invasions is a deadly business. After all,
most nations in the Asia-Pacific region and around the world could claim such grievances as the
basis for war. If this illogic pertains, Lee said “we’ll have many
insecure countries.”
- Putin’s war in Ukraine
will continue to stress already prickly US-Sino relations, especially as
China cowardly attempts to straddle both sides of the equation.
- The situation finds some leaders considering developing nuclear weapons. These people believe that Libya's Gadaffi, for example, would not haven been toppled had he kept his limited nuclear arsenal in 2003. Some claim that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Kyiv still possessed nukes. Ukraine ceded its nukes to Russia as part of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Of course, there was always the question of how much command and control Moscow had of Ukraine’s nuclear weapons in the first place. Lee says people are understandably getting nervous, for example, when former Japanese Prime Minister Abe says Tokyo should consider developing a nuclear weapons capability. He added that polls in South Korea find a majority of citizens supporting nuclear development.
Prime Minister Lee said that these "significant strategic recalibrations" born of Ukraine-inspired fear and anxiety are very dangerous. Clearly.
Singapore is a singular place, a gleaming, successful city-state with a diverse, highly productive population and, of course, just a continued whiff of paternalism and autocracy. It’s worth noting that Lee is the son of Singapore's first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew.
